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Kindergarten Books > If I Were

If I Were

text: Eiad mdah | illustration:Charlotte Shama

“If I were a duck, and a hunter chased me, I would swim underwater and run away from him…” the ant thinks and wishes she was a deer or a lizard to escape being squashed. But a surprising incidence teaches her that being tiny has advantages. A book that encourages conversation with children about their abilities.

Family Activities

The ant wishes that she was a lion, a deer, or a chameleon so that she could easily escape from danger, but she changed her mind when she heard the wish of the hunted bull to be an ant so he could disappear in the hole of a needle!

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Dear Parents,

The ant wishes that she was a lion, a deer, or a chameleon so that she could easily escape from danger, but she changed her mind when she heard the wish of the hunted bull to be an ant so he could disappear in the hole of a needle!

Our child often wavers between their desire to grow up quickly to be able to do what older kids can do, and their limited capabilities and size due to their young age. Sometimes we see them anxious, constantly testing their ability to reach a high shelf, for example, and bragging loudly about it if they could!

The ant in our story tells our child to see their current abilities and use them to the maximum, because growth is a process that has its own timing and pace. The ant also tells children who are smaller in size, for whatever reason, to see what their small size enables them to do during their daily activities, instead of focusing on what it hinders them from.

Family Activities

  • We can play the game "If I were." We take turns thinking about an animal that can do things we love, such as: If I were a monkey, I would have jumped among the trees all day long!
  • We can talk with our child about the things that they can do because of their small body, and we, as adults, are not able to do (such as crawling under the bed to remove a lost item, or entering narrow spaces...)
  • Let's imagine that we are an ant, what would the world look like to us? We may exchange roles in completing sentences, such as: If I were an ant, the bowl of water would have been a sea/ the ball would be a mountain/ the sneeze of our dad would be a storm! We can collect these sentences in a book that our child can add drawings to, and share with their friends.
  • We can search for interesting facts about ants with our child, such as: the ant is the strongest creature on earth in relation to its size, or in the ants' house, there is a queen, female workers, female soldiers, and others.
  • The ant is hiding in each drawing. Can our child find it?
  • Enjoy your reading!

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