Where's Mr Lion

This peekaboo activity for babies and toddlers is based on the story ‘Where’s Mr Lion’ by Noisy Crow Ltd. It is a great activity for babies, toddlers and preschoolers as it works on a building a number of skills. For babies it is a great activity to teach object permanence. Object permanence is the understanding that objects continue to exist even when they can not be seen, heard, touched etc. For toddlers and preschoolers its great activity to encourage a love of reading by bringing a simple story to life.

Set Up

For this activity I used green felt, blue felt, an old amazon box for the cave, juggling scarves to cover the amazon box, duplo pieces, aquarium plastic flowers, a plastic crocodile (PoundLand) and safari animals. It may seem like I needed a lot for this activity but all of this I had collected over my son’s 2 years and it was all in his toy collection. It’s just a case of using your imagination of what might work to bring the story to life.

With this sort of activity my son’s interest is immediately grabbed and he needs no encouragement to start interacting with the small world scene. He loved finding the animals in the book and and telling me where they were hidden in the tray. This was a great activity for us to practice building longer sentences and using prepositions. For example he said ‘giraffe tree.’ I then copied and said ‘yes you are right. The giraffe is behind the tree.’

Without any prompting from me, my son became the author and told me ‘cover eyes Mummy’ and he hid all the animals. When he was ready he then asked me ‘where lion?’ and it was my job to look for them. I took advantage of the situation and begun modeling resilience and problem solving by not being able to find the animals. My son found this hilarious.

This was such a lovely and simple way to bring a simple story to life and then encourage my son to become the story teller.

I think this peekaboo game would work well for babies from 0 - 2 years old who are learning about object permanence and of course older children too.