On a recent trip to our local library Blue selected the Dear Zoo book.  Pink never really liked this book, until now that is.  When I started reading it to Blue she realised that she could read most of the words and got excited and joined in.

So I thought we would try and use this to practice some reading.  I found a great colouring page here : Dear Zoo Colouring page.

I wrote the animal names and the descriptive word for each animal (as per the book) on some self-adhesive labels.

I got the kids to colour in the pictures and then we cut them out (Pink and I had to help Blue with the cutting as he could not manage all the curves).

And we stuck them on some lolly sticks with some tape.

Pink then had to stick the correct animal name on each lolly stick

And after that she had to try and match the descriptive word with the animal.  We turned the lolly sticks over and stuck the labels on the other side so that the two labels lined up.

And of course the bonus was that afterwards the kids got to play with the stick puppets.  My kids love stick puppets we have used them before with other stories, always to great enjoyment.

If you do not already have a copy of this fab book you can get one from Amazon here – Dear Zoo