Week Two Highlight: "Technicolor Treasure Hunt" by Hvass & Hannibal
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. 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 Technicolor Treasure Hunt: Learn to Count with Nature, a colorful board book that shows visual learning can truly be fun! 
“The future belongs to the curious. The ones who are not afraid to try it, explore it, poke at it, question it and turn it inside out.” - Author unknown
This book is all about letting your sense of adventure and curiosity run wild and free! Treasure hunts, counting, numbers and nature all packed into one book of fun for you and your little one. We loved unpacking this book together the past couple days. The possibilities are endless for what you and your child can do and learn together with this book! I want to walk you through a couple days in the life of Daniel and his Technicolor Treasure Hunt book. 
Daniel scoping out the white flowers in his front yard
Day One: We stared our day off outside on a treasure hunt nature walk using the Technicolor Treasure Hunt as our guide. With our book in hand, our goal was to see and collect as many items from the book that we could. We saw mushrooms, birds, leaves, the sun, feathers and even a few purple budding flowers {hello Spring!}. Once we got home, we separated all our treasures by color and placed them on color specific construction paper to make a beautiful nature collage.
Day Two: Using the book as our guide again, we began to tackle the task of counting. Each page in the book encourages the reader to count all the items they see, starting from one to ten. On this particular day, the weather was very rainy so we decided to go shopping for our items around the house. We had ten shopping bags, each numbered one through ten, and our goal was to put the right amount of items in each bag to match the numbers outside. Not surprisingly, Daniel's favorite bag was the one containing ten M&Ms - because at the end of the hunt he got to eat them….after he named all the colors first☺. 
Creating and matching the color sticks to different items around his house
Day Three: Today we went on an indoor and outdoor hunt with our book, our goal was to match color sticks with all things we saw. I created different colored popsicle sticks by gluing colored poms on them {you could easily use markers as well} and prompted Daniel to run around naming the colors and matching the stick to objects in the same color family. We matched our orange stick to play dough, crayons and an orange football helmet. At the end of our hunt, we made a color rainbow with fruit loops and cotton balls to display all the colors we saw. 
“The future belongs to the curious. The ones who are not afraid to try it, explore it, poke at it, question it and turn it inside out.”
I hope that you and your little one can let your curiosity get the best of you as you explore this book together!