"The Little Rabbit" - BFIAR Activities

"The Little Bunny" was a really fun read. By day 3, my daughter was reading it to me just by memory of the words and the sight of the photos. Which, by the way, we loved the photography used for illustrations in this book. That's different from most of our other children's books. 

We did a lot of fun things this week to enhance our book and the memories and education we pull from this book.

💓Our bible verse for this book was Proverbs 12:10 - "The righteous care for the needs of their animals, but the kindest acts of the wicked are cruel."💓

 Ellie and I saw a bunny shaped cake pan at Wal-Mart in the Easter products and it just seemed so perfect for the plans we had to bake a bunny cake. So, we bought that and took it home to make a yummy cake that Ellie just so enjoyed baking. My husband said it should have been carrot cake and that just makes so much sense! Next book about a bunny...carrot cake! 

One morning we made bunny cinnamon rolls. We just got a regular Pilsbury pack of cinnamon rolls, but one whole one as the face, and unrolled one and broke it into two pieces and shaped it into ears. This was cool to let her shape and mash and mush the dough a bit and figure how she wanted to put it together. She took control of her design and that was great! 

We also made a healthy cassava flour strawberry pie. We just saw all the Springtime goodness of this book and we wanted to make good spring time warm weather treats. Seeing bunny rabbits out and about again tell us it is nearly Spring and a time for new things. 

Oh! Here is the bunny cake before frosting, by the way!

We played outside with chalk. Ellie practiced writing "Bb" and "Rr" for bunny and rabbit. I showed her how to spell "Bunny," and we went through the word letter for letter practicing the sounds and letter recognition. 

Ellie's "B."

I found these cute bunnies and bunny with a hutch on Amazon and bought them to add to the play and learning. What a hit! Ellie and I counted them, discussed their appearance characteristics, made up stories with them, and a lot of imaginary play. In counting them, Ellie also wanted to know how many would be left if we took 2 away from the total 5 we had in this one group. She has been very interested in understanding addition and subtraction with figures and fingers and also snacks lately. It was great to hear her asking me math problems as a game and knowing she thought it was fun and found it interesting. For even more math with the toy bunnies, Ellie had a bag of baby carrots. she lined up the rabbits and I asked her how many carrots each rabbit wanted to eat for lunch. She gave me a number and for each bunny we counted out and set out the amount of carrots she designated. Then we counted the total of carrots distributed. Then she ate them! She loves carrots!

In light of the warmer Southern weather, I took Ellie on a small field trip to a local historical bridge we love to play at splashing in the creek and nature walking. We talked about how bunny rabbits may be hiding in their burrows from us or they may be out stretching their legs from their time of hibernation. Ellie ate carrots as a snack like a little bunny!

Rabbits also love celery...or any vegetable, really....so we did a science experiment with celery stalks with rainbow colored food coloring (because it is March too) to show how water travels through the veins of the plant to feed the plant all the way to the leaves. 

Then, I took Ellie to a friend's house for a field trip to see their pet bunnies and to hold them. Ellie was interested and intrigued but also scared of how hyper they were with their scratchy feet. She did just love how soft and sweet and cute they were! She talked about them all day and how cool it was to see them! What a treat!

For art Ellie got her hands and feet painted to make a carrot and a bunny.

Ellie also painted with carrots. This is always so fun because kids can write with them, roll them, stamp them. If they have their leafy greens those can be a fun brush, too. We did this also with "The Carrot Seed."

These are our "go along" books. We especially LOVED the other Judith Dunn books of all the other "Little" animals. Her sister also illustrated these stories with photography. It was honestly just so perfect to connect these all together. "One More Rabbit" was great for counting, and "Baby Animals" was an excellent tie in in general.

Have fun with this row!