Belle Day

It is no secret that Belle loves books. So, on Belle Day, we talked about parts of a story book and how they are made. We also decorated a dress for Belle using play dough.

Writing and illustrating a book

After talking about the parts of a story, we used story dice to create our own story. So that she could be an author, I had my daughter tell a story using the dice game. Then I wrote out the parts of the story on different pieces of paper.

The next day she drew/assembled the pictures that went with the story so that she could be an illustrator. Illustrating a whole book can sound daunting. To help make it more manageable, she helped me pick out clipart online to use for the characters and the setting. I printed out enough characters for all the pages that mentioned them, Then she glued them to the page and colored them like her own coloring page.

Once the pages were “illustrated,” I scanned in her art work and used power point to put words and pictures together into a document. Then, I saved the document as a PDF and used Adobe to print the pages in a booklet format. You can Bind the book using string or thread. I used a swing stapler that opens up.

Arranging Books Numerically

We sorted books to practice number recognition and number order.

To do this, I took a bunch of books, with plain fabric covers and used mailing labels to put numbers on their spines. Then, I set up the scenario that we worked in Belle’s favorite bookshop and we needed to arrange the books so that all of the numbers go in numerical order just like when we count. We started with 1 and worked our way all the way until 10.

Games like this can be frustrating instead of a fun challenge, if we have not reviewed numbers in a while. To help with this, we sometimes practice counting to 10 with a number line first so that all of the number shapes are fresh in her mind.