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In the next few posts, we will discuss fun activities for kids based on books. Activities related to books have many benefits. One benefit is increased comprehension skills because book related activities make the characters come alive. Also, children can use their critical thinking skills to analyze a character’s feelings, dilemmas, and resolutions.
Another benefit of book related activities for children are a connection with self. Many stories contain problems that need to be solved. Activities can assist children in determining whether they agree with the characters’ decisions or if they would have taken another route. Furthermore, children can apply these situations in their lives because they have evaluated the resolution through books.
Our first book is called Once Upon an Alphabet: Short Stories For All the Letters by Oliver Jeffers. In this book, each letter has a word and short story related to it. The stories having various themes such as humor, gratefulness, and the art of thinking. For example, my favorite story is for letter U, which stands for Underground.
In this story, Nigel the monkey wasn’t good at climbing. The other monkeys laughed at him because he needed a ladder to climb the tree. Nigel became upset and moved his ladder UNDERGROUND. Suddenly two events happen: a rain storm and a tall muscular man came to chop down the monkey’s tree. Now all the monkeys want to join Nigel UNDERGROUND and they did not laugh at him anymore.
Have students create stories similar to this book. Below is how they can execute it…
- Divide students into small groups.
- Assign each group a letter.
- Groups are to use a word that begins with their letter.
- If Group 1 has the letter A, their word can be “Anteater.”
- Each group will write a short story about their word.
- You can choose a theme such as:
- Decision- Making
- Financial Literacy
- Humor
- You can also have groups choose their own themes.
- Have students choose how they want to present their stories to the class.
- Make this a weekly activity until all the alphabet is covered.
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Have fun creating!
