We love to tell stories to the children as well as read to them. There is so much more engagement from them when you can look them in the eye the whole time the story is unfolding.

We have a peg puzzle which is the story of the giant turnip (although we do admit the turnip does looks like a carrot!) and it is a really fun story to do as a group, particularly as it is so action packed.

It is so good pretending to pull up that turnip altogether as a team.

Slowly each character gets involved in pulling up the giant turnip, quite unsuccessfully until the end as you’ll remember.

The children love that the animals get roped in to help.

The last pull takes a huge effort and fortunately is successful!

Next time we told the story we got the children to be the characters …

while another child took on the roll of the narrator. They always love to be involved in the acting and telling of familiar stories.

We drew up some pictures of each character which the children can wear around their necks …

and as each character struggles to pull up the turnip  …

the childen invite the next character up to help out.

Another great way the children can tell the story themselves is with our lovely puppet theatre.

We have some more ‘giant turnip’ characters which we laminated and attached to pop sticks giving the children another opportunity to act out the story….

It was lovely to see the story being acted out from both sides of the curtain!

We believe you can never have too many opportunities to tell a good story!

One day one of the children brought in a case moth he had found in his garden.

He had been following this little creature around his garden for about a week, finding it in a different place each day.  The children were totally fascinated by the way it crawled around carrying its home along with it as it looked for food.

We explained to the children that the process a caterpillar goes through to become a moth or butterfly is called metamorphosis and we used the story of The very hungry caterpillar to explain it in a language they could understand. The very ordinary caterpillar is another lovely book they enjoyed.

They also had a great time acting out the story with The very hungry caterpillar felt board.

Metamorphosis is a fascinating concept for children so we pulled out a couple of metamorphosis puzzles on the life cycles of the butterfly and the frog.

In keeping with the tadpole / frog interest we are currently experiencing at kinder we set up a frog bog using lots of natural materials, frogs (the odd crocodile or two …  naturally) and our frog metamorphosis set.

Including materials like rocks and logs from our garden the water soon resembled a muddy frog bog. It was spectacular!

We have a wonderful frogbog CD which we played (hidden behind a fern) in the background, which made the play space sound and feel like we really were exploring a natural frog bog.

This CD doesn’t contain music just incredible Australian frog calls. It’s so amazing and the children were fascinated by the sounds real frogs make….not one single gribbet to be heard let alone a gulumph!

We have a great song we taught the children about metamorphosis and Sherry made some fabulous prop cards which the children use to act out the song.

Here are the words to the song – METAMORPHOSIS

Kittens look like cats,

and puppies look like dogs,

so why don’t little tadpoles, look like little frogs.

Bear cubs look like bears,

and little sloths like sloths,

so why don’t caterpillars look like little moths.

Kittens, puppies and other things don’t need a special process.

But caterpillars and tadpoles do.

They go through MET – A – MOR – PHO – SIS!

PS. The case moth was returned to the garden and a few weeks later our young friend discovered the empty case … how wonderful!

You can see some amazing photos of case moths and other incredible insects  through our ‘Moths & Butterflies‘ link.