Games with Books

I wanted to make a quick post about a book I found at my library called Games with Books by Peggy Kaye. The book includes activities for 28 popular children's books. Books include such titles as Chrysanthemum, Blueberries for Sal, The Carrot Seed, Winnie the Pooh, Charlotte's Web, Beezus and Ramona and The Borrowers. The ages go from preschool to third grade. I think many of the activities can be adapted up or down if you want to do them with a group. The activites range from something simple like making blueberry ice pops or a dot game to silly sentences, creating graphs and crafting a Borrowers home. The ideas can be adapted for other books as well.

Peggy Kaye also has other titles such as Games for Math and Games for Learning.

Ocean Unit

A17's Ocean unit this spring ended up so large that instead of using a file folder lapbook, we put everything into a Bare Book. Bare Books can be purchased in a variety of sizes and are great for big projects or something that is ongoing like our Flat Stanley project. This ocean book contains resources from Homeschoolshare, project packs Under the Sea and Clownfish Adventure from Hands of a Child, activities from Evan Moor, Enchanted Learning and other online sites. These first pages also include booklets listing the books we read, for example DK Eye Wonder Ocean.

At the end of the book is a separate book containing all the coloring pages of various ocean animals. Most of these were taken from the Color and Learn series book entitled Ocean Life.


A17 chose to focus his report on what he called a "shamu" whale or orca. On the left page is a fact sheet containing things he wanted to remember from the books we read. On the right are photo cards and one fact of different types of whales. Last is a whale pop up book featured in a previous post

A17 chose which ocean animals to read about including dolphins, sea turtles, jellyfish, star fish and sea dragons.

Underneath the minit books for dolphin pod and echolocation, A17 put Boardmaker pictures for the definitions. For mammals in the ocean he used dolphin and whale.

This page uses Boardmaker pictures to describe why ocean are important and has some glitter fish.To go along with the Clownfish Adventure lapbook, we watched the Nemo movie and read a book called Just Keep Swimming. These pages include minit books about clownfish and manta rays, and information on characters on the Nemo movie including the Tank Gang and Bruce the great white shark!

We made several more pop up books based on the whale pattern. This one is called My Book About Dory.We included photos of some of the art projects that A17 enjoyed. You can find these posts here.

The last couple of pages are pocket pages that contain several books on ocean animals we found on Enchanted Learning and in our Evan Moor books.