House of Burke: Personalized Body Part Identification Busy Bag

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Welcome to another installment of the Book Club Play Date monthly series! New to our series? You can find out more about this awesome series as well as tips and tricks for hosting your own book club play date over at our series landing page. This month we read, I Ain't Gonna Paint No More! by Karen Beaumont. This is one of our absolute favorite books! The fun that can be had exploring this book is abundant. For our activity, we chose to create a fun personalized busy bag that will have your little one learning and having fun after reading this adorable book!

To create our busy bag, I first printed out the outline of a boy's body. You can personalize the gender based on your child. I let Kingston color his picture with a Kid Made Modern Giant Crazy Crayon. This cool crayon is huge and is made up of all different colored crayons melted together. It definitely had the feel of our adorable main character in I Ain't Gonna Paint No More who paints his entire body with rainbow colors.

Then, I printed out a picture of Kingston's face, cut it out, and taped it on. After I did that, I laminated the entire figure with my fantastic Scotch Thermal Laminator 2 Roller System and cut that out once more.

Then I labeled wooden clothespins using black permanent marker with all of the body parts that were mentioned within the story. Then, with little laminated Kingston and the corresponding clothespins, I presented K with our fun little busy bag!

We read the book over one more time and then I showed K the figure of him. The first thing he said was, "That doesn't look anything like me Mama." Hmm...okay? This kid, I swear. Then he attacked the clothespins and we read each one aloud. He was eager to match the pins to their corresponding body part.

Opening and closing the clothespins made for some fantastic fine motor practice! He used his thumb and forefinger to squeeze the pin open and shut. We pretended that the clothespins were paintbrushes and sang the singsongy portions of the book as he clipped them on.

This is a great activity for reinforcing body parts, learning how to recognize and spell body parts, and work on fine motor skills. When we were done playing, we tucked these into our plastic bag for future use. Busy bags are great for one the go and when you need a simple and educational activity to explore!