What child doesn't love Dear Zoo by Rod Campbell? It's definitely always been a favourite in our house, Ethan loved it when he was younger and Ivy loves it now. So I decided it was time for Ivy to have her first story sack to explore all on her own.
It's one of the simplest story sacks that I've put together for the children, as all that I needed to do was raid their collection of toy animals and find the ones that are in the story. Ivy was able to help with this too, digging through the animal drawer and picking up the ones we were looking for and putting them into the bag.
I also found a little cardboard box which we were using as the parcel that the animals came in. So as we read the story I put the next animal to be featured into the box and closed it up for Ivy to then open and discover what was inside. It was all the excitement of a lift the flap book on a bigger scale, she loved it!
Each time she opened the box with anticipation of what she would find inside, with the first few pages I would show her that the animal in her hand was the same as the animal that we were reading about in the story.
I would let her play with each animal for a few minutes before putting the next animal into the box for her to discover. She was just excited each time to find a new animal inside and to play with it and make it's sound (hissing for the snake) or do an action with it (jumping for the frog). When we got to the end of the story she was so happy to find the cute little puppy in the box.
After we finished she started putting the animals back into the sack straight away, one of her favourite things is to put things in and take things out of bags and boxes so I wasn't surprised when she starting pulling them all out again. So we made that into another game, I would ask her for a certain animal and we would rummage around in the sack together to find it. Then once she pulled it out we would do a sound or action that the animal does. Ivy absolutely loved it, she played with the Dear Zoo animals for ages and even pulled the story sack out the next day and brought it to me to play with again!
* This post contains an affiliate link if you would like to buy the book to read yourselves at home. *
