Going on a Stick Hunt {Inspired by Julia Donaldson's Stick Man}

Welcome to the October installment of the Virtual Book Club for Kids! This month, our spotlight author is Julia Donaldson and I am super excited about our book of the month and our language building activity to go along!

A Little About Stick Man

Stick Man lives in his home with his family when one day he gets carried off by a dog who thinks he makes a great fetching toy. We follow poor Stick Man along as he is swiped up here and there and dragged farther and farther from home. He is finally rescued by none other than Santa Claus himself and brought back home to his family! This book is an excellent new addition to our holiday library!

Stick Man is authored by Julia Donaldson, who you may recognize from The Gruffalo and one of my most favorites, Room on the Broom. Donaldson’s books are full of creative, rhyming language with amusing story lines that children just adore.

Learning Language Concepts- Going on a Stick Hunt

As I’ve mentioned previously, I want my activities to be SIMPLE, EASY and yet provide new experiences to help build and support speech, language and communication skills in young children. I want to provide activities that I think most people can do in their own homes easily. Our Stick Hunt fits the bill!

For Stick Man, I decided to take the learning outdoors and go on a Stick Hunt. We explored different language concepts by looking for sticks of different attributes like LONG, SHORT, FAT, THIN, etc. I made this scavenger hunt-type list for each of my “big” kids (almost 6 and 3 years, 9 months) so they could keep track of which types of sticks they found on our stick hunt. We then headed out and tried to find at least one stick with each attribute.

My children LOVED spotting different looking sticks all over our neighborhood! They were engaged in conversation while they described the sticks to each other. They also had a blast comparing and contrasting the different sticks we found (“This one is LONGER than that one!” or “This stick is bumpy but that stick is smooth” and “This stick has many leaves and this stick only has a few leaves!”)

And of course they loved checking off our finds along the way!

I allowed my children to bring home their FAVORITE stick from our walk. They then used their sticks to act out parts of the Stick Man story. My daughter felt that it was very important to find a stick that had leaf hair, like Stick Man from the book 😉

Scavenger Hunts are Awesome.

Scavenger hunts like this one are FANTASTIC for speech & language skill building. They provide opportunities for teaching targeted vocabulary in a very FUN and PLAYFUL way. I recommend using PICTURES with young children as well as with children with language delays, rather than just words as I used here. (My daughter was working on reading the words while my son was working on identifying the beginning letters and sounds in addition to the language use during this activity).