Clap Your Hands Book Activities & Itty Bitty Bookworm Giveaway

Katie from A Listmaker's Life and I have been working on a big giveaway for our other blog ABC & 123: A Learning Cooperative. It's with The Itty Bitty Bookworm and we're excited to announce it today, the grand prize is worth $300 and is an entire two year Bailey or Bo curriculum!

We've both been using the April unit with our own children and we've written a review of the program that you can read here. It's also where you go to enter the giveaway! If you're the parent of a child or children ages 18 months through 5 years, love literature, and you're looking for educational ideas to use with your child, you don't want to miss this one.

The Bailey curriculum is for kids 18 - 36 months old, so it's perfect for ER, who will be 3 in July. Each month has two featured books, here are some of the fun things we've been doing during our two week Clap Your Hands unit.

We made character puppets to help us act out parts of the story, I had to use candy sticks as I discovered yet another item we need for our craft kit: popsical sticks!We made paper plate tambourines, using macaroni noodles as our noise makers, because like ususal I didn't check the pantry BEFORE we began☺ It works just as well, and ER has been happily dancing to her newest CD with it.

We acted out parts of the book and took pictures to make our own version of the book. This was a very popular activity! I put the pictures into an inexpensive plastic photo album the kind where you look at two pictures at once and it's kind of like a little book to begin with. A picture is on one side and the text on the other. She loves reading it. The next six pictures are some of our favorite action pictures.

Clap your hands, stomp your feet.Shake your arms, then take a seat.

Rub your tummy, pat your head. (I found out while taking this one that she CANNOT do these two things at once; it was hilarious watching her try to!)Find something yellow, find something red.Reach for the sky, wiggle your toes.

Stick out your tongue, and touch your nose. (My personal favorite☺)

We also used some of the reproducibiles that came with the unit.

We played an animal sound game. You either make the animal sound and she picks the correct animal card or you hold up a card and she makes the animal sound. ER helped me make some of the cards. If she is running the game, and she's getting bossy enough to try every time, she always picks those cards first.

We use these laminated felt board animals along with an animal sounds poem. As you sing each line you put up the corresponding animal. She really likes this activity because she loves singing.

Besides all the literacy based activities, each month there is also a target shape and color. April's are oval and yellow. Making yellow handprint flowers was one of the color activities. I modified mine to make it cuter, but their version is much more practical if you're using the program with a room full of preschoolers.

This wasn't part of the unit, but after all that learning we just had to relax with a snack. A yellow one of course served in a yellow bowl

These are only some of the fun activities we did during a jam packed two weeks working with the book Clap Your Hands. The other book this month was Jesse Bear, What Will You Wear, and we're looking forward to doing those activities too! Be sure to head over to my other blog, ABC & 123 to see our complete review and to sign up for the great giveaway with The Itty Bitty Bookworm! You have one week to win a complete curriculum!

In the meantime, go see all the great Kid Friendly activities being shared on I Blame My Mother. I'm really enjoying seeing what everyone is doing each week and I know you would too!