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Suggested Activities: 1. Get Singing and Moving Begin with an activity that lets the children move around, shake off their restlessness and settle down. Example: a song in which the children make the motion of climbing a ladder or jumping rope. 2. Reading Aloud Since very young children will quickly lose interest if they cannot see the pictures in the books, divide the children into small groups of three or four children. Ask your guest readers to move their finger under the words as they read so the children can see that words are read from left to right. Encourage the children to participate. Children like to fill in rhymes, chant refrains, make sounds and act out parts of the story. 3. Retelling the Story After the children have listened to a story several times, give them a way to recreate the story in various ways, such as acting out the story or making it into a puppet show. A number of RIF volunteers use a flannelboard to retell stories. To make a flannelboard story, trace the characters straight from the books, cut them out and glue them onto sandpaper so the paper dolls will stick to the flannelboard. One RIF program keeps the flannelboard pieces for each story in a bag, labels it with the title of the story, and puts it in a place where children can easily find it. Then children can recreate the story on their own, looking at the pictures in the book for clues. 4. Arts and Crafts Hand out paintbrushes and watercolors and let the children illustrate a popular book. Children also enjoy making diorama scenes from books and puppets of favorite book characters. Suggested Themes: 1. Shapes Feature books that help children recognize colors and geometrical shapes and sizes. Have the children cut, draw and build the shapes. The children can work together to form the shapes with their bodies. 2. Alphabet Divide the children into small groups and give each group a page with a letter on it. Help children find illustrations for the pages. Let them look at the illustrations in their RIF books and try to find an object that begins with that letter. When they find a picture that does, have the children draw that picture and paste it below the letter in the ABC Book. Cook or bake your own alphabet letters. Shape bread dough into letter loaves then bake and eat. Use alphabet cookie cutters to make a delicious version of the children’s names. 3. Circus of Books Decorate a room as the Big Top; display circus posters of clowns, animals, a ringmaster and acrobats. Guest readers come dressed as clowns and children listen to stories about the circus. Organize games and prizes. Have a "clown workshop" for the children. Have volunteers paint the children’s faces and help them dress up like clowns. Walking on the high wire, children can costume themselves as acrobats and try to walk on a straight black line placed on the floor. Children can add a clown, balloon or circus animal cutout to a bulletin board each time they listen to a book or a clothesline across the room can hold acrobats for every book read. 4. Grocery Store This theme involves parents and the community. Set up a grocery store play area and display grocery items and ads. Read aloud from the ads describing the produce the store sells. Then help the children label grocery store items. Children can draw, color and cut out pictures of food that their parents have purchased. Guest speakers can include parents who work for food industries, grocery store managers and workers, restaurant supervisors and managers and other food service people in the community. 5. Parade of Animals Take an excursion to a pet shop, aquarium or zoo. Children can dictate stories about the animals and draw pictures from the day. Read aloud from an animal-themed book. Show pictures of the animals and ask the children to name the animal and what it is doing. Read a book about farm animals and then give each child a set of pictures from the story with the animals missing. The children cut pictures out of magazines to fill in the missing animals. These pictures are sent home and the parents read the story and help their children find even more animal pictures to fill in the blanks.
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