The Very Hungry Caterpillar Story Stones

We had such a great time with the Brown Bear story stones I made that when I saw these Very Hungry Caterpillar stones at Thrive 360 Living I knew they had to be my next project.

I made a small version for a birthday boy who was turning two.  They were such a success and LJ was so interested in them that I made a larger version for him.

I bought a wooden box from the Dollar store to keep them in.  At first I was going to paint a caterpillar on the outside of the box but then I realized I'm too cheap and would rather recycle the box for something else once we're done with these!

We love the Very Hungry Caterpillar book by Eric Carle so LJ was really into reenacting the story.

The front of the stones make up the green caterpillar and if you put them in order you can turn each one over as you tell the story to see what he eats.  Sooo much fun!

Brown Bear Brown Bear-Toddler Story Stones

"Brown Bear, Brown Bear what do you see?"

We love this book by Bill Martin Jr., illustrated by Eric Carle

 

I thought it would be fun to make up some story stones for LJ and L to play with.  It's been years since I made these Enormous Turnip story stones for L.

This was one of those projects that sounded fantastic at the time but after about the fourth animal I was seriously wondering what was going through my head.  Anyhow I pushed through and now we have these cute story stones to go alone with the book.

 

 

For those of you who are interested in making your own story stones I just used regular acrylic craft paint and then covered them with a layer of Modge Podge.

Auroras

We found this beautiful book about the story of the Northern Lights at the library recently.  It is beautifully written and illustrated by Mindy Dwyer.   After reading it L had a lot of questions about what exactly the Northern Lights are.

 I found this little story on the Internet about the Aurora Borealis and Australis that L could read herself.  We also looked at several pictures on the Internet and watched this wonderful video.

Then it was time to do some hands on. 

We covered out sheets of water color paper with dark blue watercolour paint.  Once it was dry we used black paint to do our silhouettes of the trees, mountains and a little cabin.  We also added a bit of white for snow.

Once the paint had dried we drew dark thick lines across the sky with different colored chalk and then blended them by wiping a paper towel across them.

Here are the finished products.  L's is on the top and Mommy's is the bottom one.

They ended up being quite effective and L proclaimed "They look just like in the book!"

The Littlest Matryoshka

I just have to share this sweet little book that we've been reading called The Littlest Matryoshka.  It is about a set of six Matryoshka that have been lovingly crafted by a Russian doll maker and sent across the sea to a toy shop in America.  You can read more about the story and see some of the illustrations here.  This page also has some great thought provoking questions about the story.

L and I both love this story and have read it most nights before bed.  We found it at our local library and I would recommend it for all ages.

It has inspired her to get out her own set of Matryoshka to re-create the story and make up ones of her own.  I love how L plays on her own and really uses her imagination.  The other day my mom said she was playing in the sand box and chatting away when she got one of the small pails, brought it over to our dog Petra put it under her and then proceeded to pretend to milk her squirting noises and all!  My mom just about died of cuteness and the dog was a really good sport too!

 

Swiss Family Robinson

Our latest chapter book has been Swiss Family Robinson.  I found a children's version at the dollar store. Score!  There are still some bits I need to edit for L as I think there is too much talk of guns and killing but she loves the rest of it.

I told her teacher we are reading it and she has introduced L to the land and water forms so she can see what an island is.  L is totally stoked!

We also got a coconut from the grocery store to try.  Daddy drilled a hole and L drank the milk with a straw.

 He then broke it apart and we enjoyed the yummy coconut just like in Swiss Family Robinson.

 When we got to the part about them using a pulley to bring up all of their provisions into the tree I told L we would give it a try.   Not having any rope we tied some long scarves together.  L stood at the top of the landing and I tied on our provisions one by one as she pulled them up.  It was a good idea to start but after what seemed like the 100th time I was second guessing myself. LOL

 We then made our tree house at the top of the stairs.  L was the mommy and I was one of the sons along with the other stuffed animals.  She made us dinner and then put us to bed.

We have really enjoyed this book and doing activities to go along with it.  I think it is especially good as it has a drawing of what is happening on every second page so L can follow along.  There are a lot of new concepts for her to try to get her head around.

Next up is getting Daddy to show her how to make a bow and arrow!

Story stones and August nature table

After reading about these story stones on Counting Coconuts I thought it would be something both L and I would really enjoy.  L still brings out her Peter and the Wolf puppets and wants to put on the puppet show all  the time.

One of our favorite stories that I tell L when she's warming up from swimming in the ocean is The Enormous Turnip.  This was the first story I decided to do with our stones we collected from the beach.  I just used acrylic paint and then covered the stones with a layer of Modge Podge.

While I was painting those L was painting stones to represent the animals from Brown Bear, Brown Bear.  Once they were finished she matched them up to her book.

We then put them in order all around our nature table.  The little girl represents the children : )

We also made some colored sand the same way we made colored rice and added some glitter.  It looks much more spectacular in real life!

We Modge Podged some sea glass to make it sparkle!

Hope you are all enjoying summer's radiant, heart warming sunshine!  Happy story telling.

One of our favorite books a bit too close to reality!!

One of our all time favorite books is We're Going on a Bear Hunt by Helen Oxenbury.  The book is a wonderfully fun story about a whole family going on a bear hunt through tall wavy grass, thick oozy mud and even a snowstorm.  We have so much fun reading it and always act it out when we go on nature walks.

Well the last few weeks the story has hit a little too close to home.  We've had many reported bear sightings in our lovely woods and it even walked across our lawn the other night!

Needless to say we have been staying out of the local woods and singing loudly "We're NOT going on a bear hunt"!

While we we're driving over to the west coast this last weekend we did have the most wonderful luck of seeing this mother and two baby cubs on the side of the road.  We stopped to take some pictures and they just kept moseying along.

This is as close as I want to come to a real live bear!

Back to Normal/Favorite Books Post

I feel so out of touch  : )
My husbands family have been visiting from Macedonia for the past ten days so I've had little to no time for the computer.
They have sadly left now so I've been able to finally compile a list of everyone's favorite books that they kindly shared when entering the giveaway.
Thank you to everyone who shared. There are so many wonderful books that are new to me which I will be looking out for at our library.


Children of the Forest, Peter in Blueberry Land- Elsa Beskow


Sam McBratney-Guess How Much I Love You -Sam McBratney

Chasing Degas- Eva Montanari

Time for Bed- Mem Fox

The Eleventh Hour- Graeme Base

I Love You Because Your You -Liza Baker

Blueberries for Sal- McClosky

Charlotte’s Web- E.B. White

Child of Earth, Child Fairie-Jane Yolen

Wild Child-Lynn Plourde

Dirt Boy-Erik Jon Slangerup

Papa, please get the moon for me-Eric Carle

Love,Splat-Rob Scotton

Zen Shorts-John J. Muth

Llama, Llama-Anna Dewdney

Little Pea and Little Hoot-Amy K. Rosenthal

Old Turtle and the Broken Truth-Douglas Wood

The Secret Staircase-Jill Barklem

My Dolly-Woodie Guthrie

Roxaboxen-Alice McLerran

Madeline and the Gypsies-Ludwig Behelmans

Geckos Go to Bed-John J. Murakami

In the mean time...

I still don't have a camera and yes I am going through all of the stages of grief. Thanks for the commiserations and advice. I would LOVE to get the Cannon Powershot D10 but I don't think we can swing the budget that far.

So in the mean time I thought I would talk a bit about books. This is a question I've had for a while now and have been meaning to post about it.
As I understand it the Montessori Method encourages books for 0-6 to be based on reality. After reading Montessori from the Start I was left with the impression that all books introduced to this age group should be "reality" based.
Well this has not been the case in our house. Maybe because we came to the whole Montessori thing too late and had already been reading L fantasy books and most of them are gifts from relatives. I do try to only get factual books from the library but I'm telling you they are really few and far between for this age group!
I would be very interested to hear what sort of books other people read to their children and how they feel about fantasy and the Montessori approach. In my opinion I don't think L even at this age has a problem with distinguishing between the dancing dinosaurs in her book and the ones we saw at the museum this weekend but I could be wrong.

That being said these are our favorite library books at the moment.


The whole family loves this book. We love all of the sounds and the humor. After a few times reading it to L she could say the lines along with us.
Also Rainforest Animals by Paul Hess. The illustrations in this book are so vibrant and the poems are clever and catchy.
Some of our all time favs are the Jillian Jiggs and Hairy Maclary books.

I would really love to hear all of your opinions and what some of your favorite books are. L just can't get enough and we're always looking for a good read!

Ranting and Raving

OK first the rant.... Why oh why don't the ABC picture books out there use the phonetic sounds??? L is really into alphabet books at the moment and I can't find any that use strictly phonics. We have to fudge over the words like acorns, ice cream, giraffe. You get the point. It is so confusing. I did look at the Jolly Phonics book but I think there are way too many pictures on the page. If anyone has found any good phonic ABC books I would love to hear about them. I'm also trying to find a book where you can trace the letters.

That being said...now for my rave. I would just like to take a moment to rave about the latest book that I have finished reading. Montessori Read & Write A Parents' Guide to Literacy for Children by Lynne Lawrence. I'm sure many of you have read this book already but for those who haven't I would definitely recommend it.
There is a large section on learning about your child's development and how to incorporate the Montessori approach. She includes lots of step by step activities to prepare for reading and writing basically from birth. I loved the easy and straightforward way this book has been written and will be using lots of the activities with L. I originally borrowed this book from the library but it is such a good resource that I decided to buy it.

Here is one of the first activities we've done from the book. Classified cards. I got my camera and took a general picture of one of our rooms. Then took pictures of eight things in that room. I love technology! I was able to do everything on the computer and then print off the pictures, glue them to some card and voila. Personalised classified cards. Here I have done the bathroom and the garden. L can't get enough of these and I think it's because she recognises all of her "stuff". I also put checking colors on the back but as I thought might happen she just uses them to sort the colors! I think we'll leave the checking until she is a bit older.
Each room is kept in a Ziploc bag and all of the bags are stored together in a box. L chooses two rooms at a time to work with.

Here you can see she's put the objects under the rooms but she really likes to put them on the picture where they are supposed to be!