Chrysanthemum

Yesterday, we read the book Chrysanthemum by by Kevin Henkes.  This book is on our list of 100 Books to Read Before Kindergarten.  I searched the internet for some ideas of activities to go along with this book.  I came across a great resource on homeschoolshare.com for a Free Chrysanthemum Lapbook.  The person that put this lapbook together did a great job.  They have sections of material focusing on names (which is what the book is about) and sections focusing on mice (the characters in the book) and a section focusing on flowers (because a Chrysanthemum is a flower).  We chose to work with the section focusing on flowers because I felt that was the most on Arin's level. 

We started our activites by working on the Numbers in Bloom file folder game.

Next, Arin colored the stem, leaves and petals of a flower.  I cut these pieces out and Arin "built" a flower.

Ella, who loves to be part of the action, colored a flower picture, which her daddy found on the internet and printed for her. 

After Ella was done coloring, she enjoyed putting her crayons away.

Next, Arin glued flowers onto stems. That project can be found here (about half way down the page).

Then, Arin really enjoyed the flower matching cards.  This was an easy activity for her, but the flowers are pretty and she wanted to play again and again.  We also talked about the flowers' names and their colors, etc.  In the future, we may use these cards as a memory or go fish! game.

The last project we did was an alphabet matching book.  In this book, Arin glued the lowercase letter next to the correct uppercase letter (I had cut out the letters and placed them randomly on the table beside her).  The q was made to look like a backwards p, instead of a lowercase q with a tail on it.  It was the only letter that she had trouble identifying.