Happy New Year!  Hope everyone had a great holiday with friends and family.  We always need some new activities as we get back in the swing of school after the long winter break so I wanted to share another one of my book companions I created for you to use with some of your students.  I found a perfect new winter book called Ten Sparkly Snowflakes by Tiger Tales and made some book visuals and sequencing pictures to pair with it.  I love these count down books and so do my students.  I just started to use this book with some of my students and it’s been a success!     

This book is great to work on building up animal vocabulary concepts, number concepts, rhyming skills, and sequencing skills.  I set up the book activity the same ways I do with the other book companions I have shared in the past.  To start off the activity, I have one of my students find the visual of the book cover and place it on the front of the book.  Just as a quick review to set up these books, I just put soft Velcro on the back of all the small book visuals and then a piece of hard Velcro on the cover of the book and one on each page inside the book to match up with the small visuals. 

The book starts out with 10 sparkly snowflakes and counts down until there are no more snowflakes left.  The snowflakes fall past different animals on each page.  On the first page 10 sparkly snowflakes fall past the bear’s big tree.  I just created visuals of the different animals the snowflakes fall past so on this page my student found the picture of the bear and attached it to the book.  I like how the snowflakes are textured and I have my students touch and count the snowflakes on each page.   

There are different ways you can change the prompting depending on your student’s skill level.  If your student is learning how to use an adapted book you might need to just give them the correct animal and let them attach it in the book.  At this point, the focus is to work with your students on attending to the book and participating.  It’s good to model the animal vocabulary terms paired with the visuals.  For these students I often simplify the book and only say the number of snowflakes and the animals they fall past.  I keep the language very simple.  For example, “eight snowflakes fall past the deer.”

Sometimes I give my students a choice of 2 animal pictures to reduce the visual field.  Then they can look at both visuals and determine which one pairs with the animal in the book.  I have many students working on their visual discrimination skills and building up their attention spans.  

For other students I like to model all the rhyming words in this book.  Each page has a different pair of rhyming words.  At the end of the book all the animal friends join together and build a snowman!  So I model those rhyming words “play” and “day” on this page.  After I read this book with my students I had them do a simple snowman craft which was a perfect combo.    

I also created some larger animal pictures if you wanted to use as a sequencing activity.  You could have your students put the animals on a board or the table as you read the story.  They can retell the story by saying “10 snowflakes fell past the bear, 9 snowflakes fell past the mice….”   

If you are interested in using these book visuals click the link – Ten Sparkly Snowflakes