Ocean Counting Book

image from amazon.com

I read George's Store at the Shore by Francine Bassede. It is a simple book about a duck named George and his cat setting up a beach side store. Children quickly realize that it a counting book. After reading the story, we made our own counting books. My example is below.

Decide how long you want the book to be and write the title, __'s Store at the Shore by __. Have your child decorate the front cover to look like a day at the beach.

I used a repeated phrase for the text in our book, so that the children could easily remember the text and begin to use one-to-one pointing to read the words. The phrase we used was... I have __ _____s at my store.

For kindergarten, I allowed the children to write the text and decide on a counting sequence (counting by 1s, 2s, 5s, or 10s). For little ones, you would need to write the text for them.

As for the illustration, we wrote a big numeral on the page corresponding to the number of items to be drawn. The children then drew that many items on the page. For little ones, I would use stamps or stickers for the illustrations. I love using stickers because of the novelty and ease of use by kids of all ages.

After the book is completed, point to the words as you read the book to your child. If your child is able, have him/her point to the words as you read. The next stage would be to have your child take over the reading and point to the words as well. At a young age, your child will be doing the reading by memory... which is perfect by the way. Praise all efforts and assist as needed. The repeated reading from memory will quickly place some of the words from the text into your child's memory word bank. Before you know it, your child will be able to read one or two of the words in other contexts as well.

Happy Learning!