"1-2-3 Peas" Book Craft

I was a teacher back in the day. You know, before my little people came along.  Now that Dancing Girl is getting closer to kindergarten (and I'm thinking about homeschool vs.public hopefully magnet school), the teacher that's been buried down for the past 5 years is starting to pop up more and more.

I've been trying to be more consistent about doing a "homework" time each day.  Dancing Girl is already reading on her own so we've been making making weekly trips to the library to keep her a nice supply of reading material.  My goal for now is to try to do at least one book extension craft or activity each week.  For this week, we did an activity based on 1-2-3 Peas by Keith Baker.

1-2-3 Peas by Keith Baker

We had already read this book several times.  Dancing Girl and Messy Boy were both familiar with the book so when I asked them if they wanted to finger-paint some peas, they were excited.

I printed off large numbers 0-9 for them.  Dancing Girl cut her numbers out herself for more cutting practice, and I did Messy Boy's cutting for him because I don't trust him with scissors yet.  I can't imagine how many things in my house would have holes in them if he got a hold of scissors right now. 

Cutting practice

After all the numbers were cut out, they went right to work finger-painting.  Each fingerprint represented a pea, and they were supposed to put the correct amount of peas to correspond each number. This was a piece of cake for Dancing Girl.  We used this for number recognition practice for Messy Boy, and I helped him to put the right number of peas on each number.

Practicing the numbers

When we were all done, we let the numbers dry over night.  The next day, we broke out the markers to decorate the peas, just for fun. We had such a great time putting silly faces on the peas.  Here are our finished results.

They smiled the whole time they made faces on the peas.

Have you read 1-2-3 Peas?  What did you think of it? Let me know how it goes if you try this activity with your kiddos. I hope they enjoy it as much as mine did!