I love when I can find a fantastic picture book that is not just fun but also prompts educational discussion, hands-on activities, or a craft. My Heart is Like A Zoo also has a "Valentine's Day" connection since it deals with hearts!
My Heart is Like a Zoo by Michael Hall is an interactive picture book for us, just the way a picture book preschool lesson should be. The author, who is a graphic designer, has created a zoo full of animals, each one created using hearts of all sizes. The text provides similes comparing a person's heart to the animals (such as “eager as a beaver”). My preschool-aged daughter loved counting the hearts on each page, and we made our own heart animals. Her favorite page in the book is the hippos drinking apple juice.
Then, given the interactive back cover (which shows just how Mr. Hall created the heart lion), of course we needed to create our own heart animals.
The hardest part was cutting hearts in all shapes and sizes and colors. But it was a lot of fun to follow the picture book's ideas and create similar animals with the hearts. Some were more complicated than others, but all were a lot of fun to figure out and see as an end result.
Of course, after we put them together, my daughter added some of her own touches. She even took the scraps and googly eyes and made her own monsters! Using shapes to be creative is what it should be about.
The main activity in this book relates to the dominant shape, the heart. Apart from a few circles for eyes, the animals in Mr. Hall's picture book are all created by hearts. We found the hearts in the pictures and counted them. This led to comparing the animals. Ask questions such as these:
Other educational bonus activities might also pair well with this book. Here are just two more.
Metaphor/Similes. Because of the similes in the text, it could be used as a great introduction to similes and metaphor in general. How are our human hearts like the animals pictured?
Animals. This would also be a nice introduction for learning about the various animals we created out of hearts. Compare our creations with a photo of the real animals. How are they similar? What other shapes are the animals in real life?
Personally, I loved how animals were reduced to hearts in this book. We could read more into that. We are all, at our core, our heart: how we love, how we live.
Ok, that is a bit deep for preschool. Nevertheless, that is what I thought about as we were creating animals with hearts together.
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