My Little Reader's Not-A-Box

I pulled Not A Box (Antoinette Portis) off the shelf this week and have been reading it with My Little Reader. We read this one last month in Literacy Launchpad. And I didn't really have any plans to do a Literacy Launchpad at-home lesson with My Little Reader with this particular book. I simply wanted to read it with him. But when I saw how much he loved it, the wheels turned.

As you may know, Not A Box is a story about a rabbit that imagines that his big, cardboard box is anything but a box. "It's not a box!" Instead it's a car, a robot, a burning building, a hot air balloon, a rocket...

My Little Reader is moving into that stage where he is memorizing text from the books we read over and over, and he will "read" the books with me. Not A Box lends itself well to this, because "it's not a box" is repeated over and over throughout the book. Very simple text. I love congratulating My Little Reader when he reads with me. " What a good reader you are," I tell him.

"Wanna go see if we have a big box to play with?" I asked My Little Reader. Oh boy, did he ever! He waited very impatiently as I dug through the garage looking for a couple boxes. I had an idea.

My Little Reader loves play houses*, and I was pretty sure I could concoct one out of a couple large boxes. Turned out to be pretty easy (doesn't hurt that My Little Reader isn't very particular about most things yet). I used an box cutter to make a door and a window, and then a little bit of tape to hold my boxes together and... voila!

He's been having a blast coloring the inside and outside of the box. All this fun has been keeping him busy, which is an added bonus. And I'm thinking we can still transform the "not-a-box" into something else after he gets tired of imagining it as a house!

* We were at the park this week and there were little house-like structures built around the all the garage cans. My Little Reader kept wanting to go in the "house." Ugh! Yuck!

It's Not A Box!

This week our especially playful unit wrapped up with Not A Box by Antoinette Portis. We had a lot of fun with this one. Can you tell?

I'm back from my trip to Chicago to meet my new niece. She's so little, and so sweet. It was a great trip.

One of the highlights from my trip, other than meeting my new niece, was taking my other niece (3 yrs. old) to the library. Since I don't have children of my own yet, it was especially fun to go with my niece and show her some of my favorite stories.

We tried going to the library on Friday, but they were already closed when we got there. So we came back on Saturday. My niece started out at the computer, then moved on to the puzzles, and then we started reading some books. First I pulled out a a big book version of Mrs. McNosh Hangs Up Her Wash. My niece laughed at all the good parts. Then I found Not A Box, and she loved that one too. I suggested to her how fun it would be if we had a box that we could play pretend with, and as soon as we got home she asked my mom for a box! Luckily my mom had one, and she climbed right inside and pretended it was a car. How cute is that?

After she had let me choose a few books, my niece went hunting for books on the shelf by herself. She came back with a Caillou book and a Barney book, and so we read those too.

The library closed an hour after we got there, so we didn't have a long time to read, but we still had fun. Ten minutes before they closed my niece found a big book version of The Tiny Seed. We had to read it fast, but it was a great finish to the trip!

Neither of us had a library card for this particular library we visited, so we couldn't check any books out. We put our books away and headed out to our car. My niece stopped me once we got outside. She remembered seeing the "closed" sign the day before, and so she wanted to know what the various signs outside the library said. I pointed out the "open" sign to her and explained that they would flip it to say "closed" when they locked the library doors for the night. She wanted to stay and watch them do that, and so we did. We got some strange looks from all the people leaving the library though, as we sat there intently looking at the "open" sign.

I love that my niece is so fascinated with words. She definitely understands that words have meaning, and is curious to learn what their meaning is. She will ask you to read any and all kinds of signs to her. It's great! She's going to be reading before we know it!