Kindergarten Reading Activity with Modifications

How many balloons are too many balloons? Well, one of my favorite children’s books is   Too Many Balloons by Catherine Matthias.  It is simple and repetitive and really cute.  It is a great supplement to our free online reading program because it contains many color and number words.   

Anyway, I love the book so much I decided to do a Too Many Balloons kindergarten guided reading activity with my own children.  I have 5 children – the oldest was 8 years old, and the youngest to participate in the activity was 2.  The big age span meant that in order to the activity, I would have to modify the activity so all the children would feel challenged.  I am a special education teacher by training, so I love to make modifications!

Too Many Balloons by Catherine Matthias is a fantastic book for preschool and kindergarten children.  The book teaches and reinforces colors, numbers, and animals.  You can do a math activity with it, you can do a reading activity with it, you can do a Spanish activity with it, you can even do science activities with it.  It is so flexible and easy to modify to fit any child or lesson plan.  I definitely encourage you to look for it in your local library, it is well worth it.

I geared the Too Many Balloons activity to be for the kindergarten age, but it is easily modified for toddler, preschooler, and even a second grader!  The first thing we did was read the book together.  I had my second grader read the book first to everyone.

My kindergarten student went next, and then my preschooler read the book.  That is another great thing about Too Many Balloons -it is a great companion book for Mrs. Karle’s learn to read for free program!  Mrs. Karle starts by teaching color and number words for the children and Too Many Balloons has many color and number words so children who are about day 10 in the program can already read this book!

After reading the book, I passed out the activity sheets.  The sheets correspond with each page in the book, so if the girl purchases 1 red balloon for the lion, the children get to give the lion one red balloon.  We used little colored stickers (like the ones you use for garage sales) as our balloons.  The two and four year olds got great practice with fine motor and taking off the stickers and with coloring the little round circles.  The four year old had a great time reading the color and number words and matching them with the correct animals.  The kindergarten student also did a great job reading and matching and counting all the balloons.  My second grader really enjoyed helping with the activity.  As an extra challenge, we read Too Many Balloons in Spanish!  She also counted all the balloons in the book to figure out just exactly how many balloons were too many.  One day we hope to do a science experiment…  how many balloons are too many?

I highly encourage you to check out the book Too Many Balloons by Catherine Matthias.  There are so many ways you can modify the book to work for your classroom or homeschool.  After you read the book, do this fun activity!  To get this fun free book activity, enter your email into the form below.  You will be added to our mailing list where you will find out about more fun things!

 

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