Ideas for Summer Book Fun!

Can I show you what we've been doing in class this past month? I can't believe I will be trading the preschool classroom for the homeschool classroom. It feels very weird, but exciting. And I'm thrilled that I will get to invest more time and energy into creating fun and meaningful literature experiences for my little guy AND my older kids!

I am also scheming to continue visiting my beloved schools for some special story times throughout the year so I don't suffer any terrible withdrawal effects!

So here's the fun we've been having this past month:

We had so much fun reading Chalk (Bill Thomson)! Huge hit with the kids. Oh, the fun they had imagining what it would be like to have their chalk drawings come to life! So much imagining and pretending. We drew with "magic" chalk of our own and pretended our drawings came to life. The students begged me to reread this one all month long!

Blackout (John Rocco) was another hit! I felt like this story was my son's own personal story: a boy wants to play a game with someone, but everybody in his family is too wrapped up in their technology to be bothered. Then the power goes out. Suddenly life slows down, the family comes together to have fun and pass the time during the blackout.  I think all modern kids can likely identify with this story! We turned out the lights after we read the story and made shadow puppets like they did in the story. My students were amazed by this. Then we took a picture of a city with the lights on, and turned the lights back on with our neon paints! Again, amazement from the students! And the pictures turned out so cool! Even my big kids had fun with this project when I came home with the extra supplies. We read the book around our kitchen table quite a few times!

Like Chalk, Walrus (Stephen Savage) is a wordless book. A Walrus escapes from the zoo and must hide form the zookeeper. He discovers his passion and finds a way to fulfill it while remaining at the zoo, so all ends well. The kids just crack up at the silly places the walrus hides and tries to disguise himself. So simple, but so entertaining! I brought little walruses, made out of craft foam, for us to hunt for in the classroom. Who would have thought the kids would love this so much? We also made pictures where the kids had to illustrate a way to disguise their foam walrus. Many of them took their inspiration from the book and made scenes similar to Savage. But some came up with some new ides of their own. When we finished crafting, they all wanted to take turns hiding the walruses around the room again. So if you're looking for a way to keep some preschoolers busy - hide some walruses! Ha!

Ideas for Encouraging Literacy at Home

A short list of ideas for encouraging literacy, from my family to yours. 

1. Give your pre-reader some wordless (or almost wordless) books and ask them if they'll read it to you. Mine can't get enough of this, and thinks it's great fun. He sat down on the couch with a stack of books yesterday while his older siblings were doing homework, and "read them. I asked him to take the recycling out and he told me, "Not yet, Mom, I'm right in the middle of my book!" 

2. Let your big kids read to your little kids. A win-win-win!

3. Keep your writing center stocked and available. You never know when the writing bug will bite! My little guy likes to have his in bedroom. He lovingly refers to it as his "office."

4. Be willing to drop what you're doing and read to your little ones when the urge strikes them. I know it's not always possible, so remember tip #2!

5. Turn regular toys into literacy-learning tools. This week we made alphabet letters out of Legos. It kept my little guy busy for quite a while on and off all week.