Hush Little Ones Book Activity

One of our favorite books especially at bedtime is Hush, Little Ones by John Butler. This book engages the child with beautiful illustrations and simple verses that tells about animals getting ready to fall asleep. We just worked on the letter H with our homeschool preschool and I used this book for one of our story time sessions pairing it with this activity.

 The idea  was to work on my preschoolers comprehension while also continuing to learn our letter sounds.  I started off by finding pictures in some of our Kids National Geographic magazines and also on the internet of animals that were in the book, which were 11 total. I cut/printed these and did the same for animals not mentioned in the book then laminated all of them.  Since I didn't want to just lay out the pictures on the table I used a piece of cardboard, stuck some velcro tabs on the board and on the laminated pictures.  I thought this way would make the activity more interactive.  The last thing I did was use some cardstock to make uppercase and lowercase letters on.  These would be used for my daughter to place on the animal whose animal name started with that letter sound.

We were ready to play!  The first thing I asked my daughter was to look through all the animal pictures and to stick onto the board the animals that are in the book.  Like I mentioned earlier I included all 11 animals in the book but also included 8 other animals not included. She did great!  Their were a few that she wasn't sure what the animal was like the kangaroo and whale but other than that she only included the animals in the story and knew which ones were not part of the story.

Once finished with this part we did a simple math where I asked her to count each animal and then we moved on to letter sounds.  After saying the name of each animal she had to place the card with the correct letter on top of the animal picture with that letter sound.

My preschooler stayed engaged and interested all the way through this activity, yay!!  And now I have a 'book board' that I can use again and again for other activities similar to this one!