Picnic Craft and Books for Kids

Continuing with our picnic theme, we did a little craft and read some more picnic books today. If you missed our 5 book inspired picnics, be sure to check it out!



One of our favorites was Piglet's Picnic.  Piglet invites everyone to a picnic and asks them to bring their favorite food to share.  Many animals join them like a mouse, two frogs, and a dog.  When they get to the picnic, everyone begins to open their packages.  (This part of the book is lift the flap and lots of fun to guess what each animal has brought.) Unfortunately, everyone has brought things that nobody else wants to eat! The mouse has brought stinky cheese, the dog has brought an old bone, and the frogs have brought BUGS!  Piglet solves the problem by sharing her treat with everyone (cupcakes) and everyone gets to eat what they brought.  The last page is a large fold out page showing all the happy animals sitting around the picnic blanket with food. This is a great book for preschoolers or younger elementary students.  It's also good counting practice, although we didn't focus on that aspect of it for this activity.    

Our craft for this book was to make our own picnic.  We cut some pictures of our favorite picnic food from magazines. Not surprisingly, my two and three year olds cut out a lot of of treats and candy
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We glued the pictures to gingham scrapbook paper for our picnic blankets (but any paper would do).

After the glue was dry we added some fingerprint ants to our picnics.  We just dipped a finger in paint, made three dots, and added details with a black marker.

Here's how my three year old's turned out:

I think he did a great job! My two year old and I worked "together" meaning she cut out two pictures, then bossed me, and then lost interest and I finished it:

Here are two other great books that would go well with this craft:

The Pig's Picnic has a cute message for preschoolers about being yourself.  When Mr. Pig wants to ask Miss Pig to go on a picnic with him, all his friends encourage Mr. Pig to "improve" himself.  The fox loans his tail, the lion loans his mane, and the zebra loans his stripes to Mr. Pig.  Feeling very handsome, Mr. Pig arrives at Miss Pig's house only to have her tell him to go away!!  She's thinks he's a monster! Mr. Pig quickly returns the borrowed items, shows up as himself, and happily goes on a picnic with Miss Pig.

 

Picnic is a wordless picture book (at least the version we read is) about a mouse family who heads off for a picnic.  One little mouse gets lost and everybody is sad until they find her again.  Beautiful illustrations in this book!