For today’s Time to Read Tuesday, I made a storytelling basket to go along with the book Little Blue Truck. Buddy really enjoyed the last storytelling basket I made, and since then, he’s chosen to read that book (Goodnight Moon) more often than usual.
Little Blue Truck is a story that involves a little blue truck, a dump truck, and a bunch of farm animals. I had a dump truck and farm animals already, but I didn’t have anything for the main character, Little Blue Truck. Since I didn’t want to buy a new truck toy, I just printed off a picture of Little Blue Truck from the book’s online resources. I laminated it to make it stronger, and then I taped it to a wooden block.
I read through Little Blue Truck once with Buddy before I gave him the basket. After we read the story, I gave Buddy the storytelling basket. As he pulled out each object, we talked about what that object was. I also found the part of the book where that character first appears and showed Buddy the picture. Once he had pulled out everything, we reread the book and acted it out with the figures.
Our dump truck was much nicer than the one in the book because he gave rides to Little Blue and many of the other animals. (Or maybe Buddy was just trying to show what might have happened after the story ends?) Either way, he enjoyed playing with the figures for a long time, and he did go back from time to time to look at the pictures in the book again.
I will be curious to see if this activity will make Buddy more interested in this book in the future. (That was definitely the case with the Goodnight Moon book after that storytelling basket.) In the meantime, I will have to think about what book would be good for our next activity. Please share any ideas you have. I’d love to hear them!
This picture shows everything I put into the basket. All of these were items that were already in our house. I had to go digging in our ornaments for the “toy house”, and I cut out the moon out of a cereal box and covered it in foil. For the line “Goodnight stars, goodnight air, goodnight noises everywhere,” I put some star beads in a water bottle. (The bottle has stars and air, and when it’s shaken, it makes noise.) The flashlight is supposed to be the light from the room, Mickey is supposed to be the “young mouse”, and the watch is for the clocks in the room.
We started by reading the book together. Then I took Buddy over to the basket of goodies. For each item he pulled out, I said “Goodnight_______” and we found the picture in the book. The bottle of stars was his favorite by far because it made a great noise when shaken. The balloon and toy phone were also favorites.
