The Dot Inspired Art

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When Miss G was gifted The Dot by Peter H. Reynolds last spring, we immediately fell in love. The story is about a little girl named Vashti whose paper is blank at the end of art class. After telling her teacher that she ‘just CAN’T draw!’, the teacher uses subtle and clever encouragement to get Vashti to step out of her comfort zone. Vashti starts by just making a mark, but that one mark ends up becoming something beautiful as Vashti lets go and gains confidence. In the end, not only does Vashti become a confident artist, but she also helps others who are feeling insecure with their ability to create art. Pretty awesome storyline, right?

Press Here: A Magnetic Polka Dot Sensory Bag

9 / 9 / 1410 / 8 / 14

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This week of our preschool book club was a much anticipated one. Our book, Press Here by Hervé Tullet, has been a favourite of ours for a very long time due to its interactive nature, so we couldn’t wait to explore it further. If you’ve not read it before, each page requires the reader to complete an action of some sort before moving on to the next page to see what has happened to the dots {for example, ‘five quick taps on the yellow dot’ or ‘try shaking the book…just a little bit’}. Definitely a fun and unique book!

Harold and the Purple Crayon: A Dry Erase Activity

8 / 26 / 1410 / 8 / 14

Now that we’ve been back in Kuwait for almost a week and the worst of our jet lag seems to be over with, Miss G and I have been enjoying getting back into our regular routine. Our days have been filled with fun outings, play dates with friends, and fun activities at home – including our first instalment of our second round of our awesome little preschool book club with some of our online friends!

The Mixed-Up Chameleon: Camouflaged Chameleon Hunt

5 / 20 / 145 / 20 / 14

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.}

Little Blue and Little Yellow: Colour Mixing With Gel Baggies

5 / 13 / 1410 / 8 / 14

Oh my goodness… Gracen has just been loving the book activities we’ve been doing with our Preschool Book Club! So much so that yesterday while she was happily engaged in an activity not based on a book, she stopped suddenly and announced, ‘I know what this activity needs! A book to go with it!!’ Then she ran to the shelf, sorted through to find a story that coordinated with the project, and brought it over, declaring, ‘Now that’s better!’ Hah!

Chicka Chicka Boom Boom: A Sensory Bin

5 / 6 / 145 / 11 / 14

Something I’ve recently started making sure we make time for is fun, hands-on book activities. I’ve always loved extending favourite read alouds with fun learning activities in my classroom, and Miss G absolutely adores reading books, so I’m not sure why it took this long, but heh – here we are.

Chicken Soup With Rice {a book activity}

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If you ask Gracen what she wants for dinner, 95% of the time she’ll say, ‘pasta!’ or ‘tofu!’, or some combination of the two. So this afternoon when I asked her what we should make for dinner, I was definitely not expecting, ‘Ummm… Chicken soup with rice – just like in the book!’

I must admit that I was especially pleased with this answer because I’ve been wanting to start doing activities based on our favourite books for what seems like forever now, but somehow I just haven’t made it happen yet. To get started, we read through each poem in Chicken Soup With Rice and then talked about what we’d like our chicken soup with rice to be like. G decided that it would have ‘some chicken and some rice – OF COURSE – and some veggies because they have lots of good vitamins’. With that, off to the fridge we went.

She scavenged through the crisper and decided that we’d use these vegetables for our soup, which was perfectly fine with me.

I worked on chopping them up…

While she worked on shredding some leftover chicken we had in the fridge from the night before.

We slowly cooked up our big pot of soup throughout the afternoon, and when dinner arrived, served it with some fresh bread and a reading of Chicken Soup With Rice by Miss G. ☺

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