We've been reading Jan Brett's classic book, The Mitten, for several days now and it's such a delightful story. We've been having more indoor days lately, partly due to the frosty weather and partly due to my "nesting" desire in these final few weeks of pregnancy, so it's fortunate that there are so many wonderful winter stories to borrow from the library.
In light of this, I'm trying to incorporate crafts and/or baking activities that go along with a story. In the case of The Mitten, I found this fun and easy craft. I modified it a bit, so that instead of taping the mitten together, we used the one-hole punch to create sewing holes on the edges and then M used her kids needle and yarn to sew the edges, stuff the mitten with cotton and include the animal characters. The craft is a really great way to make the story more interactive, because now as we read the story, she can put each animal into the mitten at its appropriate time. More adventurous/adept homeschooling moms could easily use felt or other material for the mitten and characters!
I've also been thinking about how great poetry is for preschool kids. While I haven't yet suggested that M memorize and recite any poems, I can envision that occurring down the road. In the meantime, I expanded upon the mitten craft by finding a cute poem and affixing it to our paper mitten. Maybe today we'll bake cookies shaped like mittens before truly exhausting this theme!...
