Author Play with Mo

In play school it is so important to never loose the element of fun and sometimes unpredictability. This week was a surprise week, the surprise week consisted of Mo Willem’s books and extension activities. I have a few Elephant and Piggy books and Pigeon books, but the library helped us out and gave us a big stack for the week. Emma fell in LOVE with Mo Willem’s Pigeon! I was pretty impressed she understood some of the humor and laughed at the pigeon quite a bit, seriously belly laughing with The Pigeon Wants a Puppy book! We have been working on her social skills of identifying emotions and feelings of others with the emotion cards in Spanish that I made last week. The Pigeon in Mo’s books is extremely expressive and she was eating it up. I called the surprise week, Author Play or Playing with Mo. I didn’t get to all of Mo Willem’s book selections, but his famous ones were a big hit! Some of the activities I made, but because we had FIVE missions presentations since last Friday the majority of the resources I used this week were from my years of teaching and resource hoarding!!!!! Great for busy weeks!!!! If you ever want to do a Mo Willem’s week these resources were a lot of fun! After we read a few Pigeon books we made our little Pigeon using the toilet paper roll, she pretty much carried that with her all week long. Here is the download if you want to use it.

One of the resources I did make was a Pigeon Alphabet review game. We did a review of the first five letters of the alphabet, but I created various levels of this activity if your child knows more letters. You just need an alphabet dice to play, I just made one for letters A-F from a wooden block I had laying around. This game strengthens various skills such as; two step directions, letter identification, letter naming, one to one correspondence, and some fine motor also. She was into it for like five minutes, but it didn’t hold her attention for much longer. Just enough for me to assess these skills and take a few pics. It is free if you want to print and laminate it.

We did some science extensions from one of the Elephant and Piggy books, I’m A Frog. It is a fun book about learning what pretending is, with Piggy pretending to be a frog. Emma had a blast pretending all week long in various ways, to be various animals, a doctor, cook, etc. etc. A day in a life of a 2 year old is pretending the majority of the day. Her creativity and imaginative play MUST be the largest bulk of her day. Play school to her is “pretending” too!!! Not for Mama haha! The science extension was the life cycle of a frog. We learned all about frogs!! She loved the Life Cycle Frog reader that is read like Eric Carle’s book, Brown Bear Brown Bear. That reader helped her rock at putting together the frog life cycle puzzle.

There are some other resources that I did not get to take pictures of in action, but we did Knuffle Bunny books with a cute Knuffle Bunny B craft, I made Mo counters and did a math counter game with dot dice. Emma had to find the number of Mo counters from the basket that match the number of dots on the dice that she rolled. Here are the rest of the resources. Unfortunately due to time I did not get to make any Spanish materials, but we definitely had a lot of Spanish with a fun song that she learned this week called Un Elefante Se Balanceaba. For my Spanish speaking peeps I attached some sequencing cards if you ever teach that song to your kiddos. Have a blessed weekend!!!