P3 Read Write Count Activity Bag

Reading this book is a good opportunity to talk to your child about their friends – what do they do to help each other out? Our page on encouraging your child to make friends has advice on how you can support your child to make friends at school.

Which animal would your child most like to be friends with? A hippo? A tiger? A gorilla? You could chat together about the pros and cons of being friends with different animals, then your child could draw a picture of themselves with their favourite animal friend.

There are lots of interesting facts about the animals at the back of the book. See if your child can find out more about their favourite animal online – this could be a good time to talk about websites they can trust and ones that might be less reliable.

Rory has a brilliant den in his bedroom. Can your child build their own den from things they can find around the house, like boxes and rugs? What special things would they keep there?

You could both settle down in the den to read The Worry Tiger together and try some of the mindfulness exercises at the back.

At the end of the story, Rory draws a picture of the worry tiger. Ask your child to draw a picture of the tiger – or another animal of their choice – and make up an adventure they could go on together. Where will they go? Who will they meet? What will they do?

The book includes a set of mindfulness exercises your child can try to help them to relax and tackle anxiety. You can find more exercises like this on our page on supporting your child’s mental health – why not give them a go?

Deal all the green Beastie Battle cards with each player holding their cards so they can only see the top card. The first player starts by reading out a category. Then the player with the highest number on their top card wins and that player collects all the cards in play. Then their turn again to choose one of the four categories from the next card. The player with the most cards at the end wins! 

These cards can be used to create new stories together. The cards include three themes to give you some ideas for the story: characters, settings and items. Select one of each at random and then let your imaginations run wild! You could take it in turns with your child to build the story sentence by sentence.

Ask your child to choose a favourite animal from the Beastie Battle game and see if they can draw a picture of it. Where does it live? What does it eat? They could draw this too, and maybe even collect leaves and sticks when they’re outdoors to add to the picture.

Included in the pack are some blank cards so your child can add their own animals to the game. What will they choose? You could help them research some facts about the animal to add to the card.

These videos on the Scottish Book Trust website have more ideas for playing games with the cards.

Your child might know their shoe size, but do they know how long their feet actually are? Why not measure them and find out? Maybe one is bigger than the other!

What an opportunity to find out what their tallest toy is! Ask them which one they think it is and then they can go and find out.

See if your child can use the tape measure to measure the length of a room in the house. See if they can keep track of where they are with a piece of scrap paper on the floor.

Some things are easier to measure than others. A clever way to measure a tricky shape is to put a bit of string around it and then measure how much string you’ve use. See if your child can do this themselves with a funny shaped toy.

You can find more ideas for using the measuring tape here.