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The Button Box

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The Birthday Box

by Leslie Petricelli

Discover all the places to go and things to do when you’re a toddler with an empty cardboard box.

Resources for The Birthday Box:
Full Book Review (English)
Full Book Review (Spanish)
Brief Book Review (English)
Brief Book Review (Spanish)

Activities for The Birthday Box:
It Fits! (English)
¡Cabe! (Spanish)

What’s better than a birthday present?  

 

Math Connections: comparisons, spatial relationships, positional words 

 

Activities to Do Together: 

  • A box can become an airplane, a boat, a toboggan, a robot costume, or a place to take a nap. Give your child a cardboard box and encourage them to create something with the box  

  • Reinforce the positional words found in the story. Take time to ask your child where the toddler is in relationship to the box in the pictures. 

  • Ask your child what they would put inside a box, on top of the box, and under the box, etc.  

 

Extension Questions: 

  1. What would you do with the big brown box? 

  2. What could you stand on that would make you taller than a tree?

  3. Look at the snowman in the  book. How would you describe the snowman to somebody who didn’t know what it looked like? What directions would you give to somebody to build a snowman that looked like the one in the book?

  4. What did the toddler add to the box to make it into an airplane? What did the toddler add to make it into a boat? What would you add to turn the box into a train?

Vocabulary for Building Math Concepts:  

big - grande, on - sobre, taller than - más alto que, inside - adentro, in- en, over - sobre, through - sobre, below - abajo, two - dos, into, antes

Please check out the Book Guide for The Birthday Box for more!

Online External Resources for The Birthday Box:

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