Jungle Drums by Graeme Base

In Jungle Drums, Graeme Base moves from the animals of Australia and imaginary animals to the animals of Africa.  He uses the Swahili words for those animals as their names.  This book is great for cause and effect, predicting, and discussing inner/outer beauty.

Some activities to do with this book:

1)  Comprehension Questions: With every book there are always discussion questions you could go though at the end.  If you don't feel like making them up, here is a list you could just steal from me.

Get your Questions here!

2) Cause and Effect: Like I said before, this book is great for cause and effect.  Every time Ngiri hits the drums Old Nyumbu gave him, crazy things happen to the animals; things he was not expecting.  You can create a cause and effect chart.  There are several ways you could do this.  The easiest way, of course, is to just write it down, but you can also create one where your kids can come up with their own answers on post-it notes and then have them stick them to the cause and effect spots on your chart.  That way, all of your kids are answering completing all of the parts of the chart and you can take data on everyone.  If you are a worksheet person, I have created one for you.

Get your Cause and Effect Chart here!

3) Adjectives: It is always great to find a book with obvious adjectives.  This one has a bunch!  Several of them are synonyms for pretty!  So you can work on adjectives and synonyms with the same activity.

Here is a list of the obvious ones: small, stunning, striking, impressive, curly, graceful, gorgeous, grand, beautiful, silly, ugly, old, wise, magic, eager, fabulous, plain, jungle, dismay, awful, fake, colored, new found, wild, terrible, long, squeaky, little, clever, roaring.

You can use die-cuts of feathers, horns, circles (for spots), strips of paper (for stripes), and just cut out necks and trunks and have your kids write adjectives on them.  I added the ones from the story to get them started.

4) Coupe Mount Kenya:  In honor of the African animals, I have found a fun African dessert fron Kenya (one of the countries where Swahili is spoken):  Coupe Mount Kenya (mango ice cream with zing).  There is technically a second part to this recipe (a "zingy" sauce) but it calls for rum so I just left the zing off.  It would probably taste better with a pineapple sauce, but I think the parents may get a little upset if you start "serving" their kids.  This recipe has to freeze before it is eaten but the kids don't seem to care when you ask them to wait to eat their creations.

Get your Recipe and Permission Slip here!

5) Drums:  Thought I would tack this fun addition to the end because it is just for fun (but you can make it a following directions activity if you want).  Talk to your music teachers and see if they have any bongo drums you could borrow for your session.  Depending on how many, one or all of your kids could get some drums and drum along during the drumming sections of the story.  If you don't have access to drums, they can drum on the table (sounds corny but they love it).  After the book you can give them directions like (clap once, drum twice, stomp once, and repeat) to work on following directions.