Have you read the book Caps for Sale? It’s one of our all time favourite classic books in the house! I first heard of it when we were in Singapore, borrowed it from the library and Mavi immediately loved it. Because I love the idea of Five in a Row, I decided to purchase the book so that we can do extension activities over and over again with the book. Now that it’s Vito’s turn, I decided to prepare simple activities to go along with book that are centered around the three objects found in the book: caps, money and monkeys.
First set of materials are the caps and monkeys. The caps are made from egg carton box, painted with watercolor. The monkey figures are from Safari Toob Monkeys.
Learning the concept of ordering. The stacking of caps based on the book exposes the child to the concept of ordinal numbers or ordering. If you’ve read the book, there’s a certain order on how the peddler places his caps on his head. As you can see, I placed the caps randomly on the table and as I read the book, Vito would stack them in the order it was mentioned in the story. Emphasize words like FIRST, SECOND, WHAT COMES NEXT, LAST.
One to one correspondence. This is one of the basic mathematical skill every child should develop. In this activity, I asked Vito to count the total number of caps, and pair them to the monkeys. So in this activity, each monkey will have its own cap, just like in the story.
And of course, out of the blue, my boy dramatized the “you monkeys you!”, his favourite part of the book. The peddler was mad at the monkeys because they stole his caps.
Learning about money. I grabbed this opportunity to expose Vito to “money”. Though he’s not yet in a stage to understand the value of money, but he knows what a money is whenever he sees coins and bills. He just knows that I need to pay something in exchange of the goods I buy in the grocery. So in this activity, I’m teaching him how to count coins using the monkey number cards I made and play money euro coins.
The play coins are from Learning Resources and are used by Mavi in practicing money problems. Now I realized that this are worth-it because I get to use them with Vito as well.
You can get these beautiful monkey number cards for free, click the download link below.
Vito and I are really loving our B4FIAR activities! The key here is having 2-3 simple activities per book that revolves around the favourite part of your child, or the key concepts that you wanted to relay to him. Let’s see what will be our next book to feature, and whether it would be as spontaneous as Harold the Purple Crayon or with as little preparation as Caps for Sale.
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This is so cute! Thank you
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