Groovy Joe: Ice Cream & Dinosaurs, the latest book by Eric Litwin, is set to be released on August 30, 2016. You can bet there are songs to go with it! Eric Litwin is also the author of the first four Pete the Cat books and The Nuts series. Watch the Groovy Joe trailer and listen to the Groovy Joe book and song.
I created a printable Favorite Ice Cream Graph to go along with the book, and will share more activities. You can find more of my “Book-tivities” here.
The new Groovy Joe book has rhyming, repetition, and sharing with others. Groovy Joe will be a series (I love serial books for kids). I had the chance to talk to Eric Litwin, and he even recited a future Groovy Joe book to me over the phone. I can say it sounds awesome! This is going to be a great series.
In this book, a guitar-playing dog named Groovy Joe spots the ice cream truck. He sings a song about ice cream, and is all set to dig in when a dinosaur barges into the room. What does Joe say? “It’s awesome to share!” Throughout the book, Groovy Joe shares his ice cream until it’s all gone. To distract the hungry dinosaurs, Joe turns his ice cream tub into a drum and everyone joins in a dance.
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Activities to do along with the Groovy Joe book:
- Set up a Dramatic Play Ice Cream Shop
- Teach a Dinosaurs Theme
- Introduce math words: little, big, huge.
- Introduce other vocabulary: burst, smashed, glared, empty, rose, share.
- Teach rhyming: chair/share, yummy/tummy, dream/ice cream. (Have kids guess the word: “Groovy Joe was living the dream./ He had a spoon and a tub of ice ____.”)
- Have a class discussion about sharing.
- Make a drum from an empty ice cream tub and have children beat the drum to the rhythm of the music.
- Use the drum to “beat” the syllables in dinosaur words, such as “tri-cer-a-tops” or “ty-rann-o-saur-us”.
- Stomp (like a dinosaur) for each word in the sentence “Love my doggy ice cream.”
Another activity after reading this book is to graph the kids’ favorite ice cream flavors. I’ve created a free print-and-cut graph you can use. More graphs like this are available in my shop: Graph Kit.
Download the Ice Cream Graph
Note: This is a free printable, just click to download.
Books by Eric Litwin
More About Eric Litwin’s Books
Eric Litwin is focused on making books that can be used by teachers. He is a former teacher himself. He connects literacy to music and movement with his books and uses call-and-response and repetition. He uses the Multi-Learning Approach in all of his books.
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Hello Ms. Karen,
thanks for sharing all these great activities and updates. I enjoy implementing them in my classroom.
Karen you are awesome 👍You are going to change my life & touch my kids’ lives forever!!!
I am so grateful to you!
I can’t wait to get my first newsletter!!!
Thanks a lot💃💃💃💃
Thanks so much, Mary!
I got the book! I can’t stop singing “Love my doggy ice cream!” hahaha Read it to my class today two times and they love it too! Thank you so much <3
I’m so glad you like it, Sharon!
Hi Karen, I just want to know if this book GROOVY JOE, comes with C.D? thank you Karen for the wonderful help you give it to me for my kids classroom. Big thanks
Hi Guilane, I don’t know if there’s a CD yet, but since the book was published by Scholastic, I feel sure they were make a CD. You can go to the Scholastic site and download the audio story and song for free at this link: http://groovyjoestories.scholastic.com You can probably burn that onto a CD as well.