What's Included
S is for Smiling Sun is a picture book with additional materials. In addition to the book, there are downloadable resources: a parent's guide, a teacher's guide, an mp3 recording of the song to accompany the book, and a poster.
About the Book
S is for Smiling Sunrise is a 32 page hard cover alphabet book with color illustrations for each letter of the alphabet. For every letter, there is a rhyme that focuses on something that starts with that letter.
L, for example, is for leaves. The rhyme that goes along with L is
"L is for Leaves so green
Waving in the breeze
Did you know they're making food?
Working with such ease!"
About the Teacher's Guide
The teacher's guide is for teachers, parents, and other caregivers. It includes pre-reading questions, post-reading questions, and suggestions of things that go along with each rhyme.
Each letter and its corresponding word has a discussion of the concepts, questions to ask, vocabulary, and activities.
The activities include suggestions like art and craft projects, field trips (museums, planetariums, gardens, aquariums, oceans, parks, and zoos), nature study ideas (sky, gardening, flowers, butterflies), observation, identifying activities, discussions, family history, food chain, sound experiments, sun/rainbow experiments, comparison, health and nutrition.
About the mp3 Audio Song
The mp3 sing-along song is sung to the words of the book. You can listen to the video here to hear a sample of the song.
Additional Materials
Depending on how you choose to use the book and related activities, the materials you need will vary. To simply use the book as a story, you would only need the book. If you'd like to listen and learn the song, you'd want to download the mp3 file. We choose to do activities from the teacher's guide, so we needed to have the guide and other materials.
Some of the things we used included...telescope, binoculars, magnifying glass, flowers, leaves, crayons, and paper to name a few. You could use things around your home to complete the activities.
Time Frame
Reading the story takes about 5 minutes, give or take a few depending on how much you discuss what is in the book while you read. The audio mp3 is about 5 1/2 minutes. The activities ranged from 5 minutes to 20 minutes. It would just depend on how much Li liked the activity. The field trips would be longer, especially our visit to the zoo.
Our Experience
Each of the kids listened to or read the story. I read the story to Li and Jo-Jo read it by herself. And Li listened to the song several times.
Ceesa read it to Wheel. Aren't they cute!
Li and I did many of the activities together. Look at him stick his tongue out as he draws! Love that boy!
~from C is for Color Related Activities
~from R is for Rainbow Related Activities
~from F is for Flowers Related Activities
Our Thoughts
Li seemed to enjoy the book, song, and activities. The activities are definitely a hit for me too. They are the things we like to do...field trips and studying nature especially.
I liked the rhymes that were educational in nature and told fun facts about the word chosen. The L is for Leaf rhyme shared above is an example of one I liked. My least favorite rhymes were the ones that were focused on "conveying...positive words." Some of these included the phrases..."be here now," "potential for greatness," "when heart and mind align," "glowing love all night," "goodness in your heart," and "reaching within, for your best."
Each rhyme has its own meter and they don't all necessarily have similar rimes at the end. For example, compare this rhyme for U and the one for L above:
"U is for Universe
Sun and moon and stars
Earth and planets, spinning comets
Galaxies so far!"
Recommendation We recommend you check out the Freebies section of their website. There you will find a free mp3 recording of the alphabet song, a pre-k parents guide, a K-3 teacher's guide, and a words poster.
Additional Note
10% of net proceeds go to charities that focuses on children's health and education.
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