Both of my sons’ favorite children’s book is “Go Dog, Go!” by PD Eastman. They love the illustrations, the easy sentence structure, the playful story line, and the “surprise” ending. They both have “read” it so often during the process of learning to read that they both have memorized the book.

My next child has started her journey toward fluency, and I thought G is for “Go Dog, Go!” and made a couple preschool activities for the letter G. Her favorite part of the story is when the girl dog asks if the boy dog likes her hat. She can “read” that part of the book already. She loves that section so much that we made “Go Dog, Go!” party hats – after we had practiced making and recognizing the letter G. (Sometimes work just has to get done, right?

Handwriting Practice, Letter G
Objective: To help children recognize the letter G and being to understand how the letter G is formed.

Materials: One letter G maze worksheet for each child, available here.

Procedure: Have each child color the path of upper and lower case G through the letter maze. Then have each child trace the upper and lower case G in the writing section below the maze.

My Kindergartner really enjoyed working on the letter recognition maze. He took it one step further and colored all the non-letter G spaces one color and all the letter G spaces a different color. My preschooler lightly traced the maze to make sure she “found them all”, and then went back over the tracing with markers. She took coloring the letter G a bit far, though, and instead of tracing the letter G lines, she turned each letter into a square and colored them in. I think I will be reviewing letter formation with her again.

After all the worksheets were done it was time to make our “Go Dog, Go!” party hats. First, I had my second grader practice his oral reading by reading the story to us. He did a great job reading this story to us all. I was excited to see his oral reading progress. Then we started the activity.

Go Dog, Go! Party Hats – Art Activity

Objective: to help the children create a three-dimensional multi-media sculpture.

Materials: a copy of the Go Dog, Go! Story
One cone cut out worksheet for each child, cut out and taped together.
Ribbon, string, buttons, jingle bells, craft sticks, stickers, markers, and anything else the children would enjoy placing on or hanging off the cone.

Procedure:
Read the story to the children and point out the crazy hats the girl dog comes up with throughout the story.

Next, give each child a prepared cone. Instruct them to make their own party hats. Help the children with their creations as needed.

Finally, tie a ribbon onto the hat that can be used to hold the hat in place.

We noticed that too many jingle bells or other heavy objects make the hats too heavy to keep on heads very well. This was just a fun art activity. I loved seeing all the different ideas my children came up with for their party hats. They enjoyed creating the hats and acting out the scene from the book “Do you like my hat?” It was a great way to spend an afternoon together.