Press Here Activities

I am extremely thrilled that I have two littles that LOVE to read. We can literally take a stack of books and sit and read them together from beginning to end, which is no easy feat when you have two squirmy three year olds! I firmly believe the saying that says, "Readers are made on the laps of their parents." It's a lot of fun to now hear Brother and Sister "read" books themselves. They can recall and picture walk with the best of them. They can also read some phonics readers with basic sight words and word families!

We recently discovered the book Press Here by Herve Tullet. Let me implore you to run and get this book. I promise, even if you have a child who is hesitant to sit on your lap and read, he will once you pull this book out! It is a series of dots (pretty basic) but the neat thing about this book is that it is interactive. The kiddos do fun things to the dots (rub, blow, tilt) and the subsequent picture illustrates that! It is so much fun! It also introduces color mixing, which is quite fun for littles. Here are a few activites we did with the book (some I have pictures for, some not).

1. Contact Paper Circles-This was a lot of fun! I just cut a bunch of circles out of tissue paper and brother and sister put them on the contact paper. After the large circle was completely covered, we hung it on the window and you can see the colors blending to make the secondary colors!


2. Tilting and Turning-I have toilet paper tubes with magent backing on them that we use for our marble run on our fridge. We made a hand-held marble run on a baking sheet and tried to get the marble to run through the tubes by tilting the pan (just like in the book).

3. Q-tip Dot Painting-I put circles on white copy paper and only gave the littles the primary colors. They used those to fill the circles with dots only using the q-tip (I am planning to revist this sometime in the future when we study Monet).


4. Venn Diagram Color Mixing-I drew a Venn Diagram on white copy paper and the kiddos took two primary colors and colored in the circles, which allowed them to see what colors they created in the overlapping sections (I forgot a pic, which is sad because these were neat).

5. Kool-Aid Playdough- We made colorful Kool-Aid playdough, which didn't really have anything to do with the book, except that we got to mix it and then press the dough!


8. Patterns-We made patterns using circles made out of the primary colors. We love making patterns of any kind!

7. The last thing we did was create our own Press Here book. We made ours about a balloon that we can blow up and it floats up. Then we pull it down. Eventually it pops! It was pretty cute and the kiddos were really good about coming up with ideas for what to make the balloon do.

If you are looking for some other ideas for Press Here, you can try downloading this mini-book for starters!

Herve Tullet also has some great coloring books that we will be looking out for as well.