Preschool Activities for "The Mitten"

 

Preschool Activities for "The Mitten"

It is winter time! Winter means breaking out some great winter-themed stories. One of my favorites is The Mitten, by Jan Brett. I put together a few reading extension activities to do with my two oldest and thought I would share! 

Writing Practice with Sight Word "the":

This is an activity I found on a Kindergarten blog called Kindergarten Rocks! which is awesome, by the way. My little ones are ages 3 and 4 so I adapted one of the great ideas on that blog to make it work for us. To begin, I read The Mitten to the little ones as a bedtime story one night and then again the next morning. After that they got to color and cut out the animals from the story. (Click this link for the Jan Brett website. There you will find lots of print out and even other activities.) I prepared the large mittens and wrote the first two words, leaving the blank line and tons of space for the kiddies to glue their animal pictures. 

Before setting the kids to task on the writing portion, I modeled completing the sentence on my own mitten. Then both Big Sister and Brother took a turn reading it back to me and spelling the word "the". After that they wrote their own sentences followed by gluing on their animals. Each child had 4 mittens in order to have a sentence for each animal in the story. To conclude this task, Big Sister and Brother took turns reading their completed sentences. For example, the above sentence would read, "In went the badger." I loved this activity and I think they did, too. 

Rhyming Word Match:

We have been doing some work with Word Families so this next activity fit in perfectly. I drew and cut out mittens and then wrote a bunch of rhyming words on the front. I used words from both Word Families the kiddies were very familiar with and some that were new to them. I laid them out on the "snow" (aka "the floor"), 4 pairs at a time. Then it was time to find the pairs. The little ones used a combination of sounding out the words and looking for words that belonged to the same Word Family as strategies for finding which words were part of the same pair. They had to say each word (sometimes with grown up support) before hanging them on the line to "dry". 

Brother found a match. I think Big SIster is proud. 

Teamwork to get the mittens on the line to "dry". 

This was a really fun activity and the kiddies were able to experience a great deal of success in completing it. 

Color Match

If you are learning your colors at your house, this might work better for you. So easy to cut out a bunch of matching color pairs, spread them out in the "snow" and let your little one pair them up. 

*Hint, hint: If you are new to making these kind of crafts at home, it is helpful to make a mitten pattern on a piece of card stock or cardboard and then use it to trace all the others. 

Alphabet Match

This is another straight forward activity but a fun one! This takes a lot of tracing and cutting out of mittens so enlist some help!  Write capital letters on half of the mittens and lowercase letters on the other half. If you use different color paper, be sure that the letter pairs that belong together are the same color. My kiddies have been doing activities like this one for a long time but they were still excited to do it again. The letters written on a mitten was a new fun twist and they excitedly found all the pairs. Then they asked to do it again! 

I hope you enjoyed checking out these ideas!  Thanks so much for reading!