Sharing a Shell – Virtual Book Club for Kids

Sharing a Shell Small World Play

This months virtual book club for kids author is Julia Donaldson – I hope you could read my smile in there – it’s one of our favourite authors and there was so many books to choose from  – with the virtual book club for kids running for a month we hope to get in a few more books. But we’re starting off with Sharing a Shell.

Sharing a shell is one of our all time favourite Julia Donaldson books – it combines my love of marine life with fabulous rhyming language and fun illustrations. The story of a little hermit crab who find a shell and then some friends to share his shell with and their fun in the rock pool. Reading through this there was only one thing to do – set up some small world play for T.

The first thing we did was set up a rock pool – with our sea creatures I found a pink blob (ok it’s a turtle but it’s a pink blob and sometimes a mum has to improvise right!) a crab and then something that could be the bristle worm – the sea weed worked well enough adding some shells we had the start of our rock pool small world play.

Of course I added a little more – so we had a complete ocean beneath with rocks and fish and coral and sea weed – well everything that was in our Sea Creature Tub.

T set about swimming the fish through the ocean and into and out of the rock pool cleaning the shells in the rock pool with the sea weed and playing with the different creatures in the pool with me.

It was great for re-enacting the story – we told the story of our little crab looking for a shell and finding it’s friends and the book – bringing it alive for T to enjoy through play.