I love sharing stories with little ones that awaken their natural sense of wonder as they connect with the story. The children’s book ‘The Magic Sky’ by Lucy Richards (published by Egmont Books Ltd in 2006) does so beautifully. I find that preschoolers can readily identify with the feelings of the main character little Rory who finds it hard to wait a long time for something. Their excitement mounts with each page that turns as the story progresses.
Little ones also love board books that have a bit of texture to them and they just love feeling the textured glitter of the magic lights across the sky when that page finally arrives.
This story book does an excellent job of awakening young children’s natural curiosity and joy in learning. The most recent group of preschoolers who I have taught have enjoyed reading this story book over and over. They loved it so much they wanted to make their own magic skies. It is fun to give little ones extra moments to touch the texture and just look at the picture and hear the lovely things they say in their own words to describe their feelings. I try to follow the little ones lead in how I pace the reading of a story and sometimes this means lingering longer on certain pages. They said that the magic sky looked like dancing rainbows which was a lovely bit of inspiration to extend into some visual arts and creative activities.
For a bit of textural fun, we mixed some glitter and salt with our paint, and then created our own versions of a magic sky. We chatted about rainbows and clouds and sunsets and northern lights as they took a few days to paint their own on great big sheets of paper.
I cleared a nice low wall at their eye level and made a magic sky gallery of all their paintings and we sat together and looked at our giant wall of all their bright paintings of beautiful magic skies and chatted about how our paintings made us feel and learned about art galleries too.