Zog

I found this interesting website recently which has lots of activity ideas to use with popular story books so I thought I would give some a try (this is similar to the Five in a Row approach and we always enjoy our Five in a Row activities). We used Zog by Julia Donaldson as I liked the look of the activities for Harry and Peter loves the book, so I thought he might actually participate in some of it too.

We went through the book and identified all the plants and animals we recognised. Harry knew lots! Harry looked up the shape of oak leaves online to confirm the presence of an oak tree. 

We also looked up mushrooms to try and identify them. We found these Nature Detectives fungi trump cards and spent a long and interesting time looking at them. 

When we had finished the identification, Harry and Peter created a Zog picture using animals and plants we had recognised from the illustrations and dragons cut out from a colouring sheet. Harry did really well taking care with his drawings and trying to copy from the book and Peter was very proud to have made something for the wall too.

We had a look at rhyming words in the book too and Harry made an 'og' word family using magnetic letters. He wrote all the words he had found.

We also looked up the meaning of two interesting words used in the story - 'agog' and 'implore'. Harry wrote the meanings and we have been trying to use them in everyday speech. I often implore Harry to be quieter :-)

This is Harry trying to look agog!

We also played role-play games, giving medical aid to dragons and re-enacting the story.

We really enjoyed this and I think I will plan some more. I love this way of working as it doesn't even feel like work but we can cover almost any subject simply by using books with a related theme.