"The Littles" Book: Cereal Box Rooms

We have entered the world of Read Alouds (for more resources look at www.readaloudrevival.com.)

As a novice homeschool mom, I have dreamt of the day my crew of kids and I would be snuggled on the couch enjoying rich literature together (cue the cozy living room vibes with classical piano playing behind, and perfectly-behaved-genius children intently listening). The problem of this narrative currently is that my crew is still young and they have short attention spans.... so our reading time is often spent answering unrelated questions or reminding them to listen as I read. (It will get better, right?)

HOWEVER...

My 6 and 4 year old have enjoyed the book "The Littles" by John Peterson. It is incredibly short (11 Chapters) and has a delightful pictures every few pages. The story captured them instantly. We giggled thinking about "Littles" living in our home and where they might hide.

We finished the book in a week and as I looked for follow up activities, I came up short. Everything found was formatted in a test-like worksheet and I knew I had to find something to capture the magic of this moment with my own littles... ENTER CEREAL BOX ROOMS...

We cut open the front face of cereal boxes and they created mini bedrooms using things they found around the house. Things like: Bottle caps, paint color cards, bars of soap, clothes pins, pom poms, tin foil, coffee filters, etc.

https://video.wixstatic.com/video/d33ba1_670c0757bda14480a57c08cdff0c719f/720p/mp4/file.mp4

I sat and kept my creative ideas to myself, allowing them to get lost in their own ideas.

My almost 6 year old was immediately engrossed and worked on hers for over an hour... my almost 4 year old son was excited at first and then moved on to pretend play.

This, my friends is the good stuff. We ended up getting to our formal lessons... but its these moments I think my kids will remember when we look back on our homeschool years.

Let's keep making the learning magic.