The Water Hole by Graeme Base

The Water Hole is probably the shortest of all of Graeme Base's books (or at least the shortest of all of the books that I own), but there are a TON of things to do with it.  It is similar to Uno's Garden in terms of counting up from 1 to 10 animals and talking about over use of resources, so you can pair them if you want or spread them out and put several books in-between them. 

Some activities to do with this book:

1) Questions: Because the book is short, there are not a ton of questions but here is what I have:
                    1.  What happened to the water? Why do you think that?
                    2.  Why do we all need water?
                    3.  When the water hold is getting smaller, how do you think the animals are feeling?
                    4.  Of all the animals in the book, which one is your favorite and why?

2) Alphabet Animals: Write the alphabet and find an animal that is depicted in the book that matches each letter.  Once you have done that, you can either draw the animals with your lower/younger kids and make them into a book or chart, or define the animals with cloze sentences.  Here is the sentence I usually use:

3) Animal Classification: Sort and classify animals into categories such as reptiles, birds, cats, insects, etc.  I have a bunch of magazine pictures on file that I will pull out to do random sorts with to work or classification and categorizing.  Old National Geographics are great to get nature and animal pictures from.  I just throw them on the floor and have the kids create the guidelines for the sort.  They have to work together to come up with the categories based on what pictures they have.  They could sort by type of animal, location of animal, carnivore/herbivore/omnivore, let their imaginations run.  To make it harder, you can reduce the number of categories they are aloud to sort into and have them start over using new parameters. 

4) Animal Conversations: On each page Graeme Base has the animals talking to each other.  This could be an activity for introducing speech balloons.  Ask each child to draw and write their own interpretation of what the animals are saying to one another.

5) Onamonapias: Speaking of animal conversations, you could talk about how the words look like the sounds they are making.  Have your kids come up with other onamonapias we use in everyday life.

6) Animals of the World: There are several things you can do with just animals in general.  One might be to find the countries or regions depicted in the book on a map, and match a least three animals to each region.  Another could be to pretend some of these animals are your pets and imagine what they might need to be a happy pet.  You could choose animals from each region that are not the main animals in the pictures and come up with adjectives to describe them.  (It might be fun to use alliteration here.)

7) Vocabulary: Although the words in this book are not difficult, you could bring in science vocabulary words to work in some curriculum.  Some words could be: habitat, environment, resource, precious, cycle, seasons, jungle, woodlands, deserts, mountains, and forests.  You could even look up where those types of habitats are located in the world or just in the US.

8) Frog Floats: There is a frog jumping through the "o" in the title, so I thought frog floats might be applicable to this book.  They are really easy:

Put one scoop of lime sherbert into a cup
Pour some Sprite into the cup
Add some mini marshmallows with mini M&Ms for eyes
ENJOY!!!

Get your Permission Slip here!