3 Pete the Cat Shoes Book Extension Activities

So we are kind of enamored with Pete the Cat around here. In case you couldn't tell… since we shared three Pete the Cat Buttons Activities last week. I can't help it. We get on a theme and I just keep going with it. (Quick note, this post includes affiliate links. Cool. Let's go play!)

Like I said last week the kids literally come running when I announce that I'm going to read a Pete the Cat book! Pete the Cat I Love My White Shoes is no exception!

I already added his latest title The Nuts: Bedtime at the Nut House to the kids' holiday wishlist, it looks so cute and I love how there are always videos and songs that go with these books. Okay maybe the kids like it too! Haha!

Let's get to the book extension activities, shall we?!

Pete the Cat's Reusable Shoes

So the publisher of Pete the Cat I Love My White Shoes has a page of printable book activities and on there, if you scroll down quite a ways, you will see ONE Pete the Cat activity. It's a pin the feet on Pete activity. I am not taking credit for the printable of course! We printed it and used it just as they intended, except that I ran it through my favorite laminator first and stuck on some velcro dots to make it reusable!

You can color on the shoes with crayons and it wipes right off with a cloth or paper towel! We did not have a brown colored dry erase board marker or else we would have used those. I mean come on, we need brown for mud, people! One thing I noticed was that we had a set or Crayola crayons and a set of dollar store crayons and in this specific case the dollar store crayons really would not draw on the shoes…the wax just crumbled. So. there you go, buy Crayola!

Pete the Cat's Shoe Print Stamps

This was really fund for both kids too. Actually I did it with them and we hung up the paper on the wall to dry. The kids LOVED that and they couldn't wait to show LalyDad our big family art project when he got home.

I could see lots of uses for this though, Pete the Cat wrapping paper, a collaborative class mural and pattern practice come to mind!

To prep this activity, I cut out the shoe print shapes from craft foam and used my hot glue gun to glue them to some corks.

For the stamp pads, I used Teach Preschool's DIY Stamp Pads trick, which allowed us to stamp very easily with any color washable kids paint, rather than buying a new stamp pad to get brown.

My toddler loved making a squishing sound every time he stamped it, as if Pete was stepping in something squishy. Hehehe. My preschooler asked for a paintbrush to brush the color on. Why you bet! So she painted the paint onto the stamps while little brother had fun squishing the stamp in the paints. It was a “family art project” as my daughter calls it, because we use a big piece of paper from the easel roll. It was fun to do all together!

Pete the Cat's Color-Changing Play Dough Shoes

My kids somehow JUST got into play dough. My son received a set for his 2nd birthday and we have played with it a lot lately. For hours at a time. What have we been doing with our lives until now, without play dough?

I saw this super cool play dough color surprise idea over on Teach Preschool, one of my very favorite blogs. I thought it would be super fun to retell the story using color changing play dough. I followed her procedures except well, we made ours into shoes that matched the colors in the book.

She actually took the extra step of making the play dough WITH her preschool kids, which is awesome but I opted to make the white play dough myself. Up to you!

She also let her color surprise balls set over night, which I did not end up doing, so I wanted to use a powder color instead of liquid. I figured sitting over night probably let the liquid color soak in a bit and since I wasn't doing that, the powder would be less messy.

I used Kool-aid for the red and blue shoes (initially) and cocoa powder for the brown. I will say the blue raspberry lemonade kool-aid looked more green when mixed into the play dough so I also tried one myself with 3 drops of blue food coloring, which is the one that made it to that picture up there. The food coloring made a more evenly colored play dough than the kool-aid. I think the coloring she used would be more like the food coloring and would work better than the kool-aid too.

The big batch of play dough that I made started with 3 cups of flour and that made enough for 12-16 shoes, although we only made 8 so I am happy to have lots of left over play dough to use for other things!

To make the color changing shoes, I made the play dough, formed them into shoes, then flipped them over in my hands, poked a hole and added the coloring. I patched it up, added a twist tie shoe string, and let the kids check them out.

They know the story well enough now that I could just start reciting and they know what happens. So We did the part about the strawberries and they said OH NO and RED at the appropriate times. Then I grabbed little brother's white shoe and started kneading it to show them that it changed colors.

It DID take a lot of kneading but as the kids played with the play dough the colors evened out even more.

The kids really like the texture of the home made play dough, it was softer than the store bought stuff (which I know they will not turn down, but it was a nice change). It is really fin to see how they each play differently with the dough. My 4 year old daughter took the shoes and kept them in the shoes shapes and gave them eyes and mouths, where as my 2 year old son just smushed the play dough, added like 79 craft buttons and googlie eyes.

Anyhow so those are the fun ways we played at our house to extend the fun of Pete the Cat I Love My White Shoes. If you like Pete the Cat you have to check out my other Pete the Cat Post with 3 Pete the Cat Button Activities!