When I come across a picture book that has a few very carefully chosen words along with amazing illustrations, I get so excited. The book titled, “Tall” by Jez Alborough was the perfect book to get us talking about the words, “small, tall, and fall.”
“Tall” by Jez Alborough is a simple story about several jungle animals showing kindness as they each come along and help the little monkey in the story feel tall rather than small…
Throughout the book, you can see the monkey (or gorilla) looking sad when he is small and then happy when he is tall only to discover in the end, sometimes being small can be a good thing after all…
After reading our story, the children helped me review the concepts mentioned in the book  (small, tall, fall) using a set of small blocks and two of the same animals we read about in our book – the monkey and the giraffe…
And then the children went off to explore the concepts of small, tall, fall in their own way at one of our centers set up in the classroom…
At the table the children found a set of jungle animals and a basket of small blocks they could use to make their animals small and tall…
The children played at this center for a long time making every effort to get their blocks stacked high with one of the animals balanced on top…
Of course, the word “fall” is an important part of this process because we soon learned that if we can’t get just the right balance, our blocks and our animals will surely fall…
And yes, lots of opportunity during their play to reinforce the concepts small, tall, and fall as well as balance, up, down, top, and how our words all rhyme and are opposites too!…
We had a fun morning of exploring simple concepts through our play…
Available on Amazon
Links to Grow On
Exploring measuring tools in preschool by Teach Preschool
Prek Math – More, Less, Same by Prekinders
Counting and Measuring with Legos by Imagination Tree