Caps for Sale

We did Caps for Sale as our week 3 book. This book was paired along with Millions of Cats and How Much is a Million to flesh out a full C-themed week.

If you are not familiar with Caps for Sale by Espyhyr Slobodkina, I cannot recommend this book enough. My kids thought the antics of the monkeys were hilarious. I loved it for very different reasons: the rhyming patterns, the sequencing, and the fabulous illustrations make this a wonderful book to read again and again.

I love coming up with our own activities that work for our stage of life. We found hats around the house and stacked them on our heads and walked around our house offering them for sale. We made little hats out of playdoh and did all kinds of playing, stacking, and sorting with them. When I wanted something that featured more independent work I couldn’t quite find something that met my needs, so I created something.

The link for the download is below the picture with all the directions. We used this in my home to practice copying the sequencing from the book. We practiced sorting by color and creating repeating patterns, such as blue, red, grey, repeat. My 3 year old practiced cutting on the straight lines. My brand new 5 year old practiced cutting out the hats and the man and doing some more intricate cutting. On the back I wrote the numbers 0-12, so that my daughter could practice putting the hats in numerical order. My son used the numbers to put them in reverse order and even to put them in order by skip counting by 2s (2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12).

Here is the link for the free download!

(If you love this download – please link back to here rather than uploading it on your site, please!)

 

We finished out this theme with banana snacks all week! There was also a viewing of the story being read on youtube here. It is so fun for my kids to see and hear it being read by someone different!

As I mentioned above I am also doing a Letter of the Week with my daughter. So I found this fun C book for this week: Millions of Cats by Wanda Gag.

This is an incredible, repetitive book that we had fun doing along side of Caps for Sale all week. By the end of the week, my kids largely knew the entire story word-for-word which was so fun! I was so excited to find a read aloud for this book on Youtube, too! Since my son is on a K5 track, I added the book How Much is a Million by David Schwartz. This book provides a fantastic explanation of 1 million, 1 billion, and 1 trillion in a fun way.

I love finding books that the two “bigger” kids can do together, such as Caps for Sale and Millions of Cats, while still challenging and fostering the next level for my older with the How Much is A Million book. So my little girl does things like practice writing her C’s and basic counting, while her older brother and I discuss sight words and numbers to a trillion. 🙂 Here is the Pinterest board I had going while I was collecting and brainstorming this week.

Have you read Millions of Cats, or rowed Caps for Sale with BFIAR? What activities did you do?