
The author for The Virtual Book club is Lois Ehlert. Unfortunately the book I ordered didn’t arrive so I am using Chicka, Chicka 1 2 3 which he illustrated. This is such a lovely book though and it was easy to think of activities to go with it. I love that it is a fiction book with a maths focus. There is such a strong visual theme to this book that I knew it would be great to recreate.

I set up the twins with some materials to make some Chicka, Chicka trees. The only thing not in this picture is the black foam which I cut up and wrapped around the roll. I would have like smaller blue dot stickers to look more like the book but the twins certainly didn’t notice! They enjoyed playing with the numbers the most and although they can’t recognise them it was a good start to recognising them.

The girls liked the sticker part of the activity the best and managed to stick most of them in the right place. The glue kind of went everywhere but I wasn’t really worried. there were lots of things to count as we went along, pom poms, numbers, blue dot stickers, things they threw on the floor.

The twins had trouble sticking the large green pom poms on top so I only gave them one each. The end result still looked cute.

When Molly came home from school she wanted to join in too. I gave her a tray of sticky numbers and we focused on the part of the book with the tens numbers. She enjoyed finding the tens numbers and sticking them on. It made me realise that she has forgotten how to count in tens – so we need to work on that a bit more again.

This book was a great way to kick of our participation in the Virtual Book Club. Next month is on October 15th and the author is Amy Krouse Rosenthal.
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