Oh my word… I’m pretty sure book activities are quickly becoming Miss G’s favourite thing ever. So much so that when I asked her what she’d like to do the other day and proceeded to suggest a trip to the beach, a morning at the pool, or a visit to an indoor play area, she quickly responded with, ‘I know! I want to do another fun book activity!’ So that’s what we did. {Apparently the fun outings can wait.}
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We pulled out The Mixed-Up Chameleon by Eric Carle, our Preschool Book Club’s story of the week, and a longtime favourite of ours. If you haven’t read it before, The Mixed-Up Chameleon is a story about a colour-changing, camouflaging, fly-eating chameleon who doesn’t feel like his life is all that exciting. One day, he happens upon a zoo and finds that his wishes to be like all of the animals in the zoo come true! The only trouble is that by the time he’s done wishing, he’s so mixed up that he isn’t able to catch the fly he so desperately wants. Before long, he realizes that he’s happiest when he’s himself and he goes back to his life of changing colours and catching flies, which makes for a lovely story ending.
While we did think about doing something involving zoo animals or mixed-uppedness {ya, I just wrote that}, we decided to focus on camouflage for our activity and I’m so glad we did. Out of all of our book club activities so far – our Pete the Cat button sewing activity, our Chicka Chicka Boom Boom sensory bin, and even our Little Blue and Little Yellow inspired colour mixing exploration – our camouflaged chameleon hunt has received the most play time so far.
The funny part is that it is by far the simplest of the 4 activities. Here’s everything we used to prepare {well, this and a stapler I grabbed part way through}… The Mixed-Up Chameleon {obviously}, plus a set of translucent page dividers {like these}, a Sharpie {this awesome set always seems to be on sale for 54% off}, and a pair of scissors.
After reading the story and talking a little bit about camouflage, we got started by cutting our dividers apart so that they were single ply.
Then, we selected a chameleon image from the book and I quickly traced it onto our page divider using permanent marker.
After watching me do the first one, Gracen wanted to try making her own chameleon – a purple one of course. To help her be successful with the tracing part, I used two tiny pieces of tape to hold her plastic page divider in place while she traced.
Then it was time to cut our chameleons out. In order to be a little more efficient, I staple several page dividers to my green one and cut out five at a time…
While Grae focused on her purple guy.
Before long, we had a whole collection of chameleons.
Then it was time have some fun! While Gracen waited patiently down at one end of the house, I found fun places for our chameleons to ‘hide’.
Technically the chameleons were all in plain sight, but I made sure to place them in spots where they would either blend in with or take on the surface’s colour or pattern – the focus was camouflage after all!
This was no easy feat in a home furnished with as much white as ours, but I managed to find several good spots.
Do you see the sneaky guy hiding here? Grae thought he was particularly funny.
By far, the clear chameleons were my favourite to hide, though I did wish that I’d left one without the black outline just to make it that much trickier to find.
Our black carpet turned out to be a great camouflaging spot…
As was highly patterned clothing.
With all of our chameleons ‘hidden’, it was time for the search to begin.
While I did manage to get these few action shots, most just involve a very blurry Gracen running through the house excitedly searching for chameleons and shrieking with each find.
Of course once she’d found all ten chameleons, it was time to switch roles. She became the hider and I became the finder. {This is one of her hides.}
The game continued on and on all afternoon until I convinced her that we should do one final hide before Papa returned home from work so he could join in on the fun. And you’d better believe she put him straight to searching when he walked in that door! I have a feeling we’ll be doing many more camouflaged chameleon hunts in the next few days. ☺
Ready for some more fun Mixed-Up Chameleon activities? Here’s what our lovely friends came up with:
mixed-up snack mix | chameleon sensory bin | mixed-up creatures | feed me flies game
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What a fun idea! I love that it gets the kids moving and looking.
What a fun idea!! My son loves anything involving movement and hiding so this is the perfect way to introduce him to camouflage!
Great idea! :)
This is really really cool! I just love it.
I want to play I love this idea!
Love this idea – The Mixed Up Chameleon is a great book :)
AWESOME! Thank you so much for sharing!
I love this idea its fun