Grab your favorite preschooler and put that unintentional baseball cap collection to some good use!

Here’s what we did:

* Borrowed the book and CD from our local library.

* Listened to the story several times during car rides to and fro.

* Gathered up a pile of baseball caps, a reader (oh, DAAAAD!), an audience (Lia, of course!), monkeys (Vivienne, Mommy), and a peddlar (Mommy, Vivienne).

* Pile on the caps and get actin’!

Despite an award-winning performance as the peddler (it is quite darling when a three-year-old musters up the peddler’s frustration with an intense, “YOU MONKEYS, YOU!”), Vivienne said that she enjoyed playing “the monkeys” much better. And who’s surprised?

As a follow-up, I’ll sketch out a picture of the peddler with his pile-o-caps. I’ll set Viv at her art table with gray, brown, blue, and red crayons; read the description of his caps; and ask her to color four caps of each color in the right order.

1. Nature Peddler: Together, plan the number of acorn caps that you’ll need to collect in order to make your nature man. Get outside and get collectin’! Come in, smock up, and paint away. (You’ll be happy to realize that you don’t have to paint the brown caps.) Use a hot glue gun to glue the caps on top of each other and then to assemble the rest of the Peddler.

2. Colorful Peddler: Using tracing paper, trace a picture of the peddler from the book. Read the description of the caps aloud. Ask your child to find the colored pencils and color four caps of each color in the right order.

Wanna really do lessons about Caps for Sale? Check out the lesson plans here and here and oh-my-goodness here!