The Mitten, by Jan Brett

First of all, as you can tell, my New Year's resolution to try and post reading activities I was doing with my kids every day was way overly optimistic.  I am sincerely trying to concentrate on doing more learning activities each day, but not all of them are fabulous and "post-worthy" and let's be honest, they are not happening as often as I would like, but I figure some improvement is better than nothing.  This last week Paige and I had a really great time reading the mitten and doing a great activity that was as simple as can be because the author/illustrator did all the work.  The Mitten, by Jan Brett is a great book.  I happen to own the board book version, which I think may be abridged, but either copy is great.  Paige and I read it fairly frequently, but this week I was reminded by this post, that Jan Brett has a great website with all kinds of cool projects you can print.  This is the one that we picked.  We cut out two mittens and stapled all around them so that it would hold the animals, then we printed out the animals and Paige colored them.  I cut them out and she was able to put them in the mitten, just like in the story.  Paige loved it and carried the mitten around for several days and told everyone about it.  It took me until today for her to forget about it enough that I could finally throw it away.  I know from teaching that authors and illustrators and even publishers do all kinds of free stuff like Jan Brett's website to promote their books, I don't know why I don't think of it more often and take advantage of it!