The Story of Little Babaji

During the letter B week, we read The Story of Little Babaji, written by Helen Bannerman.  The original title of this book was The Story of Little Black Sambo.  It can be read online here.  This was Arin's favorite book for the week.  She wanted me to read this story over and over and over.

The story is set in India.  We put together our world map floor puzzle.  We love this puzzle!  We take this puzzle apart and put it away each time we use it, so now Arin is getting very good at putting it together.  Once the puzzle was together, we mapped out the route from Florida to India.  Then, we talked about sizes.  I asked Arin which was bigger, India or the United States. 

Arin also colored a picture of India.

The story is about a little boy who meets tigers in the woods and has to give up his clothing to them.  I found a good lapbook lesson about tigers, (it can be found here), but it was a bit too advanced for Arin.  So she ended up just coloring a tiger picture from her coloring book.

At the end of the book, the tigers turn into butter (sorry for the spoiler!).  Babaji's dad, Papaji, finds the melted butter and takes it home to his wife, Mamaji, who uses it to fry pancakes for dinner.  The girls and I made homemade butter.  I remember doing this activity when I was younger and I really enjoyed it.  Arin was amazed that you can turn milk (she doesn't understand the difference between milk and cream) into butter.  The girls did enjoy this activity, but they are still a bit young to stick with the jar shaking for the whole time, so we took turns, a lot!  Once we had made the butter, we made a pancake dinner, which was a hit!

Also in the book, it names the color plus the article of clothing (red jacket, blue trousers, etc.).  We are working on colors with Ella, so I made a pancake flipping game for her.  I cut six circles out of brown cardstock.  Then I cut out two red, two blue, and two green circles out of cardstock.  I glued one colored circle to each brown circle.  Then, I put three plates in front of Ella (blue, green, red).  I gave her a spatula and laid each circle or pancake brown side up.  Then, Ella would flip the circle to reveal the new color.  After she saw which color it was, she'd scoop up the pancake and serve it up on the correct colored plate.  She loved this game.  She did need a little help since she isn't completely coordinated with flipping, but I encouraged her to use the spatula rather than her hands.  It was a quick, simple game to put together, but it provided a lot of entertainment over several sittings/days for Ella.

We also played The Story of Babaji game, which can be found here.  I think Arin enjoyed this game every bit as much as she loved the story.  She wanted to play it with everyone that came to our house!