The Napping House 

Audrey Wood, Don Wood 

Video of Ms. Ellie reading The Napping House

• Pile in the bed: let your child collect a bunch of their favorite stuffed animals and/or dolls and see how many you can pile on top of them before they all fall over. 

• Retell the story: print out this page, let your child color it, and cut out the characters. http://www.kizclub.com/storypatterns/napping.pdf Your child can retell and act out the story with the cutouts. You can tape the sleeping pictures to blocks for your child to stack up like they are stacked in the book. The flea could come in and wake up all the sleeping characters by knocking down the block tower. 

• Put them in order: with the characters from the above page, or with toys, put the characters in the order they get into the bed. Practice using ordinal numbers with your child, “The Granny is first, the child is second,” etc. The characters reverse order as they wake up: this time the mouse is first. 

• Who is in your house? Cut out a simple house shape from construction paper and let your child draw the people and animals who live in your house. You can also do this with a play house and toy people and animals. 

• Make a rainbow: draw a rainbow with washable markers on a paper towel (or let your child do it), and then let your child spray the paper towel with water from a spray bottle (SUPER fun toy, especially outside when it’s warm) or drop water onto it from an eye dropper. Watch the rainbow colors spread! 

• Other great Audrey Wood books: King Bidgood’s in the Bathtub; The Little Mouse, the Red Ripe Strawberry, and the Big Hungry Bear; Silly Sally; Full Moon at the Napping House 

• Other cumulative books: There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly, Taback; One Day in the Eucalyptus, Eucalyptus Tree; The Sandcastle that Lola Built; Jump, Frog, Jump!