Are You My Mother? Storytelling Using Props

Storytelling with kids is easy when you use a child’s favorite book. Add some props to recreate the story together. Storytelling using props helps get kids involved in the storytelling process. Check out how we retell one of our favorite books, Are You My Mother? by P.D. Eastman. I get commissions for purchases made through the affiliate links in this post.

Are You My Mother? Storytelling Using Props

Are You My Mother? is easily my son’s current favorite book.

We checked it out from the library a while back.  I think we read it every day.  Then, sadly it had to be returned.  I assumed Aiden (age 2) would be fine with returning it because we check out a lot of books, and they are all returned and replaced by new books.

Aiden continued to say his version of lines from the book days after we no longer had the book.  “Oh no, the snort got you!”  “Gotta get out of here!”  “Are you my mother?”

That’s when we realized this is probably a book we should buy.

We brought it home, and he immediately opened it up and started “reading” it.  He flipped through the pages and told the story of what was happening.

He loves to tell us the story even without having the book in front of him.

This gave me the idea of acting out the story with some props.

We searched his room for all of the characters.  He assigned roles (chose certain toys to play a certain part).

We were missing a boat and a plane.  (How do we not have boats and planes in our house?  I’m not really sure.  I guess we’re just more into trains and cars.)

I fixed this problem by making a paper airplane and a paper boat.

Daddy was the narrator and Aiden and I acted out the parts.  Aiden said the lines as he saw fit.

We started with our mother bird in her nest.  The egg jumps.  Aiden jumps up and down saying, “Oh, oh, oh…!”

Are you my mother?

Are you my mother?  Aiden says, “No, I hen.”

We continued through the rest of the characters.  Aiden’s favorite part is the snort (the crane).

All in all, we had a blast acting out this story.

Reading Confetti has a great printable matching game to go along with this book.  Aiden loved helping all of the animals find their mothers.  (We have played this game over and over again.)

 

I have to give a little shout out to Jillian from A Mom With A Lesson Plan.  When she was doing her storytelling week, I commented on one of the activities about how I couldn’t wait until Aiden got older so we could do them.  She made me realize that we already could do storytelling.  It was later that same week that Aiden started quoting lines from the book.  He was definitely ready for storytelling.

If you’re looking for more storytelling ideas, check out my Story Telling board on Pinterest.  There are lots of great ideas, and I keep collecting them all the time.

What is your child’s current favorite book?

Thanks for stopping by!  If you like what you see here, I would love to connect with you on Twitter or Facebook.