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Fun Reading Activities: Color & Trace “Molly On the Books”

By T.S. Poetry 5 Comments

LTR Featured Molly on books
Now, you can help a child learn to read with the young chickens Molly and Joe—two wide-eyed early readers who are full of curiosity, mischief, and mirth! Rich language and amusing illustrations combine with strategies that address how the brain remembers best: pattern, repetition, visual novelty, and multi-sensory experiences.

Molly and Joe Want to Know the Tongue Twister Secrets of B Front Cover

Learn to Read Story and Activity Book

Children demonstrate six reading stages, from zero to five (print awareness to analysis and reasoning). Our first multi-level Molly and Joe Want to Know reader serves stages zero to two: print awareness, sound and letter pairing, and automatic reading.

You can use the Reader to read for pleasure (even for babies!); then teach the letter b; then teach or reinforce other sound/letter relationships, high-frequency words, new vocabulary, and writing.

In a move-quickly-from-one-thing-to-the-next culture, it can be surprising to learn that stage two learners benefit from repeated experience with the same texts and materials, until reading is automatic. To make the necessary repetition easy and fun, we’ve included simple games with cut-out materials (all reusable) and activities in the Reader. You’ll find Color & Trace Pages, Biscuit Bingo, Story Cards (for Matching, Story Train, Partners in Rhyme, and Story Challenge games), Letter Dress-Up Cards (for sound and letter associations and word building), and Sentence Builders.

Color and Trace “Molly is on the books”

Color and Trace Molly on the Books Preview

Download the printable coloring page

Our Color & Trace pages help teach high-frequency words, develop fine motor skills and handwriting, and solidify memory of the letter b or other sound/letter relationships.

So maybe you’re looking for extra, fun reading activities to support the learn-to-read journey. To that end, we’re sharing: “Molly is on the books.” (Molly is that delightful little chicken atop a teetering tower of books!) If you’ve already got the Molly and Joe reader, then you have other fun coloring pages that teach high-frequency words.

5 Fun Facts About Books

1. The Molly and Joe readers keep most of their sentences short and sweet. But not all books do. In his book Les Misérables, Victor Hugo wrote one sentence that was over 800 words long. That’s a real mouthful!

2. According to Google, as of 2010 there were 129,864,880 in the world. Add to that another two-and-a-quarter million books they estimate are published every year, and Molly has a pretty tall book tower to sit on in 2017!

3. The Welsh National library has a teeny, tiny book (maybe the smallest anywhere) that measures just 1mm by 1mm. The pages in this itty bitty version of Old King Cole have to be turned with a needle.

4. Japanese has a word for the habit of acquiring books but not reading them. We’ve read that tsondoku is formed from the words tsumu, which means to pile up, and doku, which means reading, and plays with the contraction of tsunde oku, which means to leave piled up.

5. If you’d rather stack books on your head, instead of sitting on a book tower like Molly, you might be interested to know that the world record for the most people with books balanced on their heads at the same time is 998, in Sydney Australia in 2012.

Watch a Video About How a Book is Made

Books Limerick Poetry Prompt

Try your hand at a limerick about books. Use the “fun facts” as inspiration if you like. Need more inspiration? Check out our limerick infographic.

Molly and Joe Want to Know the Tongue Twister Secrets of B Front Cover

Give the gift of reading now!

This book is so much fun! I used it with about 10 Kindergarten and first graders who are labeled as “at-risk,” (I like to call them my promising students), and we had a blast reading the poem and doing the activities. The poem produces giggles and conversation, and the activities are easy to prepare and fun to complete! Plus, I love that I can use the activities over again. This is a must have in a teacher’s classroom.

—Callie Feyen, at-risk literacy specialist

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T.S. Poetry
T.S. Poetry
Helping you get inspired. With poetry & poetic things.
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Filed Under: Blog, Learn to Read, Literacy, Literacy Starts With Love, Molly and Joe Want to Know

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Comments

  1. Katie says

    July 14, 2017 at 12:03 am

    Oh, I’ve had some fun with this one!

    In the process of playing around with it, I’ve learned that there is a Japanese word for the habit of buying books but not reading them: tsondoku
    The root for tsondoku means “leave piled up” for which I must plead guilty!

    Let me get this book
    Even though I know it looks
    As if I’ll never stop
    Veering into bookshops
    Eager to acquire one more

    Please will you hold the door
    I need just one more
    Last set of book
    Ends for my
    Den’s bookshelves that are spilling on the floor.

    Unless you know this is another false
    Pledge.

    I like the flow of the first verse better than the second – any suggestions?

    Reply
  2. L.L. Barkat says

    July 14, 2017 at 7:34 am

    Katie, fun poem. Since you asked for suggestions, here is how I might see the poem revised:

    Pledge

    Let me get this book,
    even though I know it looks
    as if I’ll never stop
    veering into bookshops.

    Please will you hold the door
    I need just one set more
    of spill-preventing book ends
    for the full shelves in my den!

    Reply
    • Katie says

      July 14, 2017 at 8:55 am

      L.L.
      Like it! Thanks:)
      Good title;)
      Gratefully,
      Katie
      P.S. Had a good laugh at my self after scrolling back up and seeing the source of tsondoku!

      Reply
      • L.L. Barkat says

        July 14, 2017 at 2:02 pm

        We need to borrow that Japanese word right into English, don’t we? I’m sure there are many of us tsondokuites afoot!

        That’s something I sort of learned from reading Ted Kooser. He recommends taking “extra” descriptive parts of our poems (especially location information) and making them into the poem titles. I think you can do that with extra thoughts, as well—putting them into the title where they can do the heavy lifting, as he says.

        Reply
        • Katie says

          July 14, 2017 at 2:19 pm

          Great tip, thanks L.L.!
          I always learn something new from TSP:)
          Appreciate your suggestion and you sharing what you’ve learned. The prompts and then the feedback in the comments have helped me so much in my poetry writing!
          Grateful for this community:)
          Katie

          Reply

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