Tap the Magic Tree Book Activities

Today we are featuring an interactive book called Tap the Magic Tree by Christie Matheson!  It’s just one of the featured book activities you’ll find on Growing Book by Book.

As the tree in the book changes during each season, the reader is involved in the process.   You will be asked to tap, shake, jiggle and even blow a kiss on each page to make the magic happen in the book.  I really enjoyed how playful the book was and at the same time taught a great science lesson about the seasonal changes of trees.  Check out Tap the Magic Tree.

Literacy Extension for Tap the Magic Tree:  Letter in a Tree

After reading, we came up with a game to practice letter recognition and noticing details about trees in each season.  I was inspired to create this game from Playdough to Plato’s game called Little Mouse.  It’s a super cute game for color recognition that we’ve been playing a lot in our house.

Set Up:  You will need to create 4 trees (one for each season). We used toilet paper rolls as the tree trunks and construction paper for the branches and leaves.  You will also need 9 milk caps labeled with the following lowercase letters- b, c, d, e, g, p, t, v and z.

To Play:  Hide a milk cap under each tree.  Decide which letter you want to be found.  Together you say, “Little __ (insert one of the letter names), little ___ are you under the ____(insert either fall, winter, spring or summer) tree?”  The child lifts up the chosen tree to see if the correct letter is under the tree.  If it’s not there, then the chant is repeated again with another guess.  Play continues until you are too tired to play!