I found this really cute book that I had never heard of before called Jump! by Guy Porfirio. It’s about a cactus named Barb that dreams of a life outside the desert. She attaches herself to different things and people in order to travel and sets off to experience new things. There are some funny moments like when her prickles spring a leak in a raft and in the end, Barb decides that it’s not very fun to have adventures with no one to share it with and goes to find a way to bring her friends. It’s a cute book and there are lots of ways that it can be expanded on.
After reading the book Jump! to the kids, we made a fun snack by putting toothpicks into a cucumber for the cactus’s pointy spines and adding black olive eyes and cutting out a little mouth.
I put a question on the white board and had the kids draw their responses. “If you were Barb the cactus, where would you want to visit?”
We learned a bit about cactuses and talked about the desert. A few weeks back, I had made a Desert Sensory Bin which worked well to pull out for this book as well.
