March Read Along: Anybody Hungry?

For a Story, a Craft, or a Snack?

Helping Little Hands is hosting a smorgasbord of reading this month. Have you checked out all the great books and activities yet? I’m pleased to be joining in the fun and sharing a entertaining books and easy craft.


A Mouth Full of Surprises

Lift-the-flap books are popular with the youngest babies (as long as they’re sturdy) but bigger kids enjoy the interactive aspect too. What’s for Dinner, by Ann Garrett and Gene-Michael Higney engages young listeners with rhymes, bright animal illustrations, and large flaps representing the mouth of each animal. The poem on each page identifies the animal as well as a snack the animal enjoys, which is revealed in the illustration by opening the mouth flap. Animals include a cat, a walrus, a frog, a bat, and a shark. Both the poems and the illustrations are full of humor, such as the cat “playing with her food,” which is a rat who is munching some cheese of his own. The final page is features a kid, whose snack has a funny reference of its own: a hot dog is not a dog at all! B enjoys repeated readings of this one, and he’s learned to contribute some of the under-the-flap sound effect words, like gulp, slurp, and crunch. The flaps and pages are both heavy cardstock, but I wouldn’t leave this one in the unsupervised hands of an inquisitive toddler (like T).


Feeding Your Face

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The giggles that ensued from the silly snacking in the story prompted me to put together a simple munching craft with a free printable, a paper lunch bag, and some clip art. Visit DLTK’s Growing Together for a long list of printable paper bag puppet parts. We started with a frog, but you can also find a cat and a bat, and the hippo could be pretty easily adapted to a walrus. Haven’t found a shark, but we could probably design our own. (Unless anybody wants to suggest a place to find one?) While B colored and cut out the puppet pieces, I found a clip-art fly from Microsoft and printed it out as well. When we assembled the puppet, we could “feed” it the fly! You could also use other animals to create new snackers; perhaps a bird munching a worm or a pig crunching some corn? Kids learn about animal behaviors while getting some fine motor practice in the assembly process. You could even extend this craft to a nutrition lesson by printing out some examples of food and discussing which are healthy choices to “feed” your puppet.

Appropriate for: some toddlers, preschoolers, primary grades.


Thanks, Polly, for including me in the read-along. If you’re a new visitor to Little Sprout Books, welcome! Visit this week’s Feed Me Books Friday post for a spring garden book and activity, and link up your own book recommendation while you’re there!