Storytime Ideas: The Great Gracie Chase

This is the fourth week of our summer storytime ideas series. Each week we gather in our local park to read great books for kids together with our neighbors. This week we featured The Great Gracie Chase by Cynthia Rylant with some clever book activities.

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Storytime Ideas: The Great Gracie Chase

The Book

The Great Gracie Chase by Cynthia Rylant is a fun tale that takes you all over town.  Gracie the dog likes a quiet house, but when the painters come to the house it is anything but quiet.  Gracie gets out of the house and discovers that someone left the gate open so she heads out for a stroll.  Well, as town members start to discover that Gracie is loose, they all start chasing her.  Gracie keeps going and going.  Eventually everyone gets tired of the chase and gives up following Gracie.  This is when Gracie decides to head home all by herself where she discovers a peaceful house again.

The Group Activities

Puppy Song

We sang this cute song about puppies to the tune of “Teddy Bear, Teddy Bear”.   The kids enjoyed acting out the song.

Puppy dog, puppy dog, turn around.

Puppy dog, puppy dog, sit on the ground.

Puppy dog, puppy dog, sit and beg.

Puppy dog, puppy dog, stand on one leg.

Puppy dog, puppy dog, bark and wail.

Puppy dog, puppy dog, chase your tail.

Puppy dog, puppy dog, into your bed creep.

Puppy dog, puppy dog, go to sleep.

Skill building:  fluency

Who Let the Letters Out Song

Next, each child was given a letter to hold.  They each took turns coming through the doghouse we made out of a cardboard box as we sang Dr. Jean’s “Who Let the Letters Out Song”.  The song is on her Kiss Your Brain cd.

Skill building: letter identification, letter sounds, fluency

Follow-Up Activities

Pretend Play Dog Park

Pretend play is a wonderful opportunity to build language skills.  This dog park pretend play idea from The Measured Mom is so much fun.  I can’t wait to set this up for my boys.

Baking for the Dogs

Let the kids make homemade doggie treats for the dog.  We don’t have a dog so we made this carrot and oat recipe from Food + Words  and then put them in bags and delivered them to the neighbors’ dogs.  It was a great activity to teach my boys to take care of animals and to do something nice for others.

Hot Doggy Dinner

This is a super cute hot dog dinner idea called Dog in a Dog from Rhodes Bread.

More Dog Themed Books

Here are some more books about dogs that you may enjoy exploring.

For more storytime ideas to go along with the book, The Great Gracie Chase and other great books, follow our Storytime Ideas Pinterest board.
Follow Jodie Rodriguez @ Growing Book by Book’s board Storytime Ideas on Pinterest.

A big thank you to Scholastic for donating copies of The Great Gracie Chase and to Camp Bow Wow for donating books.  Their support was greatly appreciated.

Join us again next week when we feature the book, Drum City by Thea Guidone.