Monthly play roundup: Little Green Peas

I am a couple of days late with my usual monthly post of some of the things I’ve been up to over the past month with my family day care kiddos. But I definitely did not want to miss this one as it has been a very fun little series of activities.

Our main focus over the past couple of weeks in June has been based around one of the children’s current favourite books ‘Little Green Peas’ by Keith Baker.

Apparently there is a whole ‘peas series’ of these books featuring these adorable tiny little peas… on alphabets, numbers, months of the year. This particular one that I picked up at the library featured colours.

My kids were just nuts over the myriads of irresistibly cute little green peas dotted all over each page. Interestingly, they were not drawn so much to the colour theme of the book (they all knew their colours down pat very well anyway). Instead they were more focused on pointing out the large letters and trying to count all the tiny little peas of each page.

So to extend of the children’s captivation with the alphabet and counting elements in the book, I set out some activities related to letter and number recognition.

A ‘Counting Little Green Peas’ activity tray
Using green glass stones and these printable cards from andnextcomessl

A letter matching activity tray
Using some magnetic letters and a magnetic chalkboard from Ikea

‘Five little peas in a peapod pressed’
We learnt a new fingerplay rhyme which we took turns singing and doing the actions with both our hands,
as well as with this cute little ‘peas-in-a-pod’ set I made with some green felt and pom-poms.

Shelling and eating fresh peas-in-a-pod
This was my favourite activity of all -- I brought out a bowl of real fresh sugar snap peas-in-a-pod to show
the children. I popped open a pod to show them the little baby peas sleeping inside. They immediately
wanted to try opening a pod themselves and tasting the peas inside. They kept clamouring for more
and more pods to shell and eat. So that ended up being part of our morning tea as well.

There are so many options to extend on this pea theme further… like the story of the ‘Princess and the Pea’… cooking pea and ham soup… sensory or craft activities with dried peas… but I think the children had enough with peas for now. We might pick it up again in some other related version down the track. Stay tuned at the end of this month to see what else we get up to.

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If you enjoyed this post, you can check out last month’s roundup of activities and more of my other play and learning ideas. Stay tuned for next month’s roundup!