Virtual learning for early learners: Explore a world of words

By Children’s Librarian Shelley Harris

Greetings and salutations! Jenny and I have been having fun sharing words this week, from words about apples to what we can find around our homes. Words are everywhere!

Explore words together with these videos, activities, books, and more.

Watch these videos

Miss Jenny has a book called Be Kind, which is a great place to start conversations about what kindness means—a smile, saying hello, or listening to a friend, for example. How many ways can your family think of to be kind? How many are easy and how many are hard?

Mr. Dean has a very cool skeleton kit that he put together for everyone to show how our bones connect to each other. Can you remember all the bones in his video?

Try these activities

• How many kinds of trees can you and your kids name? Each tree has a different shaped leaf, so talking about their names and shapes can include a lot of new words!
• Use those leaves, either real, drawn, or printed out, to create pictures of animals, flowers, and anything your imagination can create! Maple leaves make good feet, and elm leaves make good tails, for example.

Read these books, check out these Discovery Kits

• What’s An Apple? by Marilyn Singer is a playful exploration of what can be done with apples. 
• Leaf Man by Lois Ehlert is about a man made of autumn leaves, with beautiful art kids can try and replicate.
• Autumn: An Alphabet Acrostic is one in a series of four seasonal books. Autumn is described in in poems where the first letter of each line spells out a word, like acorn. Can you describe yourself using words that spell out your name? 
• The Body Discovery Kit includes a life-size skeleton puzzle and the Anatomy Discovery Kit includes models with smaller pieces for kids to explore. Both are fun ways to learn words about our bodies!