Book of the Week: In the Tall, Tall Grass by Denise Fleming

Today on a quick trip to the library we got this fabulous book by Denise Fleming. I am sharing it with our Music class tomorrow, so we read it a few times together once we got home.

As we started reading, we decided to get a little creative and do some art activities as we went through the book.

Materials Needed: tongue depressors (lots!), colored foam pieces, markers, watercolor paints/paintbrush, masking tape, cardstock (in varied colors), scissors, crayons, and anything else you want to use to create.

Directions:
The first thing we did was make our tall, tall grass. We cut up some cardstock and some green foam to make two different grasses.


We attached tongue depressors to the back (with masking tape)...

and then we hid in the tall, tall grass as we started reading the story.

Boo!

The first character we met in the story was a caterpillar. The caterpillar crunched and munched... so we decided to make our own caterpillar. We used cardstock and a black marker to draw an outline and then my son colored both caterpillars with crayons.

Our caterpillars crunched and munched... and played in the tall, tall grass with us once we were done.

Then we pretended to be caterpillars... and instead of crunching and munching leaves... we crunched and munched chocolate chip cookies. Mmm! My son was talking about crunching and munching for the rest of the afternoon!

The next character in the story we met was a hummingbird. We found a cute hummingbird image online here and printed it out. Then we mounted it to cardstock to make it less flimsy.

Next we took out our watercolor paints and painted the hummingbirds. We made two (one for me and one for my little guy).

Once they were dry, we stuck tongue depressors to the back and flew them around the tall, tall grass.

In the book, hummingbirds sip the nectar from the flowers... so we pretended to be hummingbirds and we sipped juice in our cups. Sip, sip, sip.

After the hummingbird, we met a bee in the tall, tall grass! I drew an outline on a piece of yellow foam and then my son colored in the bee.

Once it was done we cut around it and mounted it to a tongue depressor as well.

The bees hummed in the story, so we flew our bees around and hummed... and they played in our tall, tall grass.

The last animal we read about before it was time to get ready for dinner was a crow (or a big bird). We put on our shoes and went outside to flap, flap, flap like the big bird in the story. We soared around the backyard and flapped our wings through our own tall, tall (weed ridden) grass!

By that point we were distracted by balls and toys outside (and me with dinner), so we were done creating for the day. We still have many more things to discover in the tall, tall grass!

This was such a fun activity to do together! Sometimes I wish the day didn't go by so fast!