Good Morning, Gorillas

As the children arrived, they colored a picture of a leopard, completed a maze, and did a connect-the-dots activity.

I summarized the twenty sixth book, Good Morning Gorillas, and asked the children a variety of questions about the book.

When we arrived at the part in the book where the tree house spun, each child received a Dizzy Pill (which is actually a Tootsie Roll) to help make them less dizzy. After eating their Dizzy Pills, the children were instructed to spin around three times, as if they were in the spinning tree house.

When we got to the part in the book where Jack wrote in his notebook, I showed the notebook I made that has all of Jack's notes in it.

After discussing how Annie and the baby gorilla climbed up a tree, I passed out triangles made out of popsicle sticks. Prior to the meeting, I hot glued three popsicle sticks together to make these. The children colored the triangles with green markers to look like a tree. Then, I gave each child a brown rectangle, which they taped to the bottom of the tree as the trunk.

Our next craft was making the "I love you" symbol in sign language. Each child colored and cut out a picture of a hand and a heart. We glued the heart to the palm of the hand, and then folded down the middle and ring fingers on the hand. I also passed out a piece of paper with the alphabet in sign language on it and helped the children learn to sign their names.

Lastly, the children colored and cut out pictures of gorillas. Some of them taped their gorilla head onto a stick to make a puppet.