by: Eric Carle
A fun book to use as a study is The Grouchy Ladybug! My girls love this story and it is now part of our bedtime reading. This book has wonderful concepts to keep little ones busy and bigger little ones entertained.
Letters
We focused on the letter “L” for ladybug. We also discussed other words that begin with “L”. Before making our project, we pretended the “L’s” were legs and let them walk around for a little bit. My girls thought this was hilarious.
For the letter project we glued a large letter “L” to a piece of construction paper. We also glued a simply ladybug print out on the page as well. Once glued the girls colored the “L” and the ladybug.
Additional Activity: Go on an “L” hunt. Have your children find as many items in your house that start with “L”.
Play Doh Ladybugs and Lesson on Aphids
We love Play Doh in my house! It is one activity we all love doing together. So it was only natural to make ladybugs out of Play Doh. In doing this we discussed the structure of an insect. In addition, we added the dots we placed on the ladybug. For a little work on subtraction we made leaves with tiny aphids. We then had our ladybugs eat the aphids while we subtracted the number of them on the leaf.
For a bit of a science lesson we discussed how aphids affect the leaves of plants and further how ladybugs are friends to the leaves since they eat the aphids.
Let’s Tell Time!
As anyone who has read The Grouchy Ladybug knows, the book has a focus on telling time. For activities to relate to time we discussed how long a minute is as compared the length of an hour. After setting a timer for one minute, I explained how an hour was 60 of those minutes. I also explained by saying it was about the length of time it took if you watched two Dora the Explorer episodes. Then we discussed activities which took a minute and what took an hour or more. For more fun, we set a timer for a minute and I asked them to put as many Legos as they could in a box in one minute. They loved that! Racing was another fun activity!
The Human Clock
This is a fun activity to teach a child how to tell time. I simply wrote the numbers 1-12 on construction paper with a Sharpie. Then I arranged the paper in a circle on the floor. I had my daughters play the hour and minute hands. My 2 year old did not quite understand this exercise but she did learn to recognize numbers!