The other week was a lot of fun as we studied Chicka Chicka Boom Boom. My two year old loves this book but my five year old is not so in love with it. She had fun doing our activities but this is still one book that is not on her top 10 or even top 20. I still do not have a clear answer as to why. She is not a letter and reading kind of gal. She turned five in May and reads three letter simple words and still gets some letters mixed up or forgets what they are. However, she is excelling in math and just started a first grade word problem math book. So, I suspect the letter overload of this book was a bit unappealing.
Letters:
What else but letters with this book?! I decided to bring out a small bin of foam letters. I read the book aloud and as I said a letter the girls had to find the letter in the bin. My two year old was right only a small fraction of the time. However, my five year old thought hunting for the letters was a lot of fun. Once the letters were on the table we had some fun putting together some words. As my two year old grew bored of that, we acted out the story with the letters again. To further add fun to our letter them we got out the Scrabble game, wooden letters, Bananagrams, Appletters, and Pairs in Pears. They matched letters and made words found in Bob Books and other reader books. No worksheets, coloring, or pencils, just simply hands on fun.
Craft:
We made a coconut tree to put on our wall!
Supplies:
Green poster board
Brown construction paper
Leaf Template or free hand (I can’t make a straight line with a ruler so I needed a template.)
Tape
Brown or copper colored balloons (for coconuts)
Black marker
Poster letters
Instructions:
1. Trace several leaf shapes onto your green poster board. You may use construction paper. I made six leafs and it was plenty.
2. Take your brown construction paper and cut it in half lengthwise to be the bark. The number of sheets will determine how tall your tree will be.
3. Tape the brown construction paper to the wall to the wall forming the bark. I simply taped the pieces of paper on the wall as I worked. So, I basically constructed the tree on the wall.
4. Arrange the leaves and tape onto the bark. Surprisingly tape was all I needed.
5. Blow up five brown balloons to be your coconuts. I used five to represent the vowels.
6. With your black marker write the one vowel on each balloon. Then attach to your tree.
7. Use the poster letters to tape onto the tree as in the book. I allowed the girls to do this step as we went over the letters.
The girls had a blast putting the letters on the tree as we read the story again. Then we began a letter hunt. I had my five year old find items that started with “A”, since that is the first letter of her name. My two year old did not find items but found letters I hid around the dining room. Each time she found one, I reinforced the name of the letter and the sound.