As your toddler learns which organ is connected to which sense (we see with our eyes, we smell with our nose, etc.), here is a fun way to highlight the fact that we hear with our ears: combine a silly craft with an audio book!

I hope to get Veronika into audio books since we’ll be in the car quite a bit more now, doing school drop-off and pick-up for big brother. She’s on the young side for audio books, so today was mostly about familiarizing her with them.

I traced a simple ear shape on poster board to start, following an online template.

Cut out and glue the ears onto construction paper in the same shape, only slightly larger. This adds a nice decorative edge.

Tape the ends of a pipe cleaner near the top of each ear, then bend the pipe cleaner into an arc so it sits like a headband over your child’s head and ears.

Veronika giggled when I tried the ears on myself first as a demonstration. In fact, I think she liked it more on me! But she did tolerate wearing it.

 

(And occasionally pulled it off to look at it in confusion).

Then we started up the audio book! I have a wonderful collection of farmyard stories from Usborne books, but any read-aloud of a children’s book would work for this.

Bonus points if you have a physical copy of the book so kids can also leaf through the pages, connecting images to sounds. Veronika particularly loved the vroom of the tractor or the sounds of the farm animals.

She had a tendency to flip through the book, too, since she isn’t yet connecting the words to a particular page. But as I mentioned above, the idea was simply to introduce audio books today.

We’ll be playing these stories out loud the next time we travel in the car, and wearing our silly listening ears, too!