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.  

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. 

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.

Storytime, Bedtime

Holy Storytime crowd, batman! I had triple the number of little ones today! This month I have averaged about 8 people at storytime, today we had 25!

 
Everyone's favorite rhyming book recently, this is becoming a favorite character at storytime.

I asked questions about if the dark was scary and what we can do to help calm ourselves if we get scared of the dark.

We sang twinkle twinkle little star.


This one didn't go over so well. The kids were confused about the bear living in a refrigerator and why the animals were flying. So we talked about dreams and how when we use our imagination, whether we are dreaming or playing pretend that anything can happen.

We talked about what we need to do before we get ready for bed, and flowed that into:

 

This story is so adorable, well written and wonderfully short. The parents with smaller ones in laps particularly enjoyed the tickle bug page. This would work better for a one-on-one bedtime book than for use in storytime.

Craft: I borrowed this lovely idea from Confessions of a Real Librarian. I brought out crayons and tissue paper to decorate as well. I did choose to not bring out the googly eyes, we had quite a few crawlers in the room and I only had minuscule eyes left in the package, so we drew our own.

Outreach Storytime, Monkey

The schools in the county have had a 5 day weekend due to the deep freeze this winter, so I made sure to do a lot of movement activities with the preschoolers this week during outreach. Nothing says winter like -20 degree wind chills and no recess for weeks.

Opening song: If You're Ready for a Story Take a Seat

 
This is one of my favorite books lately. I love the audience participation aspect and the vocabulary.

Go bananas song- this is a boy scout camp song, the kids just go crazy once I explain to them what it means to 'go bananas'. The song is super long so I pick and choose what lyrics to sing.

Form banana, form form banana. (Arms above head in banana shape.)
Form banana, form form banana.
Peel banana, peel, peel banana. (One arm down.)
Peel banana, peel, peel banana. (Other arm down.)
Go bananas! Go, go bananas! (Jump up and go bananas.)
Go bananas! Go, go bananas!


This is such a classic, but one that doesn't get enough attention. The smallest ones can sing their ABC's but can only pick out the letter in their names, so we are working on letter recognition the next few months.

I wanted to get the kids up and moving, so I handed everyone a magnetic alphabet tile and we put ourselves in alphabetical order. Some kids had the same letter, but we sang our ABCs several times while getting into line.

 

With below zero wind chills for the last week and a half, I needed to get everyone up and moving, so I brought out the parachute as we chanted 'Five Little Monkeys Jumping On the Bed'. I have a smaller parachute, so I had one group sit under the parachute while the other group bounced our finger puppet pals.

Goodbye song: G-O-O-D-B-Y-E

Outreach Storytime, Love

This week's outreach storytime theme is Valentines Day/Hearts/Love



Tony Chestnut song from The Learning Station.
Tony Chestnut knows I love you. 
Tony knows.
 Tony knows.
 Tony Chestnut knows I love you. 
That’s what Tony knows.



Skinnamarink from Wikipedia.
Skinnamarinky dinky dink
Skinnamarinky do,
I love you!

Skinnamarinky dinky dink
Skinnamarinky do,
I love you!

I love you in the morning,
And in the afternoon
I love you in the evening,
Underneath the moon…

Skinnamarinky dinky dink
Skinnamarinky do,
I love you!



*Note: My kids weren't quite feeling the love today. Several were fairly vocal about expressing their opposition to me interrupting their day with 'gross kissing books' and 'i don't wanna's' today.

Storytime, Purple

PURPLE PAINT song
Tune:  “Mary Had A Little Lamb”

First you paint with red paint,
Red paint, red paint.
First you paint with red paint,
Then you add some blue.

Then you mix the paint around
Paint around, paint around
Then you mix the paint around,
‘til purple you have found.
                                    Jean Warren

From Preschool Express

Tune: "Yankee Doodle"

If I had a purple penny or a purple nickle,

I'd go to the purple store and buy a purple pickle.

Purple pickles, purple peas, purple macaroni,

purple pudding, purple pies and purple pepperonis!

From: Bus Songs

*i had the kids stomp with me to the tune, and then we sang it again and jumped to the beat!

I wanted to end with "One eyed, one-horned flying purple people eater," but sadly, we ran out of time.

Craft: open ended. I gave out purple crayons and construction paper squares and let the creativity flow. 

Storytime, Winter

New story time sessions have started! I am down to two sessions a week-Wednesday nights and Thursday mornings. This session runs 13 weeks. All of our storytimes are birth to age 5, so there is a wide range of age, activity and comprehension levels. I try to choose shorter books, books that I can sing, books in rhyme or humorous books to share with these groups.

Our sessions usually run 35 to 45 minutes, the first 15 to 20 minutes are stories, rhymes, songs, flannels and the occasional puppet. The last 15 or so minutes we do a craft. We have a divided room with a half wall to separate our rooms, so we move from one area to the next as i play transition music. I know there has been discussion on other blogs about crafts in storytime, but it works well for us. This gives the parents the ability to chat with other parents and lets the kids be creative. I try to have open-ended crafts or multi-part crafts, and the kids really enjoy them.

Plan:

hello song-If You're Ready for a Story, Take a Seat from Miss Meg's Storytime.

Boots song from Laurie Berkner.

B-O-O-T-S boots! 
B-O-O-T-S black boots In my black boots, in my black boots I stomp around in my black boots In my boots (stomp, stomp) In my boots (stomp, stomp) I stomp around in my boots 






Goodbye song from Preschool of Rock.

Craft: I used the patterns from kizclub and cut out a pants and jacket pattern. I used the black and white outline, that way the kids can color the frog and then add his winter clothes.


*I had three under 2s at my Wednesday evening storytime, so we skipped Froggy and did a board book instead. I feel so horrible, one of the kids started to cry during the goodbye song! We had to stop the song and explain that we were just saying goodbye to the stories-but boy, did I sure feel terrible!