A Color of His Own: Chameleon Watercolor Project

We love connecting projects to books, and we're always inspired by the amazing group of bloggers who participate in the Virtual Book Club for Kids (you can also check the club out on Facebook) as the group comes up with some great extension activities each month. This month's author was Leo Lionni. We chose to read and do a project using a book we've really been enjoying lately, A Color of His Own. 

This is the sweet tale of a little chameleon who is looking for one color to stay all the time, but keeps running into that challenge that chameleons change color. In the end, he winds up finding a friend to always be with so they can at least always be the same color together. 

Rhyming Fish Play with Dr. Seuss

In the last few months Big Brother has gotten really interested in Dr. Seuss books, asking to read the ones in our collection quite often. I was excited when I saw that this month's Virtual Book Club for Kids author was Dr. Seuss himself. We decided to read One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish for our read this month.

The book is full of silly rhymes. As an extension I decided to play with rhymes in connection with reading the book. 

Mess Free Color Mixing on the Light Table

We love participating in the Virtual Book Club for Kids, and this month the author is Ellen Stoll Walsh. We enjoy several of her books, but particularly love the story of three little color mixing mice in Mouse Paint.

A while back we did a color mixing wheel based on the book, so this time I was looking for a different idea. As we're still in the dark days of winter I decided to incorporate the light table in our play. 

It's not often these days I get any time alone with Little Brother, but last weekend Daddy and Big Brother were on their own adventure so we had some down time together. Perfect opportunity to do a toddler focused color mixing activity.

Buttons Come and Buttons Go (A Pete the Cat Game)

We were excited when we discovered that this month's Virtual Book Club for Kids author was Eric Litwin as it meant focusing on his Pete the Cat books. We discovered Pete the Cat a few years ago and love Litwin's easygoing, rhythmic style. (Scroll down to the bottom of the post for links to a few of our favorites.) The boys love his stories and I love the messages they convey about not sweating the small stuff.

Buttons Come and Buttons Go Math Game

For this month's activity we decided to focus on the book Pete the Cat and his Four Groovy Buttons. Not only does it convey a great message about not getting upset over the loss of some buttons and finding positives in the outcome, it also builds early math skills right into the storyline. We extended the book into our "Buttons Come and Buttons Go" math game.

Room on the Broom Memory Game

This month's Virtual Book Club for Kids Author is Julia Donaldson. As she is not an author we know well we were looking forward to reading some new books and discovering a new author. Which is part of the fun of the Virtual Book Club for Kids! And of course it's also always fun to see what great project and activity ideas can come from these books.

Room on the Broom Memory Game

We decided to read Room on the Broom because it's a great fit for Halloween. 

Five Senses Walk (with free printable)

This month's Virtual Book Club for Kids author is Aliki, who has such an amazing collection of books to chose from. We decided to use the book My Five Senses. This book and activity is one I've loved combining over the years. Recently we read the book and did the activity at the preschool nature camp I ran, so we were excited to do it again.

Five Senses Walk

In a clear, easy to understand way Aliki introduces kids to each of the five senses and gives examples of how we use them. Kids connect to the illustrations and how the examples fit their everyday lives. 

Foolish Tortoise Painted Rocks

This month the Virtual Book Club for Kids author was Eric Carle. We love Eric Carle, and own many of his books. We read several all month, but choosing one for our project and post was hard. In the end, we went with The Foolish Tortoise because it was one we didn't know as well.

Big Brother has been asking for a while to paint rocks, and this seemed like a perfect extension project. The book tells of a tortoise who takes off his shell, only to learn how much it needs it for protection. We painted the rocks to look like the shells and added felt bodies. 

Tall, Tall Grass Sensory Basket

We've continued to explore books from this month's Virtual Book Club for Kids author Denise Fleming. I created this extension activity for In the Tall, Tall Grass so quickly and the boys enjoyed it so much I couldn't help but share it.

We've read the book a few times this week and liked reading about the different animals throughout the story. We knew we had some of the animals in our play animal and finger puppet collections. 

Rewriting a "Time to Sleep" for Spring

The author for this month's Virtual Book Club for Kids is Denise Fleming, and while we love her more spring and summer themed books we also really enjoy Time to Sleep which takes place in the fall.

When we reread the book this week we knew that the animals were no longer going to sleep for winter, but waking up from their long winter nap for spring!

Happy Hedgehog No Bake Cookies

This month the Virtual Book Club for Kids author is Marcus Pfister. For our monthly read we enjoyed The Happy Hedgehog. We liked the story of the little hedgehog who tries to figure out what he can accomplish in order to make himself happy, and discovers it's really just being himself that brings the greatest happiness.

We decided to follow up our reading by creating Happy Hedgehog cookies!

I wanted to make sure Big Brother could be involved as much as possible, so we made a "no bake" recipe. 

Creating Our Own Sibling Book

This month's Virtual Book Club for Kids author is Laura Numeroff, and although we love her well known books like If You Give a Mouse a Cookie, I knew this was the perfect opportunity to put together a project I've had in mind for a while.

In the fall when Big Brother started to show some sibling jealousy, I ordered a copy of What Brothers Do Best. We already had What Mommies Do Best/What Daddies Do Best in board book, but this quickly became a new favorite. We used it to talk a lot about ways their relationship was special and different from other relationships he had. We talked a lot about the things they already enjoyed together and things they could do together some day.

But, I knew Big Brother would like to take the book a little further, so we created our own "brother" book.

Virtual Book Club: Listening Walk and Book based on Bill Martin

So we missed participating in the Virtual Book Group for Kids in July and August for various reasons, but I was really excited when I saw the author for September was Bill Martin Jr. . I've only recently realized how many books he has written as many of them are illustrated by very different artists.

Although we've been reading several of his books, for our extension project this month we decided to use Polar Bear, Polar Bear What Do You Hear?

We're big fans of the better known Brown Bear, Brown Bear What Do You See." Big Brother and I enjoyed talking about the different animals and their sounds while reading and Little Brother was really engaged with the colorful and bold illustrations. 

Virtual Book Club: Seed Exploration with Gail Gibbons

This month the Virtual Book Club author was Gail Gibbons. We read several of her books including "Dogs," and "Fire! Fire!" But the book we chose to do an activity around was From Seed to Plant. 

It felt like a natural connection to the family garden we planted last month and the other Gail Gibbons' book we had read during that time, The Vegetables We Eat.

Virtual Book Club: "Swimmy" Sponge Painting

A few months ago I discovered the Virtual Book Club for Kids on facebook and pinterest. We used some of the ideas I saw for celebrating Dr. Seuss' birthday and creating activities to do with David Shannon books. This month's author was Leo Lionni.

For our first Leo Lionni book we decided to read Swimmy. Swimmy tells the tale of a little black fish who finds the courage to explore his world. He then uses his bravery and clever thinking to encourage a school of fish to work together so they too can explore the ocean. Big Brother was really interested in the creatures Swimmy meets along his journey but he wasn't sure what they all were. We did a quick search on YouTube to look for videos of the creatures. We loved seeing some of the amazing underwater videos of jellyfish, tuna fish, eels, schools of fish, and lobsters.

In this book Leo Lionni used several different materials to paint and print the illustrations. For our project we sponge painted ocean scenes. Before the project I cut several sponges into different shapes. Some shapes were recognizable, for example the fish shape, but others were generic like the half circle and rectangle.

Material notes: For the sponge painting we needed lots of flat surfaces or trays for the paint.  We used the lids of strawberry containers. We also kept a bowl of water for rinsing the sponges in between colors.