Summer readathon 2012 – week 1 animals #readforgood

Last week I mentioned about the Summer Readathon 2012 with MeMeTales and PBS and talked about the weekly themes and some bloggers doing activities based around the books that you can borrow from the MeMeTales site based on that theme each week. Well we’re here to give you some inspiration to go along with one of the books. Five Little Ducklings is one of the tales suitable for 0 – 2 and 2 – 5 year olds so it was perfect for J and T to read with me and then for us to do some fun activities based on our reading.

The Five Little Ducklings

See more at memetales 

 

Five Little Duckling Puppets

So that we could retell the story and bring it to life we decided to make some ducklings and a Mummy duck. Retelling stories is a way to get kids involved in stories and a great method to involve the younger children (J is just under 3 and T is 15 months) and helps to promote a lifelong love of reading.

What you need to make the Five Little Duckling Puppets

Card
Crayons, Pens, Chalk, Paint
Craft Sticks
Orange Craft Foam
Googley Eyes
Glue
Sticky Tape

How you make the Five Little Duckling Puppets

J colouring in Mama Duck using a paint Dabber – he also used chalks, crayons, pencils and felt pens

This was a craft that I wanted J to get out of as much as possible – we had read the book and he counted along with the story – so we knew that there were ducklings and there was a Mummy Duck. I very quickly drew some ducks for J – I’m sure that if you don’t want to draw ducklings then you could print some ducklings and a Mummy duck onto card. Then we found all of our yellow colouring methods, crayons, pens, chalk and dot paint marker and J set about colouring in the ducks using the different methods.

Whilst he was colouring I cut out some very simple triangles from Orange Craft Foam for the beaks of the ducks – making sure that one of them was a lot bigger than the rest for the Mummy Duck.

Adding beaks and Eyes to duckling puppets

J added googley eyes to each duck and then he glued on the beaks – at the moment he loves using a glue stick.

Once everything was added I cut out the ducks and J and I helped each other to attach a craft stick to the back of the duck and ducklings first using glue and then when J realised that it meant T could easily remove the craft stick with sticky tape as well. There was a lot of J telling me to “hold that”, “more glue” and “sticky tape mummy, now I need it now”.

Five Little Ducklings puppets for retelling the story

Once we had the duck and ducklings made J, T and I sat and retold the story from memory (and from knowing the song as well – one of our favourite bath time songs).

Five Little Ducklings Play dough Pond

Last week was Play Dough Pledge week with The Imagination Tree, Nurturestore and Sun Hats and Wellie boots and I cooked up some play dough using my favourite recipe from The Imagination Tree – I coloured it with green, blue, yellow and orange food colourings and left some “white”.

What you need for Five Little Ducklings play dough Pond

Play dough in a variety of colours
Blue and green paper
Googley Eyes
Box
Plastic Bath Ducks

How we set to play Five Little Ducklings play dough Pond

Using our play box J put some blue paper in the bottom for the pond water, and green paper for the side of the ponds we then built some hills in the corner and added some mud – every good pond needs mud! apparently. We added some blue play dough for water at the edge as well.

J retelling the story with one of our plastic bath ducks

We then added in our plastic bath ducks (we only have 3 so we had to make another 2 ducklings for the pond). Using yellow and orange play dough J made them into duck shapes and then added some googley eyes.

J’s play dough duckling

We then retold the story again in our Five Little Ducklings play dough pond.

Retelling the story using toys and homemade play dough ducklings

Please watch out this week as I will be sharing more Animal Based Activities and Book Suggestions around this theme and also see what other bloggers are doing. To see what I a sharing with everyone you can like our facebook page, follow us on Twitter, come and see what I am pinning or subscribe to Rainy Day Mum by Email.

Disclaimer – I will be receiving the books that I feature from MeMeTales in exchange for sharing our fun ideas for toddlers and preschoolers each week and promoting the Summer Readathon with MeMeTales and PBS 2012.