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David McPhail Book Activities for Children

2013
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This month’s Virtual Book Club for Kids author, David McPhail, was new to us so I am super excited to see all of the fun book activities for children featuring his work that everyone is linking up.  We checked out many of his books from the library, but the one we had the most fun with was Piggy’s Pancake Parlor (Action Packs).

Piggy’s Pancake Parlor is the story of a little pig who is taken in by a farmer family.  Mrs. Farmer teaches him how to make a pancake recipe with a special secret ingredient.  Piggy befriends Fox and they open a successful pancake parlor together in town.

Pig Book Activities for Children and the Virtual Book Club for KidsThe kids loved the idea of having a pancake parlor and decided to make their own.  They started talking about what they were going to do even before we had finished the book (it’s written in a chapter book style so we didn’t read it all in one sitting.)

They even designed costumes for their characters.  They created a pig nose for Piggy like we did during our Letter P Play Date and cut out cardboard ears for Fox and taped them onto a headband.  The customer carried a purse/wallet with play money in it to pay for the pancakes.

Piggy's Pancake Parlor Book Activities for ChildrenNot only was their pretend pancake parlor fun, it was also packed full of early literacy practice!

  • They used writing and prewriting skills while creating the sign, writing (and pretending to write) the orders, and filling out the bill.
  • They recalled and sequenced story events while planning and acting out the book.
  • They identified the main characters and were able to describe each the characteristics of each.
  • They made text to self connections and used their background knowledge of really going out to eat pancakes to help remember and understand what happened in the story.

It’s amazing how much learning takes place while kids are playing!

Now it’s time to check out all of the other David McPhail book activities for children that bloggers have linked up!

We’d love to see what you did this month so please link up your David McPhail inspired posts to the blog hop below.

There are a few rules for this blog hop that we ask you to follow, so make sure to read them:

  1. Link up only posts inspired by David McPhail that share children’s book inspired crafts, activities, recipes, etc. Any other posts will be deleted.
  2. Visit other blog posts on the linky and comment on or share the ones you love!
  3. Add our Virtual Book Club button to your post if you’d like.

Virtual Book Club for Kids

Here are all of the bloggers who are participating in the Virtual Book Club for Kids this year!  Be sure to visit to see all of the fun they have had!

Toddler Approved – Rainy Day Mum – Adventures in Reading with Kids – 3 Dinosaurs – Royal Baloo – The Educators’ Spin On It – Inspiration Laboratories – Pleasantest Thing – Edventures with Kids – Two Big Two Little – Playing With Words 365 – Kitchen Counter Chronicles – Outlaw Mom – Mommy and Me Book Club – Crafty Moms Share – No Twiddle Twaddle – The Good Long Road – Ready. Set. Read 2 Me – Reading Confetti – Mama Smiles – Juggling with Kids- Mom to 2 Posh Lil Divas – Creekside Learning – Creative Family Fun – The Usual Mayhem – Teach Preschool – PlayDrMom – CraftoArt – Here Come the Girls – Being a Conscious Parent – Smiling like Sunshine – Crayon Freckles – Train Up a Child – Smile Play Learn – Enchanted Homeschooling Mom – Coffee Cups and Crayons – Having Fun at Chelle’s House- Love, Play, Learn – Juggling With Kids

Disclosure: This post contains affiliate links.

Filed Under: Reading Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Go Orange for Hunger: Super Hero Capes

2012
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Today we have invited all of our friends to a Hunger Hero play date at the park in support of No Kid Hungry’s Go Orange days.  All of the kids are bringing food donations for our local food bank–and turning into Hunger Heroes!  I made bright orange capes for all of our Hunger Heroes to wear out of plastic tablecloths from the Dollar store.

They were super easy to make!

You can get 8 capes out of 1 108 inch table cloth.  I began by unfolding the tablecloth and using the folds to cut the tablecloth in half, and then into fourths, and finally into eighths. You end up with a 27 inch cape.

Then I folded the top corners in to make a cape shape.  Next I used scissors to poke a hole where each shoulder would be and tied a piece of yarn through each of the holes to tie the cape on.

And voila–a Hunger Hero!  I can’t wait to give these out at the play date this afternoon!

I am proud and excited to join Moms Fighting Hunger in supporting No Kid Hungry’s Go Orange for hunger days!  The statistics on childhood hunger in America are shocking.  1 in 5 kids in America are affected by hunger, that’s over 16 million kids.  And we’re not the only country facing this problem.

Moms Fighting Hunger aims to help you find ways to help in your community.  All month long bloggers have teamed up to share the many ways you and your kids can get involved.  Follow us and join in the fun!

Facebook:  http://www.facebook.com/MomsFightingHunger

Twitter:  https://twitter.com/MomsFightHunger

Pinterest:  http://pinterest.com/stacyofksw/moms-fighting-hunger/

This is a Moms Fighting Hunger Blog Hop!  So go and check out all the awesome ideas!

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Filed Under: Birthday Parties, Special Days Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , ,

Create an Alphabet Puppet Theater

2012
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We had a ton of fun with July’s Summer Virtual Book Club for Kids’ author Audrey Wood.  And yes, I know it’s already August. Better late than never!

There are so many great books by Audrey Wood and her husband Don, but we became obsessed with the series of books based on the alphabet that she did with her son Bruce.  Alphabet Adventure, Alphabet Mystery, and Alphabet Rescue follow the adventures of a set of precocious lowercase letters.

In the first book, Alphabet Adventure the letters prepare to go to school and become Charley’s alphabet.  Then Alphabet Mystery and Alphabet Rescue chronicle the escapades the lowercase letters get into.  All three of my kids loved seeing the lowercase letters personified in the story and asked for our magnet letters so they could act the stories out.

They were having so much fun with the letters we decided to make letter puppets to use in a puppet show!  We couldn’t find a set of already cut lowercase letters so one of my friends cut out a set for us on her Cricut.  Then I laminated the letters and hot glued them to craft sticks.

And the kids got to work on the theater.  I got a little carried away freehanding the opening and it was too low for the kids to sit behind.  We compensated by placing the cardboard on top of our train table, but you may want to only cut yours half as tall if you decide to make one for your house.

After they finished the puppet theater they made some additional puppets to help them tell the story.  I loved listening to the three of them work together on this!  Creating a puppet show based on a book is a fantastic way to promote story comprehension and pretend play.

We even had a storage pocket on the front for all of our puppets!

Then is was showtime!  After a little bit of discussion the kids got busy telling us the story of Audrey Wood and Bruce Wood’s Alphabet Rescue.

I was amazed at how well they remembered the details of the story and how they worked together to retell it to my husband and me.

We have had a ton of fun with our lowercase letter puppets and they have been the stars of subsequent original stories.  The kids have loved playing with the Charley’s Alphabet books and the letter puppets and have been developing many skills in the process such as letter identification, phonemic awareness, retelling, comprehension, and story structure.

We can’t wait for next month’s (okay this month’s) Summer Virtual Book Club featuring Kevin Henkes!

Check out all the other fun activities you can do with Audrey Woods’ books:

Linking up to:

kids crafts

Filed Under: ABC Activities, Crafts, Learning Activities, Reading, Writing Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

Colorlicious Color Game

2012
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This month’s challenge for The Little Book Adventure was to create a game based on a book.  When I explained it to my 6 year old she immediately said, “Oh, let’s do a game for Pinkalicious!”  They decided that they wanted to make a game where the players pretended to eat food and then turned the color of the food.  So that’s what we did!

They collected food in different colors and we made a color die to roll to decide which food to eat.  To make the die we duct taped two waffle box corners together to form a cube and then covered each side with a different color square of construction paper.

Then we designed game boards.  They wanted people on it in each of the colors, but this was the best I could do in Word!  If you want to use them too, just download the free COLORLICIOUS GAME BOARD PRINTABLE.

Then the big kids colored the faces and added googly eyes!  This was also the point they decided to change the name from Coloricous to Colorlicious–I admit it’s catchier, but I didn’t want to waste the supplies so this one is still on their boards.

Then we were ready to play! We started by rereading the book.  Then they took turns rolling the color die and eating the food.  They used a goldfish to mark the corresponding color face on the game board.

They really put their acting skills to work while eating and loved pretending that they were turning different colors!

 We kept playing until all of the faces were marked.

As you can see they had a blast playing!  And each got to practice colors at their level.  The two year old identified and matched the colors for us.  The four year old identified each color word on a chart, and the six year old practiced spelling the words for us.  Tons of fun for the whole family!

Linking up to:

 My Little Bookcase

kids crafts

Filed Under: Crafts, Learning Activities, Reading Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , ,

Camping Themed Kids Activities

2012
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Is anyone else shocked at how fast this summer is flying by? It seems like the last day of school was just yesterday.  One of our favorite activities this summer has been doing Camp Whamma Jamma with some of our friends.  The mom had asked me if we wanted to participate in a mom-run home summer camp and I couldn’t say yes fast enough!  We picked a couple days in the month of July and took turns hosting a themed camp.

I had the first session and did a camping theme. So fun and easy to pull together!

The first camping activity was decorating sit upons!  Originally, I was going to have them make the sit upons themselves, but I had so many other activities we weren’t going to have enough time so I put them together the night before.  I cut a large repositionable contact paper rectangle for each kid and filled them with crumpled magazine pages.  Then before I sealed them I stuck a short ribbon into the open side for a handle.  The kids then personalized their sit upons with crayons and stickers.

  Then it was time for some stories.  We read Maisy Goes Camping by Lucy Cousins and When We Go Camping by Margriet Ruurs.  The kids especially loved When We Go Camping, the illustrations are amazing and each page contains a footprint for the reader to identify.  We highly recommend it!

Next up was a “hike” in the backyard!  We gathered lots of fun things like rocks and leaves.  Everyone got to pick a special rock to turn into a pet.

And then made crayon rubbings of some of the leaves they found!

For a snack we had trail mix and s’mores! Since our campfire was made out of tissue paper, I roasted the marshmallows for everyone on the gas stove.  You can’t go camping, even pretend camping, without roasting marshmallows!

After a snack we went outside for archery practice! I found the coolest tutorial on I Can Teach My Child for making mini bows and arrows.  You have to check it out!  We had so much fun with them–once we figured out which way to hold the bow!

After archery the kids had free play time and enjoyed trying out the cardboard tent and campfire until they got too hot and headed inside to cool off.  After a little bit of unstructured time we gathered back together for another story and craft.  We read Eric Carle’s The Very Lonely Firefly and talked about what would happen if you were to catch a firefly in a jar.

Then we made our own inspired by the ones from Come Together Kids.  We followed Laura’s directions for glow in the dark firefly jars except we used our fingers to make the bugs instead of a paintbrush.  Then we tried them out!  The kids went into a dark room with their glowing jars and “caught” glowing bugs (purchased from the dollar section at Target) that I had hid all over the room.

After a busy morning the kids were ready to take their bag lunches and their sit upons out to the campfire for lunch!  Definitely a fun (and sunny) camping filled day!  What fun camping activities have you tried?  We’d love some more ideas!

Linking up to these great blogs:

Filed Under: Learning Activities, Reading, Themed Parties Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Dine with a Character: Muffin Tins with Moose!

2012
11 Comments

We have been taking part in My Little Bookcase’s The Little Book Adventure and really enjoyed challenge #2, leaving letters in library books for the next reader.   This month’s challenge is to dine with a book character–so much fun!  We could not wait to get started!

We actually chose which character we were going to dine with one night while we were eating.  We have been doing Muffin Tin Mondays and the kids decided that a muffin tin meal would be perfect for Moose from If You Give a Moose a Muffin by Laura Numeroff.

We decided on a night and sent Moose an invitation.  We were thrilled when he accepted.

We looked back at and reread the story many times while we were planning our meal.  My daughter cut out the invitation to resemble the muffin in the story and even added jam to the top to entice Moose.  Planning to dine with a character was a great way to review story details and analyze the main character of the story.

They choose the food for the muffin tins very carefully.  There was the food from the story–muffins, of course, jam, and blackberries.  Then they decided to add lettuce leaves because they thought moose like to eat leaves and white cheese cut out to look like the ghost he dressed up as in the story.

Before Moose arrived in the kitchen we set out fancy place mats and added a vase of roses from the backyard.  A very fancy dinner party!

Then it was time to eat!  They had a blast talking about all of their food choices and remembering the different parts of the story.  They each shared their favorite scene and decided that Moose’s favorite part was probably when he put on the puppet show because he looked like he was having so much fun.

We had a fantastic time dining with a book character!  And just like the library letters they have already decided that this is definitely going to be an activity we do many more times!

Linking up to:

 MyLittleBookcase

Filed Under: Food, Learning Activities, Reading Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , ,

Naked Mole Rat Play Dough Activity

2012
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One of our summer activities is to participate in Reading Confetti‘s Summer Virtual Book Club for Kids!  Each month she chooses a different author and participants read one of his/her books and do an activity related to the book.  This month’s author is Mo Willems.  We love Mo Willems here and ended up reading, and rereading, 4 of his books last week–The Pigeon Wants a Puppy, The Pigeon Finds a Hot Dog, Naked Mole Rat Gets Dressed, and Pigs Make Me Sneeze!  Such great reads, we definitely recommend all of them!

Once of the most reread books was Naked Mole Rat Gets Dressed.  It’s the story of a naked mole rat who likes to wear clothes.  In fact he likes to wear clothes so much he opened his own shop.  His clothes-wearing makes the other mole rats very uncomfortable and they take the issue to Grand-pah for consideration.  You’ll have to read it yourself to see how it ends, but I will go out on a limb and predict you’ll love it.

They loved the idea of the naked mole rat getting dressed and wanted to make their own mole rat to dress up.  The 6 year old drew a naked mole rat on construction paper and we laminated it so we could reuse it.

 Then the kids got to work!  They made tons of play dough clothes and accessories for our naked mole rat.  Including a light saber!

After they had all the socks and sandwiches and shirts and light sabers they needed it was time to dress him up!

They used the play dough props to reenact parts of the story and to role play how the mole rat should react to his friends when they don’t like that he wears clothes.  All without any prompting from me.

Doing crafts and activities to go along with a book not only increases your child’s enjoyment of the story it helps develop their comprehension skills and allows them to better internalize the author’s message.  The activities don’t have to be elaborate or “pinnable”, it’s the simple activities that are can be the most loved.  Especially, when kids are given the chance to do them over and over and over again.

Linking up to:

Make sure to check it out to see all of the Mo Willems book and activity ideas that other bloggers come up with this month!

Also linking to:

   While we were busy creating mole rat clothes out of play dough the folks at The Imagination Tree, Sun Hats and Wellie Boots, and Nurturestore were hosting a play dough play date!  Stop by to see TONS of great play dough recipes, why playing with play dough is important, and lots of fun ways to add play dough into your play.

Filed Under: Crafts, Learning Activities, Reading, Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

Egg Carton Computer and Jelly Bean Toss Game

2012
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It’s time for another Tinkerlab Creative Challenge!

The item this month is an egg carton and we definitely have lots of those in our craft cupboard right now!  Last Friday the big kids each got an egg carton to create something with.

The almost 4 year old got right to work cutting even though he wasn’t quite sure what he wanted to make yet.  After he had cut the cup section into 3 parts he announced he was going to make a game and would know what kind of a game it was going to be after he finished painting it.

The 6 year old turned her carton around in her hands a couple times and decided it would make a perfect play computer.  She thought this would be especially good because we only have one pretend laptop and they usually need more than one computer when they’re playing.  She cut the top off of the carton and flipped it over so that the the inside of the top could be the computer screen.

She painted the “keys” each a different color and traced and cut out paper to cover the writing on the top of the carton.

After the almost 4 year old had finished painting he decided the cartons were going to be “catchers” and that they needed handles.  He cut and painted a paper towel roll to attach to the bottom to use to hold it.

I hot glued the rolls to the cartons for the game and the top onto the bottom of the carton to make the computer.

And here’s the finished game!  Instead of catching a ball in the cups he wanted to try and catch jelly beans — and his little sister agreed that was a wonderful idea!

Other than making a computer for their pretend play the oldest didn’t have an exact plan for how they were going to use it until it was done.  Since then they have used it in their “office” to work on their website, to practice “typing” colors, and as part of an I Spy game that all three of them understood the rules too even though I never did.  Upcycled, simple to make, and full of pretend play opportunities – I love it!

So far neither of the little two have caught a jelly bean in their “catchers,” but they have had lots of fun (and eaten lots of jelly beans) trying!

To see what other bloggers and their kids have done with egg cartons check out:

Tinkerlab’s Creative Challenge: Egg Carton post

What have you created using an egg carton?  We’ve still got some left.  :)

Filed Under: Crafts, Learning Activities Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , ,

And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street Dr. Seuss Craft

2012
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We are on a Seuss kick this week!  And the countdown is on to his birthday on Friday and the opening of The Lorax!  Today we had some friends over and had some fun with Dr. Seuss’ And to Think I Saw It on Mulberry Street [Random House, 1967].

We read the story and used paint and paper towel rolls to create Imagination Spy Scopes.  In the story Marco imagines all sorts of crazy sights as he walks home from school.

 When our Imagination Spy Scopes were dry we took them outside to see what kind of exciting things we could imagine were on our street.

They “saw” many spectacular sights such as candy people, a sleeping snake, dragons and animals that had escaped from the zoo!

How have you used books to activate imaginations and inspire pretend play?

Linking to:

VirtualBookClub

Filed Under: Crafts, Learning Activities, Reading Tagged With: , , , , , , ,