Outreach Storytime, Books on Books

Spring has not yet sprung in the lovely Midwest yet, and the heat at the preschool was leaking and had to be shut off this morning, so I attempted to do my outreach storytime in the gym. Large, open spaces are very distracting to classes of preschoolers, and taking them out of their daily school routine causes chaos. I don't want to say that my storytime today was a complete failure, but it was pretty close.

The first 5 minutes of my planned storytime was spent wrangling the kids to come and have a seat. Then we read:


This story has beautiful illustrations, and is a little longer  than some of my stories for this age group, but the rhyming and pacing is fluid and fast, making the story fly by at a rapid pace. The kids would normally be entranced by the illustrations of this book, but not today.

I handed out magnetic letters and sang the ABC song. When we got to their  letter they had to stand up and shout their letter along with the song. Magnets, however, like gyms, are easily distracting to children in general. We almost made it through the entire alphabet before letters started flying across the floor and had to be put away quite quickly. (I was planning on having them put themselves into alphabetical order, but that just wasn't going to happen today).

Then we read one of my favorite stories:

The kids couldn't get enough, The thought it was hilarious. I  had several kids ask me to read it again even before I was finished!

We usually do another rhyme and short book, but I spent so much time getting everyone seated and sitting that we ran out of time. I did my goodbye song and left, disappointed. Hopefully the heat will return and my visit in two weeks will go better than planned.  

Preschool gardening

My library doesn't do a lot of programming on the weekends, since there is only one staff member per department and we are only open 4 hours on Sundays, so I like to come up with fun weekend programs when I am working. I try to find programs that require minimal set-up so that I can maximize my time on-desk.

Since this program was created for children ages 3 years to grade 3, we read a story to set the mood.


This story is a little long for the younger crowd, but includes all of the vocabulary associated with gardening, like root crops, perennials, and pollination.

Then we decorated our pots. I found a kit from Oriental Trading, and bought two packages of bean seeds. For some unknown reason, I discovered a bag of dirt in a craft cabinet, so I used that as well. I love these pots because they don't have giant holes in the bottom for dirt and water to spill out. Everyone got a pot and packet of foam shapes and markers to decorate. Note; the foam shapes do not have adhesive backs, so glue is necessary, plan accordingly for younger ones.  
When they were done decorating they could fill their pot with dirt. I placed a bucket of dirt with several spoons on a tarp on the floor. Once their pot was full I let them choose two seeds to plant, about 2 inches down. We had 20 children attend this Sunday afternoon program.

Lightbulb Lab, Force and Motion

I do a once a month science program for grades 3 and up, this month the theme was force and motion. I like to choose at least 4 experiments or activities based around a central theme. I wanted to really focus on Newton's laws, so I rounded up a few fun activities to explain the theories.

The cost of this program: FREE!

Materials: ten pennies, plastic cup, cardboard, tape, pencil, plastic knife, iPad (optional, to watch Steve Spangler videos), piece of fabric, plastic dinnerware.

Activity 1 was a coin trick. You place a piece of cardboard over the top of a cup (we used plastic for safety reasons) and place a penny on the cardboard. When you flick the cardboard the penny drops into the cup.

For activity 2 was a more complicated coin trick. We turned our flat piece of cardboard into a hoop and placed the penny on top of the hoop, and balanced that on top of the same glass. Using a pencil, we quickly hit the hoop to force it into motion and watched as the penny, again, went directly into the cup. We discussed the reasons behind this and the kids gave their best scientific theories.

Then we discussed what Newton's laws mean-that an object in motion (the cardboard) wants to stay in motion, but an object at rest (the penny) wants to stay at rest, and is affected by the forces of gravity pulling it toward the cup.

We watched a video for activity 3. I was too nervous to do this demonstration on our carpeted library floor, so we watched this video from Steve Spangler Science. (I really wanted to do this demonstration for all of our school tours for "Fizz, Boom, Read," but the director wasn't so thrilled with the idea.)

For activity 4 we made a coin tower. We stacked ten pennies on a tabletop and used a plastic butter knife to hit out the bottom coin. I challenged the kids to see who could swipe out the most coins, one by one, from the bottom of the stack before it fell over.

Activity 5 was by far the most entertaining demonstration we did. Everyone has seen the tablecloth trick, where you pull the tablecloth out from under the plates of food. I used some of the plastic dishes and cutlery from our early learning kitchen, but if you really trust your kids you could use real china. I taught them the correct way to pull out a tablecloth and gave them each 2 tries.

Storytime, Cows

It finally feels like spring! I just had to do a farm storytime this morning.


Love this cumulative story, the kids really enjoyed making all of the farm animal noises with me. A few kids were stuck on "how did the animal heads get on the bodies?'

Song: Old MacDonald had a farm. I had the kids help me choose three farm animals to sing about-we chose cows, ducks and roosters.


I have used this before in  outreach storytimes, and I was initially worried about using this title with younger ones, but they helped me tell the story. One little girl yelled 'The cow is going to get a time out, he's been bad!" so I knew that they got it.

Craft: I used the head and legs from this template 
I let the kids color the pieces and then glue them to an empty toilet paper roll.

Storytime, Friends

Spring means more storytime friends, so I did a friendship theme. We had 30 people today, which is a lot, especially considering the size of our storytime room can usually only accommodate 25.


I love this story, and am waiting for a personal copy to come any day now :) The illustrations are gorgeous, and I have been wanting to read this in storytime for a while. Dan Santat is one of my favorite authors!

Song:Make New Friends via ScoutSongs
Make new friends,
but keep the old.
One is silver,
the other is gold.

A circle is round,
it has no end.
That's how long,
I will be your friend.

We only sang the first two verses, and repeated twice.

We only read the first half of the book, I would love to someday learn enough Japanese to read both sides and sing the song in the middle of the text. 

Craft: Crowns! Our friend Beekle wore a crown, so we can too! I found the printable at Firstpallette crafts.I pre-cut all of the crowns and set out crayons and foam shapes for decoration. We had so many gorgeous crowns fit for princes and princesses!

Outreach Storytime, Green

With St. Patrick's Day just around the corner I wanted to read books about the color green today.



We discussed some of the more unfamiliar Irish terms in the story like laddies and lassies, shamrock fife and shillelagh. I enjoy this book for the rhymes and pacing of the story-short enough to read for storytime, but more difficult language than most of the books I share.

Song: 5 Green and Speckled Frogs from DLTK.
Five green and speckled frogs sat on a speckled log 
Eating some most delicious bugs -- YUM YUM! One jumped into the pool where it was nice and cool Then there were four green and speckled frogs.

I love using the Bear books in storytime, although this is not one of my favorites for storytime sharing. The i spy feel would work better for one on one sharing.

Song: 5 Green peas from Toddler Storytime.
Five little peas in a pea pod pressed. 
1 grew, 2 grew and so did all the rest 
They grew and they grew
And they did not stop 
Until one day, that pod went, Pop! 

I used 5 jumbo pom poms and threw them in the air at the end. We repeated this song 4 times. 

Outreach Storytime, Fractured Fairytales-Three Little Pigs

I took the format from last month and ran with it, the school-age kids seem to enjoy the fractured versions of their favorite tales.

I made craft stick puppets and had several 2nd grade volunteers help me tell the original story. Then we talked about what we could do to make the story different. I introduced words like protagonist, antagonist and point of view to determine who was telling the tale, and who is telling which tale.

Book:

We discussed the wolf's point of view and how different characters can see the same situation in different ways (I am still trying to come up with a great way to tie this into the topic of bullying, but I am drawing a blank so far.) We did discuss the actions that the pigs or the wolf could take to be a better friend.

Book:

I love the rhymes in this book. And Dan Santat is my hero-his picture book The Adventures of Beekle is the 2015 Caldecott Award winner. We discussed the similarities and differences between each book and the original story and made a triple Venn diagram on giant post-it note posters.

Storytime, Hair

Flannelboard: Little cat, little cat, are you under the red hat?

I copied and pasted several types of clip art hats-baseball cap, hockey mask, cowboy hat, top hat, etc. and hid a picture of a kitten behind one. We love doing guessing games in storytime!



Rhyme: These are Grandma's glasses from Storytime Katie
These are Grandma’s glasses
This is Grandma’s hat
This is the way she folds her hands
And lays them in her lap
Here are Grandpa’s glasses
And here is Grandpa’s hat
And here’s the way he folds his arms
And takes a little nap

Song: Silly hat song from Sur La Lune
On my head, I wear my hat.It is such a silly hatThat my head will wiggle waggle to and froWhere else can my silly hat go?
[Repeat using foot, elbow and knee.] 


I found inspiration for this craft from Chadwick's Picture Place. For our craft we did haircuts. I drew out faces and upper bodies and let the little ones draw a face and glue on strips of paper and give their character a haircut.