Oi Frog!

This is a very easy, fun literacy activity for toddlers and older children at home. Oi Frog by Kes Gray and Jim Field is currently one of my eldest daughter’s favourite rhyming books. She often recites sentences from it. It is definitely one that gets stuck in your head like a catchy tune. Rhyming activities and reading rhyming books are one of the earlier stages of phonics and learning to read. They are great for helping children to start listening to the sounds within words.

Set Up

So we already had the story “Oi Frog” at home and I gathered up the resources from around the house. I got as many of the animals and objects that the animals sit on as I could find. I couldn’t find everything but this doesn’t matter and I did use a bit of creativity when it came to some of the objects. For example our cow sat on a snow plough! If you are limited on time I would maybe only find one or two and then use the story as a starting point for a treasure hunt IE “ Can you find a log for the frog to sit on? Where can we find a fork?”

In the story the cat is telling the frog of what each animal is supposed to sit on. “Frogs sit on logs.” Foxes sit on boxes. “ M already knows the story pretty well so as soon as she saw the story she instinctively started taking objects from the basket and started pairing them up. There were other objects where she was slightly more unsure of what Mummy had intended them to be. “Mummy why is there honey?” It was supposed to be jam. And then we would read through the story to find out which animal sits on the jam. F was intrigued by all the objects and what M was doing with them, so she started to randomly get them to “sit” on top of one another.

After a while M got distracted from pairing up the animals and objects and instead just started playing with the objects. Jam sat on plough and the cow ate a carrot. F is a little to young to necessarily understand rhyming words. She is however, able to complete verbally some of the sentences from the story and whilst we were playing I simply repeated some of the rhyming couplets as she played with those objects. I think next time we try this rhyming activity at home we will turn it into a bit of a challenge to find all the objects or animals around the house as M does like a treasure hunt! This is a nice, simple literacy activity to try with toddlers and children alike. This children’s book is a fun and engaging one to get them listening to and identifying rhyming words.