The Virtual Book Club for Kids is reading Amy Rosenthal this month. For our activity, we decided to focus on Duck! Rabbit! , Rosenthal’s imaginative take on cloud-watching. There is an image, and the book is an ongoing debate about whether it is a duck or a rabbit.

The boys had fun playing with puppets I made for the book. One duck, and one rabbit.

Making the puppets: I traced the image on the front cover. Then I cut out two images out of white paper. I outlined the puppet in black marker, and glued both sides onto popsicle sticks. I made 2 sets of these – one with an orange duck bill and the other with pink inside the rabbit ears.

Puppet Play: We read the story together, using the puppets. Then we played with the puppets: we hopped the rabbit, and waddled the duck. The animals chased each other, we fed them, we pretended to walk the rabbit to a rabbit den and the duck to its nest.

Next we designed several “tests” to see whether it is a duck or a rabbit (most of these come from the book):

Where it lives

Does it have whiskers?

How it moves

How it sounds

What it eats

Whether its babies are in eggs

Whether it has a “quivery” nose

Does it have feathers or fur?

My 4 1/2 year old also enjoyed putting the puppets together- so it was both a duck AND a rabbit!

Have you used puppets to retell a story yet? Which ones are your favorites?

Looking for ideas for the 2 and under crowd? Check out Zero to Two: the book of play , an e-book I co-authored! It includes 25 step-by-step tutorials with pictures, as well as links to over 50 more ways to play with babies and toddlers – all for $8.99

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