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Light Table Activities for Kids Based on Children's Books
J is obsessed with the Elephant and Piggie series by Mo Willems, with his current favorites being Let's Go For a Drive!, Happy Pig Day, and I am Going!. J, not yet four and a half, can read all of these books by himself and has been reading them to daddy at bedtime. They are fantastic books for new readers. The stories are cute and the illustrations are adorable too.
Using an idea from this post on The Mixed Up Chameleon from Teach Preschool, I placed an clear overhead transparency over a page in the book that I wanted to trace. Then I used a black permanent marker to trace the outlines of the characters. I then colored the characters in using colored permanent markers. After coloring the tracings, I cut them out.
I placed the new transparent book characters on the light table, along with one Elephant and Piggie book, for J. You can see the subtle smile on his face here as he discovers that Gerald and Piggie are now on the light table.
He immediately began recreating scenes from the books and then eventually put Piggie on Gerald the Elephant's head, which was not in any of the books we've read.
J then asked for some letters to expand on his storytelling so I handed him some plastic alphabet magnets. He started spelling some words that Elephant and Piggie were saying. I think, however, that they might speak a different language than we do...
We also tried the characters on our overhead projector, which allowed us to make them appear as large as J. He thought it was fun to stand with them and put himself literally into the story.
I love how much storytelling this simple project brought out in J. And even my husband thought it was awesome. I later found him tracing Sonic the Hedgehog for the boys.
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