Bookish Play : Sophia the squirrel

Sophia the squirrel is part of the feeling friends series by Phillipa Morissette. A group of cute character books helping little children to cope with big emotions.

In this book Sophia is afraid and anxious and learns how to find her courage, which makes her happy.

How to start

We always start our bookish play in the same way each week, by reading through the book and opening discussion on the characaters, story and talking about the illustrations.

In this book we spoke about things that make us scared and how to find our courage.We looked the emotions of happy, sad, brave, scared and anxious.

Then we move onto the activity that accompanies the book’s theme.

To compliment this book, I wanted to focus on emotions and so I used a salt tray with a happy face hidden under the salt.

We had to name one thing that made us happy, then using the paint brush move away the salt and reveal the smiling face.

This is a good fine motor activity and also great practice on pencil grip.

What you need:

For this activity you will need:

• Casserole dish or plastic container
• White board markers
• Salt
• Paintbrush

How to play:

First draw a smiling face in the bowl or container with the whiteboard marker.

Next cover with salt. Fine salt works best but I only had coarse salt in the house and this was just as efficient.

Let your child list something that makes them happy and then use the brush to move the salt and reveal the smiling face.

You can take this opportunity to introduce pencil grip and the correct way to hold a pencil.

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