"The Mitten" Lapbook

Recently, Piper brought home a book from her Mookie and Papa's - "The Mitten" by Jan Brett. She loved it and had me read it to her several nights in a row before bed. It is an adorable little story about a little Ukranian boy named Nicki who loses one of his mittens. Several different forest animals find it and squeeze in to keep warm until the mouse cozies up on the bear's nose causing him to sneeze! As always with Brett's books, the illustrations are beautiful and the story is fun and engaging!

Anyhow, around the same time, I had just discovered  lapbooks while cruising around a few of my favorite, newly found homeschool blogs: Homeschool Creations and 1+1+1=1. So I decided to give it a whirl myself by creating a lapbook of our own for Piper's homeschool preschool!

This is what her and I have been working on for the past couple of weeks...

The title page for our lapbook. The mitten is attached with velcro so that Piper can take it off to use during the story.

Here she is following along as I read the story, putting each animal in to the mitten as the story progresses.

She colored the animals in, we talked about what letter each started with, which one was biggest/smallest and about the animals that were not so common to her (such as hedgehog, mole and badger).

Piper LOVED this aspect of the lapbook!

This is the inside of the lapbook.

I made pattern cards of the fox, owl and rabbit and pattern boxes for her. We started out with simple AB patterns. She found this activity a little frustrating because sometimes she wanted to throw fox into a 'rabbit/owl' pattern but eventually she did get the hang of it!

These are the number mittens where she had to match the number on one mitten to the number of dots on another. She was a whiz at this! Pipe is crazy about numbers!

Next, color mittens. For this activity, I would tell her what color word was printed on the mitten and she would find the corresponding marker and color it in. She did really well with this too and rather enjoyed the chance to use her markers!

Piper lined up the different sized Nicki's from biggest to smallest. This one was a no brainer for her. I think I'll have to make it a bit more difficult next time around! (Notice Taitum goofing for the camera in the background! hehe!)

This one was thrown in for good measure! She had to line the letters up correctly to spell her name. She still doesn't know 'E' or 'R' very well so that part was a bit trickier!

But in the end she got it with a little help from Mama and was very proud of herself!

This is the back of the lapbook.

This was the shadow matching game I made of the animals from the book. Piper did this one easily too but enjoyed doing it over and over.

Overall, I would say our first lapbook has been a success! It was a wonderful way to work on all the new things Piper is learning in a way that really got her interested! We're looking forward to our next lapbook - a Christmas one! We're using the printables found here, in case you'd like to try it too!

Also, all of the images I used to make the prints for 'The Mitten' lapbook were found at Jan Brett's site. Its really worth taking a peek at since she offers tons of great resources for many of her books!

*Edit: I came across this awesome resource from Totally Tots: Once Upon a Book ~The Mitten. Fanatastic ideas related to the book! I wish I would have discovered it sooner!

COMING SOON: What we've been doing with the letter 'A' and the color green!