The author for this month’s Summer Virtual Book Club for Kids is Kevin Henkes!

(amazon affiliate link)

We read lots of Kevin Henkes books this month and especially enjoyed the book Birds, which is beautifully illustrated by Laura Dronzek.  The book may be simple, but it packed full of fun learning opportunities.  In the story Henkes talks about what birds look like, what they do and what they could do.

 In the story Henkes talks about what birds look like, what they do and what they could do.  He even hypothesizes what the sky would look like if clouds were birds.  We love to look for and tell stories about things we find in the clouds so my kids were very interested in the cloud page illustrations.  Then, of course, after we read the story we had to make our own bird clouds!

There are many ways that you can make cloud paint and our favorite is to mix together shaving cream, white paint and school glue.

There was a bit of a debate about what the best way to paint would be–fingers, brushes, Q tips, etc.  After a bit of discussion they all decided that thin brushes were just what they needed!

Fun Kid Activity Alert:  Cloud painting is such a relaxing activity and super fun to do outside on easels when the weather isn’t quite so hot!

The next Birds activity that we did was a color match memory game!  My 2 year old is extremely proud that she knows her colors and loves to identify them.  She was all over the beginning of the story where Henkes talked about all the different colors birds could be.  To build upon her color knowledge my 6 year old and I created a bird memory game for everyone to play.

The game cards are just 8 pairs of different color birds my 6 year old drew on halves of index cards.  We mixed them up, turned them over and took turns trying to remember where the colors where.  It took a couple rounds before the 2 year old caught onto the idea–during the second round she warned her brother not to turn over that purple card under there because she was going to get the match on her turn.  After he made the match himself she wisely learned to keep that info to herself!

The third Birds activity we did based on a page talking about what the sky would look like if birds made marks with their tail feathers when they flew.

This was a collaborative art project.  Each kid got to “be” a different color bird and use a feather to paint that birds’ path on the paper.  It was a lot of fun for them to work together and our colorful sky looks very cool hanging with all their cloud paintings.

There are so many more activities that could be done with the story!  We will definitely be doing more with it. What fun things have you done with Birds?

We’re participating in the Summer Virtual Book Club for Kids’ blog hop!  Check out all of the awesome Kevin Henkes ideas below and then stop by Toddler Approved and many of the other sites for a Kevin Henkes giveaway!

`