A Parliament Of Owls by Devin Scillian

A young girl with a camera watches different animals gather together in this book of animal plurals.

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Skills

Vocabulary: The animal plural names, some familiar (a pride of lions) and others not as familiar (a rhumba of rattlesnakes) abound.

Phonological Awareness: The rhyming text promotes phonological awareness (knowing sounds).

Print Awareness: Animal plurals are all in a bold font, and some sentences curve on the page. As you read the book to your child, you can run your finger under the bold words and along the curved sentences – both will help your child be aware that print has meaning.

Practices

Talking: Talk about the rhyming words on each two-page spread throughout the book. Read a set of sentences with rhyming words and ask your child to identify the words that rhyme. Ask them to think of additional words that would rhyme with them. Have them make up silly words that rhyme!

Playing: Have your child act out the ways the animals moved in the book: hop like a rabbit, slide like a cobra, scowl like the gorillas, pretend to fly like a butterfly, and so on.

Gather your child’s stuffed animals together around your child and take a picture!

Extend the book with a handprint owl!

To make your handprint owl:

1. Cut out a large oval shape.
2. Cut a wide “V” from the top the oval shape. You now have the head/body of the owl.
3. Trace around a hand, and cut out three hand shapes.
4. Glue one hand shape to each side of the owl for wings.
5. Cut the thumb off the third hand shape. Glue it at the bottom of owl for tail feathers.
6. Draw and cut out 2 medium circle eyes out of yellow or white paper and glue to owl.
7. Cut a triangle beak and two small oval feet from orange paper and glue to owl.

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If you like, make several and have your own parliament of owls!

Check out A Parliament of Owls from LCPL!

Making something new is always fun, especially when you do it while moving and making fun sounds! Join the Monsters as they scribble, mix, dance and wiggle while creating their favorite colors and discovering new color combinations.

This book builds: 

• Phonological awareness: Rhyming words are used, emphasizing the similar endings and repetitive sounds.
• Print awareness: Text is repeated and highlighted and special words are listed in bold print.
• Vocabulary: learning synonyms for familiar words
• Background knowledge: knowing basic colors and learning about color mixing

This book helps kids practice:

• Talking – Can you repeat the new words you hear?
• Reading – Notice the colored words, what colors are they?
• Playing – Do what the monsters do, can you use your hands to mash and squish?

Extend the book and work on your writing skills by scribbling and drawing the way the monsters do. You can also practice color mixing with play-dough, markers or even paint.

Illustrations by Kendra Binney

Venetian Lullaby is a song story that is sung by one of the only female gondoliers in Venice. The beautiful illustrations take you on a trip through the canals as a baby is sung to sleep.

The rhymes help build phonological awareness of how words sound and the patterns they make.

As children listen to the story and look at the pictures, they will learn some background knowledge about the beautiful city and its canals. Kids will also use background knowledge about their understanding of what cities are like and how boats are used on the streets instead of cars.

Readers will learn new vocabulary words like “cobbled” and “gondoliera” to describe everything the baby is seeing and hearing as he drifts softly to sleep.

Place your hold on Venetian Lullaby here!

Extend the book by playing with your food!

Take a banana, a few blueberries, a couple strawberries, a grape, and a veggie straw to create your own fruit gondolier.

Playing helps solidify new information and helps kids think symbolically. The banana is the gondola, the fruit becomes people, and the veggie straw becomes the pole (the fèrro).

Let us know how your creation turned out at kids@lcplin.org.

by Rosanna Battigelli

A family of cats prepares for some Halloween fun with pumpkins! Pumpkin picking, pumpkin carving, pumpkins everywhere!

This book is a great read for beginning readers. Every page is full of rhyming words to help with phonological awareness. You and your young reader(s) can sing the story for a little more fun! This develops narrative skills to strengthen spoken and written language.

This book has vocabulary words like gleaming, glow, and glaring, just to name a few. This is a great book for some Halloween word fun!

Extend the book: Coffee Filter Jack O’ Lantern

Supplies:

• Coffee Filter
• glue
• Makers
• Wet Paper Towel
• Construction paper

Instructions:

Color the coffee filter. I used orange, but you can make your pumpkin any color.

Take a wet paper towel and dab the water all over the coffee filter.

Let the coffee filter dry. In the meantime, cut shapes for the face of the jack o’ lantern and the stem for it.

Once the filter is dried, glue the shapes and stem to the pumpkin.

Decorate your favorite space with your coffee filter pumpkin!

Dancing Feet by Lindsey Craig is a delightful book that encourages movement and promotes the early literacy practice of playing. Play nurtures creativity and helps children think symbolically.  Written with an distinct rhythm, your child can “feel” the beat and dance along with the animals throughout the book.  

Along with rhythm and rhyme, Dancing Feet is filled with silly words like “tippity”, “thumpity”, and “slappity,” which are used to describe the sound the animal’s feet are making. Rhythm, rhyme and silly words are all part of the early literacy practice of singing and support the skill of phonological awareness, or the ability to hear the individual sounds in words.

Dancing Feet works well for dialogic, or interactive, reading.

Read a page, such as, “Tippity! Tippity! Little black feet! Who is dancing that tippity beat?” Ask your child what animal they think has little black feet. Have them search the picture for clues and see if they can guess what animal it refers to. Wait a few seconds for your child to respond. Ask why they thought it was that animal.

Asking an open ended question is one of the best ways to develop early literacy skills through talking. If your child is too young to answer, or simply doesn’t answer, suggest something, “do you think it could be an (animal)?”  Let’s see…” Turn the page to show ladybugs dancing on tippity feet.

Remember that children learn more words when they have opportunities to talk, use unusual words, and respond to an adult’s questions.  The names of the different animals adds to your child’s vocabulary.  

Dancing Feet also is an early introduction to footprints. Be sure to point out the footprints throughout the book and talk about them. Have your child make a footprint in sand or put some flour on the sidewalk and let your child step in it to show their footprint. Learning about footprints adds to your child’s background knowledge, everything they know before they begin to learn to read.

After reading Dancing Feet and dancing the steps at the end, continue the fun by dancing along to the Silly Squirrel Dance from Sesame Street!

Extend the book with a moving trunk elephant craft

We followed this tutorial to make ours. When you blow through the straw, the elephant’s trunk extends!

You’ll need:

• A piece of square paper (8.5″ x 8.5″ or 9″ x 9″)
• A piece of paper size 2.5″ x 12″ (for the trunk)
  
• A straw
  
• Glue stick
  
• Scissors

Here’s how ours turned out:

As you can see, we used googly eyes instead of paper for the eyes on the pink elephant - a fun addition if you have them!

This book will help build:

• Letter knowledge - it has large font and clear letters
• Print awareness
• Phonological awareness - it has rhyming text and alliteration
• Vocabulary
• Narrative Skills
• Background knowledge - touches on winter animal activities like hibernation and migration. The content is interesting and makes reading fun!

This book will help kids practice:

• Talking
• Reading

Extend the book with an ice painting activity!

You will need:

• Paint

• Small paper cups or ice cube trays

• Craft sticks (optional)

• A freezer

• Paper

First, dilute and freeze your paint.

I used washable, child-friendly, nontoxic tempera paint. I put some into a tiny paper cup. Then I added water and stirred it up with a craft stick.

Use a separate cup for each color. If you’d like to make things less messy, freeze a craft stick in the cup as well, so that it sticks up from the paint, making a handle. Ice cube trays also work very well for this.

Tip: If your stick won’t stay upright, try using tape or rubber bands to hold it in place.

Once frozen, they resemble ice pops. Just peel away the cup, or pop them out of their tray, and you’re ready to start painting.

I made a nature scene out of construction paper. Green triangles make trees. White ice paint puts “snow” into the picture.

This is very tactile, sensory experience.  It gives a hands-on opportunity to explore science, and it  helps build fine-motor skills.  

You can also just use these ice paints to draw anything you want.
[Picture here:  Blue heart]

Illustrated by Sophie Fatus

This singable story is inspired by a Chilean folktale and will help kids practice singing and talking. This is a great book for building phonological awareness, background knowledge, narrative skills, and vocabulary.

Sing and count along as a young boy collects new pets for his farm two by two.

Practice counting skills, storytelling skills, baby animal vocabulary, and learn a bit about Chilean culture through the bright and playful illustrations.

Here’s a video you can watch to learn the tune of the song:

Practice counting by 2’s with this fun activity!

Each time the book reads “How I love my [number] little pets,” write the number on a piece of tape.

Tape the number to a pipe cleaner or piece of string.

Count out a matching number of beads and string them onto the pipe cleaner or string.

Use this activity to practice counting by 2’s. Can you count up to 16 with the book? Can you count all the way up to 20?

Use this activity to practice counting by 2’s. Can you count up to 16 with the book? Can you count all the way up to 20?

The classic Halloween hit “Monster Mash” has been made into a children’s picture book!

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Feel free to read or sing the book aloud to your little one. Singing can help build your child’s phonological awareness because it focuses on the rhythm and rhyme structure of the story.

You can talk about the different ghouls and goblins you encounter on every page, which will help build up your child’s background knowledge.

The book also provides ample opportunity for new vocabulary with lines such as, “The ghouls all came from their humble abodes to get a jolt from my electrodes.”

Extend the book by dancing!

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Search for “Monster Mash” by Bobby “Boris” Pickett and the Crypt Kickers (or any of its covers) and do the mash!

Listen Up! Train Song uses bold text and bright colored photos to highlight different types of trains and the sounds they make.

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Onomatopoeia is used on each page, encouraging readers to make the sounds themselves. Children reading can explore new vocabulary associated with trains and sounds while pointing out what they see on each page.

Back matter includes early literacy tips on how playing with sounds, rhymes, and song can help get your child ready for reading and school.

When reading this book, do the sounds for your child and encourage them to repeat you. Make it a rhyme or chant if you can. When children play with rhythm it helps them learn about the sounds that make up words, increasing their phonological awareness.

On each page you can also point out the bolded letters that represent the sounds. Ask them if they recognize the letters and what sounds they may make, then make the sound together.

If your child loves trains, ask them to talk about this passion. What kinds of trains to do they see in the book, what color are they, what kinds have they seen in real life? Talking with your child helps them learn background knowledge, improves vocabulary, and builds a better understanding of how conversation works.

All of these skills lead to better reading comprehension when your child begins to read on their own.

Extend the Book with a Paper Train Craft

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Supplies:

• construction paper squares (variety of colors if possible)
• construction paper circles (black)
• Train engine template
• markers or crayons for coloring and writing
• glue stick
• 1 11x18 inch piece of paper for a background

1. Cut out the template of the train engine. You can either do this with white paper and let your child color it in, or cut it out onto construction paper and add a small square of yellow for the window.

2. Help your child count how many letters are in their name and then cut out a square for each letter. These will be the train cars. The engine can be the first one or two letters if need be.

3. Cut out 2 inch circles from black paper for the train wheels for your cars, and 1 inch circles for your train engine. Let your child help with the cutting if you can. This helps hone fine motor skills that later help with writing.

4. Glue your train in place on a paper background starting with the engine, then the colorful train cars, and then glue the wheels between each joint. I used a 12inx18in piece of construction paper, but you can tape together regular sized pages until it is long enough to hold your whole train.

5. Finally, help your child write the letters of their name on each train car.

The Rainbow Snail is a brightly illustrated picture book with easy-to-read text that is great for teaching colors to toddlers and preschoolers.

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We follow the charming snail and discover all the colors of the rainbow. This book promotes vocabulary and background knowledge.

This book also encourages talking and playing as you describe the different colors of the rainbow: blue like the raindrops, green like the grass and yellow like the sun.

Extend this book by making a rocking rainbow snail

What you will need:

• paper plate
• white, black, red, orange, yellow, green, blue and purple construction paper
• scissors
• tape or glue
• black paint

1. Fold the paper plate in half.
2. Paint the plate black to match the snail in the book.
3. Cut out paper circles making the red one the biggest and purple the smallest.
4. Cut out black strips. Cut out white and black circles for the eyes.
5. Glue or tape pieces together.
6. Glue or tape the circles and the eyes on the plate.

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