Before Five In a Row-Caps for Sale

I recently found a used copy of the book 'Before Five in a Row' for a great price. It contains many different ideas for activities to do with young kids that go along with different children's books. I happened to already have the book 'Caps for Sale' checked out from the library, so we did that one first.

I just thought I'd share some of the fun things we did with this book (we did all of the activities from 'Before Five in a Row' and a few more that were my own ideas). We had a lot of fun reading this book over and over again, even renewing it from the library so we could keep it longer. Lizzie loves counting the monkeys in the tree and imitating the peddler along with them when he is trying to get his caps back from them. We also checked out the spanish version. I made monkey cards by photocopying a page of the book onto a piece of card stock and cutting them out. Lizzie enjoyed looking at them and carrying them around, but she wasn't much interested in playing memory with them, like I'd originally planned. She could match them just fine, but the game just didn't hold her interest long enough to play it through.

These pictures show Lizzie sorting caps by color, and then gluing the caps onto the paper after she had sorted them. She loved the sorting part, and she was very excited to start gluing, but then she decided she was done after only gluing down about three of the caps.

She is using the magnet board that I made for her last week. It was an idea I saw online. We bought a magnetic cookie sheet from the dollar store and a pack of magnets from Michaels. Then I hot glued some old buttons from the button box onto the magnets to make them more interesting. I was so excited about this nifty new toy, so I was disappointed when Lizzie didn't show much interest in it at first. But after just having it around for a few days she's taken a greater interest in it, and I keep thinking of new things that we could do with it, so I'm quite satisfied with it. I think it will be a great road trip toy, as the pieces don't drop easily.

The peddler in the book carried his caps stacked on top of his head, so Lizzie and I practiced balancing books on top of our heads and trying to walk with them. Lizzie did a very good job of balancing a book when she was standing, but the book didn't stand a chance when she started to move.

She was very concerned that Sadie get a turn, too.

I thought it would be fun to make a cap for Lizzie to go along with the book, but I didn't have a pattern and didn't want to pay for one, so I made my own. I made a miniature version first to make sure that I had designed the pattern right, because I didn't want to waste a lot of fabric before I knew I'd gotten it right. I'm pretty pleased with the results, and now Lizzie's Nick has a cap of his own, and Lizzie will have one in a few days when I have time to finish hers. (I was pretty proud, this is the first time I've ever made a pattern from scratch.)

So anyways, we've had fun with it. I was planning on starting 'Corduroy' today, but Lizzie has suddenly become obsessed with the book 'If You Give a Mouse a Cookie', so I'm going to wait a bit to start.