Corduroy

We've successfully finished our first week of school! Peanut has started Preschool this year and I decided to take a slightly different approach to her year than when the older two did Preschool. For Patty and Petie I did a letter a week, but with Peanut I've decided to pick a book a week and theme all our activities around the book. This first week our main book we used was Corduroy. We also used A Pocket For Corduroy and The Button Box.

After reading the story, we played a game where she had to roll a die and stamp the bear with the number that she rolled. The roll and stamp page was printed from here.

Since Corduroy spends much of the book searching for his lost button we did a lot of activities using buttons. She sorted the buttons and put them in our balance to see which weighed more. Here she is weighing the star buttons against the flower buttons.

I prepared these pages with numbers for her to make a number book by gluing the right number of buttons on each page. Although she was able to do fine going all the way to 10, I probably should have stopped at 5. It took a lot of buttons to go all the way to 10 and I think she got a little tired of it by then. I also just ended up hanging them on the wall instead of making a book out of them. If you want to do this as a book, I would recommend using cardstock instead of construction paper.

Patterning is another great activity to incorporate into this theme. She loved making the patterns and did better with this than I expected. I got these cute buttons at the craft store and just love how big they are, making it easy for little fingers to work with.

I also picked up some plastic canvas at the craft store and had her practice sewing on buttons. The kids all loved this and have asked to do it every day.

We made Corduroy paper bag puppets. This pattern was in a book my Mother-In-Law gave me from her teaching days, so I don't have the pattern to link to for this. (Peanut has a very vivid imagination when it comes to using color in her artwork.)

After we read A Pocket For Corduroy, Peanut made her own pocket that we hung around her neck. She wrote her name on a piece of paper and we tucked it inside her pocket just like Corduroy.

I was so excited to find these book cut-outs in Jo-Ann's new teacher section because I already had this idea in mind. Each week I will write our book of the week one of these and we will glue on an object that goes along with the story. This week we obviously chose a button to go along with the story of Corduroy.

Here are a few other activities that I didn't get pictures of:

- Counting all the buttons on everyone's clothes.

- I had an assortment of other buttons from sewing project and she picked through them and found any that matched exactly.

- After reading A Pocket For Corduroy we discussed how important it is to obey, and talked about the results of Corduroy not obeying Lisa when she told him to stay in the chair.

- One of the characters in A Pocket For Corduroy was a painter, so I let her paint her own picture to explore what a painter does.

These are a few other links to Corduroy and other bear related lesson plans and activities.

Delightful Learning is where I got the button sewing idea and she has loads more cute ideas.

United Teaching Discoveries has a great Corduroy post with lots of activities.

Little Giraffes and Pre-K Pages both have great bear theme pages. I plan to use many of these ideas for other bear related books we'll be reading this year.

Homeschool Share has lapbook printables for both Corduroy and A Pocket For Corduroy.

We had so much fun with these stories and activities. I hope Peanut's enthusiasm (and mine) continues throughout the year.

Sharing this post at:

Preschool Corner