This post is the eighteenth in a series about the alphabet quiet book I'm making with the girls for preschool this year. To read the introduction, click here, and to read the rest of the posts (updated on a weekly basis) click the "Quiet Book" label on the right.
Finally, a quieter page! P is for piggy bank only has one activity, but it is brilliant in its simplicity.
Inspiration and Page Design
My piggy bank page is directly inspired by the piggy bank quiet book page by Celina on the Shaffer Sisters blog. I love the concept! Juice concentrate lids make perfect "coins" for little hands. And after you push them through the slot on the top of the pig, you turn the page over and...
They've all dropped neatly into a zippered pencil case! My pencil case was almost exactly the same size as my quiet book page, so it was a bit tricky to get everything lined up and to fit the grommets in.
The grommets are closer to the zipper than they should be, so the girls have trouble unzipping the pouch all the way on their own. Fortunately, the "coins" can slip out just fine when only partially unzipped.
Although I loved the plain design of the piggy bank, this page was going to be next to O is for Ocean, so it needed more of a pictorial setting than a basic bank on a solid background. I decided to set the pig on a dresser top, next to a purple table lamp, and against green flowered wallpaper.
The lampshade is made from a leftover scrap of the fabric we made my wedding dress from. I love details like that - it's like memory patchwork quilts where you can point to a square and remember happy times wearing that piece of clothing. To make the lampshade frame, I sewed a round black shoelace in like upholstery welting.
Preschool goals for using the Piggy Bank page
I'm hoping to use the piggy bank page as a jumping-off point for learning about the different kinds of real coins, and about saving, tithing, and spending. But for now, they're just having fun putting the coins into the bank and taking them out, which is just fine by me. I love how, although it's one of the simpler pages in terms of moving parts and number of activities, it's one of the first pages they turn to when playing with the quiet book. That saying about less being more is true, and especially in this quiet book it's necessary to balance to the complicated pages.
My 2 year old grands love the piggy bank page. One will put the coin in 15 or more times, asking each time, "where'd the money go? " before Turing the page and finding it. My first book, I seemed to have a lid of some sort that was 2 inches. It might have been an old chocolate tin cover. Boo hoo, now they are plastic lids. So I thought limeade is 6 ounces, perfect...but the stores don't sell them any more! The 12 ounce cover just seems too big! Sigh.
ReplyDeleteI used the lids from 12-oz orange juice concentrate. They're about 2.5 inches in diameter, which is pretty big but seems to work well for little hands. Plus, you don't have to worry about any choking hazard!
ReplyDeleteThe one I used is just over 2 in. Still safe but just that little bit smaller. I think my piggy is just a little smaller than yours. Then I tried to find a matching pencil case because the first had a nice big zipper. Argh...!so I finally found one with a window, and I replaced the zipper with one I had taken from a jacket. I cut my piggy out of the solid side of the pencil case. Trying to post a photo of the original. Much simpler than your lovely piggy!
ReplyDeleteI figured it out!! Crescent roll packaging!! Or the cinnamon rolls with icing. The little icing container and the ends of the packaging are perfect coins for my piggy bank. I walked all through the grocery store looking for my "coins" and found them. There are several different sizes, some the same as juice but most a bit or a lot smaller.
ReplyDeleteYou do have to tease the cardboard out of the edges, but they are perfect.
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