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We love the Otis the Tractor series by Loren Long. After we read the main book, Bear {4 yrs} retold the story to me with the plastic characters. This is a book that we’ve read eleventy-billion times, so he knows it well.
We also did an Otis the Tractor math activity using the following items:
equal number of red and yellow craft pom poms
tree made out of foam
two plastic cups to act as buckets
yellow & red dice
The rules were simple:
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Each player gets their own color apple {craft pom poms}
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Roll the dice
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Take that number of your apples off of the tree and put them in your bucket
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Other player takes turn
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The first one to get all their apples in their bucket wins
The Otis cooking activity was Bear’s favorite. To mimic the mud in the story, we made chocolate pudding. I’m a horrible from-scratch cook, so originally, I bought two boxes of chocolate pudding mix. But in reading the mix, I noticed that it had red dye #40 in it, so we couldn’t use it. {more on that soon} so we had to make our own. From scratch. great.
After finding out I could substitute flour for cornstartch with the correct adjustments, I finally settled on this one from SmittenKitchen.com. Bear was able to help mix the ingredients, but then had to stay far away from the stove after I created my own makeshift double boiler.
Some time later, our pudding was done. And quite yummy I might add.
Other Otis the Tractor ideas:
- Beginning vocabulary words: tree, mud, red, cow
- Paint with apples
- Paint with toy tractors
Well done! My daughter loves games. Cute book…we will have to check that one out!
We love reading the same books over and over, too. We'll have to check this one out!