Waaaaay back at the beginning of my teaching career, I had the privilege of working for The Institute of Reading Development. I taught reading skills to 4 year old students all the way through retired adults. It was definitely a unique position, starting the day with preschool students, maybe switching to 4th grade students next, and then ending the day with adults from 20 to 60 years old. And every day was a different mix of age groups!
I absolutely loved the preschool classes that I taught! The biggest thing we did to encourage their love of reading was making the picture books come to life. We acted out books like We're Going on a Bear Hunt by running around the room, pretending the bear was chasing us. We colored masks and had a Wild Rumpus after reading Where the Wild Things Are. We chose one student to be the page boy from King Bidgood's in the Bathtub to act out the final scene. The kids loved this part of the class!
I try to do this as much as I can with Aaron, usually spontaneously if he's really connecting with a book. This week we went to the local library to pick out another round of 10 books. I let him choose most of the books, and then I always sneak in a couple books that catch my eye based on the aesthetics. I loved this find, by Mac Barnett and Jon Klassen.
The illustrations are beautiful, and they're simple enough that I could recreate them! The story is about a triangle playing a sneaky trick on a square, and as the story unfolds, your child is talking about squares and triangles and which is bigger or smaller. It's very clever!
I wanted Aaron to keep practicing the concepts, so I pulled out some black construction paper, some scissors, and a chalk pen and recreated the scenes and the characters, adding in a circle and a rectangle. We talked through which shaped fit through which door, we counted how many characters fit in each door (Rectangle's house is definitely the party house!), and we talked through which character was the biggest and which was the smallest.
It was hands on, it sparked a lot of great conversations practicing numbers and shapes, and it brought this book to life! And the best part... this book is one of a trilogy! Now I'll have to get my hands on the Square and the Circle books!
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