Storytime, bugs

A little longer, but what a great message about helping others and sharing! Adorable illustrations.

Can you move with me? From Preschool Education

Sung to: "Do Your Ears Hang Low"Can you wiggle like a worm?Can you squiggle? Can you squirm?Can you flutter? Can you fly like a gentle butterfly?Can you crawl upon the groundLike a beetle that is round?Can you move with me?Can you flip? Can you flop?Can you give a little hop?Can you slither like a snake?Can you give a little shake?Can you dance like beeWho is buzzing round a tree?Can you move with me?


I had the kids help me try to name all of the bugs in the book.

Baby Bumblebee
I'm bringing home a baby bumblebee.
Won't my mommy be so proud of me?
I'm bringing home a baby bumblebee.
OUCH! It stung me.



For our craft we made bumble- b's like the one I found from All Kids Network. I used yellow construction paper and black markers. Super cute!
 

Storytime, Dance

The second to last storytime of this 12 week session had ended, only 1  left until we break for summer. This is also my last storytime session at this job. :( I'm going to miss all my kiddos, but I'm only moving to a library that is 20 minutes away, so I can still come visit if I want to be the creepy adult with no kids hanging around the children's department.

We have been having lovely spring rain for this last week, so I wanted to get the kids up and moving today.



We talked about rhyme and pacing of the story, and I let the kids bust out their favorite dance moves like Gerald, the giraffe in the story.

We simply had to keep moving with several rounds of 'head, shoulders, knees at toes' and increasingly difficult speeds.

We don't usually stand while reading books, but we had so many wigglers this morning that we stood and marched to the sounds of:



Ducks flapped, bears stomped, ladybugs tiptoed and caterpillars wiggled in this simple rhythmic movement book.

For our craft I printed out giraffes from Edupics.com to color. Then we added brown paper strips to give the giraffe its trademark mane.

Outreach Storytime, Frog

This is my last storytime at this location. I start my new position in 2 weeks, so I am wrapping up my storytimes and outreaches for the last time. *tear* I have been seeing this group twice a month for the last six months. I wanted to share some of my favorite spring books with them.


I had all of the kids stand up as we sang this one. Love the twist ending-the kids couldn't stop laughing.

Then we sang 5 green and speckled frogs. I made my frogs out of a paper towel roll similar to this one at Librarian vs. Storytime. I used clip art frogs and colored them brown and green.



I love these cumulative song stories.  They have one for each season and most holidays now; this one is about Easter. The little old lady eats a chick, some grass, an egg, etc. The kids started to sing along at the end.

Instead of reading our final book the kids asked me to re-read a book from the last visit.


The kids love it, and I love performing it. In high school, I was on the speech and debate team for 3 years, and I was absolutely horrendous at it. This book reminds me of speech performances, but in a good way. I love that I can be silly and yell and make awkward and generally unprofessional noises that would, under any normal conditions, be frowned upon.

I am excited and nervous about my new position. Hopefully it will be a good change! I will continue to update with storytime posts and programs once I get settled in to my new job!!

Storytime, Spring

Spring break equals smaller storytime numbers this week. Only 3 people last night and 10 this morning.


This one is a little long for my storytime crowds, but Easter is in a few days and I wanted to share a secular Easter book. Love the theme of perseverance. This little pig won't let anyone tell him that he can't be the Easter bunny.

As a bonus, I discovered a bag of plastic eggs in the depths of my desk, so we incorporated those into a song.

I changed the words to this song from Perpetual Preschool.
Tune :My Darling Clementine
Yellow flowers, blue flowers,
red flowers I can see.
Pink flowers, orange flowers in the garden I can see.

I passed out plastic eggs and we sang:
pink eggs, pink eggs, pink eggs I can see.
Pink eggs, pink eggs, in the garden just for me.

We went through all of the colors of eggs and the kids handed them back to me when we got to their color.


This is the perfect book to start a discussion about activities that we can do in spring.

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.