Week Three Highlight: Masks in the Forest by Laurent Moreau

March is National Reading Awareness Month and we're celebrating with a special series where we highlight our favorite children's books and fun activities to further interact with these sweet stories - sorry we're a week late on this one! We asked Michelle Hiller, sister to Curate founders, to share how she and her son used their favorite children's books to learn valuable lessons {p.s. these ideas all come from a teacher's perspective!}. This week we're featuring Masks in the Forest: A Story Told with Masks, an interactive book containing pop-out paper masks...making an enchanted forest come alive before their eyes! 

“This world is but a canvas to our imagination." -Henry David Thoreau

If you are searching for a book to come to life in your home Masks in the Forest is just that! Complete with pop-out interactive face masks, you and your child can literally act out the text with each and every page. Your bedroom becomes a jungle, monkeys swing from the trees in your living room and a lion hides under the kitchen table…shhhhh!

Daniel acting out the different animal characters with the masks from the book

Daniel and I had a blast making the words of the book come to life in our house. I took the role of the narrator and he became the actor. We began by scoping out our settings for the book. Together, we built a fort for the hunter to hide in, hung green party streamers from the living room ceiling for the monkeys to swing and visualized the lion living under our kitchen table! As I read the text, Daniel reenacted the show - handing him a new mask for each page, he made the corresponding animal sounds and pretended to behave like the animals in the story. Our house was filled with roaring lions, prancing deer, hooting owls and so much more. At the end of the story, I instructed Daniel to read the whole book by himself and he promptly replied “I did it!"

This fun, interactive book gives you all the tools your need to encourage your child to read. As you read with them, show them the text and ask them to act out what they see on each page - I'm confident they'll learn and experience all the more (plus, it's sure to be entertaining for you). I hope this book helps promote your imaginations, filling your house with laughter and play!

Ways to Encourage Reading:

• Have your little one act out the pictures and the text as you read

• Have your little one read to you, show them the pages and encourage them to use their own words to describe the pictures