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:
Seriously- stick puppets are an awesome activity- every kid loves stick puppets! Any puppets! And puppet theaters should be in every home!
I agree! They are fantastic on every level. And quite addicting to make for kids, I’m glad I got a bag of 500 craft sticks!
I love the puppet theater! Your children are adorable, and they look like they had a blast. Thank you for linking up to The Sunday Showcase.
They have always been puppet lovers but it is so cool to actually get to pretend to be the letters! Thanks so much for stopping by!
My grandson LOVES the Audrey Wood/Charley’s Alphabet books! He even makes me read the credits to him, and he knows that Audrey and Bruce Wood bring Charley’s alphabet to him. These are great activities!
Yay! I’m so glad to hear it! The books are great! I feel like we have been hogging them from the library. We need to get our own set. I love how your grandson knows the author and illustrator–that’s fantastic! Thanks so much for stopping by!
I love the idea of the kids acting out the story using alphabet stick puppets. They must have had so much fun!
I like this idea for the research project I am doing and was wandering what website you printed the alphabet from or if you made it yourself.
Hi Amanda! I’m glad you like the idea! The letters were printed from a cricut machine. Good luck!