Green

We've been talking about specific colors all this month in storytime. This week we talked about the color green. We noticed that many kids were wearing green on their shirts (or pants or socks), saw green books on the shelves, and talked about that usually, by this time of the year, the grass is green. Instead, our grass is once again white with snow. *Sigh*

Books:

Green by Patricia Stockland
Green: Seeing Green All Around Us by Sarah Schuette
Green by Laura Vaccaro Seeger

Grandpa Green by Lane Smith
Green Eggs and Ham by Dr. Seuss

Music:

I used two different songs this week, depending on the ages of my groups. For younger ones, I used G-R-E-E-N (sung to the tune of BINGO). "There's a color I like to wear and green is its name-o"...

The other song I used is Green, Green, Green - a song I learned from folk singer Ross Sutter that can be used with many colors:
"Green, green, green is the color of my clothing
Green, green, green is everything I wear
I wear green
So I can't be seen
I wear green because I am a hunter."

The tune is here. I usually do this with photo props and try to have the kids guess the last word/occupation in the song, so I usually save this one for somewhat older or more vocal kids.

Snack:

I debated on the snack, and went back and forth between bringing celery (no PB, of course) or some sort of green candy. I'm too scared of having someone choke to bring grapes. I caved and bought a bag of green candy spearmint leaves (like gumdrops). Half the kids wouldn't even touch them. Guess I should have gotten the celery after all.

Activity:

 I tried using a paint chip matching activity I had read about on Inner Child Fun, and gave each kid page with four different shades of green on it, and had many different pages with green pictures on the tables to have the kids match colors.
But... the kids didn't really get into it.

So I changed tracks for my other storytime sessions and had kids rip small pieces of green construction paper and glue them as leaves to a page with a bare tree trunk with branches.

Next week: Orange

Blue

We've been talking about specific colors all this month in storytime. This week we talked about the color blue. We looked around the library for things that were blue, noticed that I was wearing all blue, and wished that the sky was blue (instead of grey).

Books:

Blue by Patricia Stockland

The Artist Who Painted a Blue Horse by Eric Carle
Little Blue Truck by Alice Schertle
Blue Chicken by Deborah Freedman
In a Blue Room by Jim Averbeck

Music:

For a song this week we sang Three Blue Pigeons (see previous post). I had never heard it before last week, but thought it would be perfect. It is easy enough for first time listeners to start singing along by the second or third verse. Very catchy too.

Snack:

Blueberries. Most of the kids just gobbled them up, but there were two that had never eaten them on their own (only in muffins and pie) and didn't care for them.

Activity:

Blue Jello Playdough
I used a recipe I found online to make blue playdough using jello. Gave each kid a chunk and we used our senses to see, hear, smell and touch (but not taste!) the playdough. The youngest ones were happy just manipulating the playdough - for the 3 and 4 year olds, we practiced rolling the playdough into "snakes", then used the snakes to make letters.

Three Blue Pigeons

Found a new song to use for my "Blue" theme for storytime next week: Three Blue Pigeons. I'm thinking about making 3 Mo Willems-style pigeons for the flannel board, but we'll see what I get time for.

There's a video of it here, but I couldn't find any sheet music/chords for it so I can play along with my autoharp (the kids just love when I pull out the autoharp). So for myself, and for anyone else, here are the lyrics and chords for Three Blue Pigeons.

C         G       C

Three blue pigeons

C          F      C

Sitting on a wall,

C         C      F    F       C          F      C

Three blue pigeons sitting on a wall.

(spoken): One flew away – oh no!

C         G       C

Two blue pigeons

C          F      C

Sitting on a wall,

C         C      F    F       C          F      C

Two blue pigeons sitting on a wall.

(spoken): One flew away – oh no!

C         G       C

One blue pigeons

C          F      C

Sitting on a wall,

C         C      F    F       C          F      C

One blue pigeons sitting on a wall.

(spoken): The last flew away – oh no!

C         G       C

No blue pigeons

C          F      C

Sitting on a wall,

C         C      F    F       C          F      C

No blue pigeons sitting on a wall.

(spoken): One flew back – hooray!

C         G       C

One blue pigeons

C          F      C

Sitting on a wall,

C         C      F    F       C          F      C

One blue pigeons sitting on a wall.

(spoken): One flew back – hooray!

C         G       C

Two blue pigeons

C          F      C

Sitting on a wall,

C         C      F    F       C          F      C

Two blue pigeons sitting on a wall.

(spoken): One flew back – hooray!

C         G       C

Three blue pigeons

C          F      C

Sitting on a wall,

C         C      F    F       C          F      C

Three blue pigeons sitting on a wall.

(spoken): The last flew back – hooray!

One World, Many Stories

This week I've been running around to all the classes in our elementary and middle schools to talk about the summer reading program. Between all the classes, I think I've talked to over 500 kids. Add that to all the preschools and daycares I covered in the last couple weeks, and I think I've seen just about every kid under the age of 14 that lives in our area at least once this month.

We are doing the theme "One World, Many Stories" for our summer reading program this year. Cool storytimes, fun prizes, and all that usual stuff (check it out on our website for more details). But what I'm really excited about is that we're working to put together a book of real-life stories from members of our community - both adults and kids. Got a great story? Please send it in to me!

We did an abbreviated storytime this week, since I talked to the kids here about the summer reading program as well. I did tell them a true story about myself as a child (involving a couple toads and the gas tank of a lawnmower) and then did a few stories from around the world.

Books:

Everywhere the Cow Says "Moo!" by Ellen Slusky Weinstein

A fun book that I've done before where we learn what cats, dogs, frogs, and other animals say in Spanish, French, and Japanese. After each animal, I let the kids repeat the animal noise, and we all join in on "And everywhere, the cow says Moo!" 

  

Similar, but not quite as fun are the books Yum! Yuck! A Foldout Book of People Sounds and Mung-Mung: A foldout Book of Animal Sounds both by Linda Sue Park. It's interesting how the same concept of different sounds in each language can be such a hit or miss. The kids I read these books to didn't seem to "get" the sounds were in different languages, and they were presented on the page in such a way that it didn't lend itself to the "kid chorus" like the Weinstein book. 

I also wanted to do a little storytelling, so in addition to my own story, I read a few selections from Three Minute Tales: Stories from around the World To Tell When the Time is Short by  Margaret Read MacDonald. We didn't have this at our library, so I got it through ILL (I just love that service). There are great stories in here for all ages, all of them perfect for those with short-attention spans like my toddlers & preschoolers, or more thoughtful tales that just happen to be shorter. I need to get a copy of this book for myself.

Craft:

We told stories during craft time - I let the kids write down or tell me stories for our book if they wanted to do it. Otherwise, I put down paper on the tables and let them draw whatever they wanted to. Always nice to have an very open-ended activity once in a while.

 

This theme was used the week of May 30, 2011.

Next week we'll start our world tour for summer reading, starting with Norway.

Airplanes

I like doing storytimes on vehicles because there are so many little boys and girls that just love anything that moves. So I decided on airplanes this week. I started by lining up chairs in rows in our storytime area and we all pretended to take a flight (to Florida, of course. Where else would we go from snowy Minnesota?)



Books:

That's Not My Plane by Fiona Watt
I love the "That's Not My..." series. Even older kids and adults like being able to interact with the books by feeling the scratchy propeller, the shiny headlights, the rough seat. And of course I always let the kids feel the pages as I'm reading it. This slows me down, so this time I was smart and had two copies of the same book - one in each hand, letting twice as many kids touch at the same time.



Redbird by Patrick Fort
Redbird was a neat book I found that is in both braille and printed text and it has raised bumps under the elements of each picture as well. The story, frankly, is not good and not much of a story. But I read it anyway to the kids the opportunity to touch the bumps on the book and imagine what reading would be like for those who cannot see.

Other books I read this week were:
Airplanes!: Soaring! Diving! Turning! by Patricia Hubbell

Amazing Airplanes by Tony Mitton
I Love Planes! by Philemon Sturges

Activity:

We got to do something we've been doing a lot at my house lately: make paper airplanes! I gave the kids markers and crayons and instructed them to decorate both sides of a blank piece of paper. Then I folded it into a basic plane (my standby is the dart) and had a space set aside for them to fly their creations. For instructions on how to fold the dart, and other great airplane designs, try the site www.amazingpaperairplanes.com.



This theme was used the week of 12/6/10.
Next week we'll be talking about pancakes.

Big, Bigger, Biggest

I don't know about you, but my own kids have had trouble with size comparisons. Or at least they did early on. They've got it down by now. Seems easy: "A is bigger than B, therefore B is smaller than A". "This jacket is too big for me, but too small for mama." But inevitably they'd say the jacket was too small for me and too big for them, or get it mixed up somehow. So I decided to do a storytime on that. I brought a number of items from my house, each in 3 sizes. I brought spoons (teaspoon, soup spoon, serving spoon), whisks (small, medium, large), jeans (infant, child, and daddy's), and a few other things. The pants were the biggest hit, of course. But for each we figure out which was the biggest, which the smallest, and which in the middle.


Books:

I'm the Biggest Thing in the Ocean by Kevin Sherry
The story of a giant squid (not an octopus, a squid) that goes around stating how he's bigger than this fish, he's bigger than that jellyfish, and then of course an enormous whale swallows him. But then he finds he's the biggest thing inside the whale... It's a good book and funny for the kids, I just wish they wouldn't just use "I'm bigger than..." all the time. An occasional "This ____ is smaller than me" would have been nice, since that's what I was working on with the kids this week.

Big, Bigger, Biggest by Nancy Coffelt
I read this book two different ways depending on the age of the kids. For the older ones, I read it how it was written - there are 3 animals in each set and each says a word and 3 synonyms to describe itself (The hippo is big, large, huge, jumbo; the orca is bigger, gigantic, immense, enormous; the dinosaur is biggest, mammoth, humongous, colossal.). For the younger ones, I just read the hippo as "big", the orca as "bigger" and the dinosaur as "biggest". And so on.

What Size? by Debbie MacKinnon
Each page in this book has a number of pictures and a question - "Which is the smallest car?", "What color is the narrowest line?". Nice to see different adjectives - instead of just big and small, they have wide and narrow, tall and short, thick and thin.

I'm the Best by Lucy Cousins
A dog finds that he's the best because he's bigger than Ladybug, swims better than Donkey, faster than Mole, and a better digger than Goose. But then his friends discover that actually, Mole is the best digger, Goose the best swimmer, Donkey is the biggest. But at the end, Dog has fluffy ears, so he's still the best. Good book about comparisons and also about bragging.


Activity:
I couldn't come up with a great craft to go with this, so I put together a worksheet with different sizes of pictures (balls, stars, etc) and had the kids color them, then circle which item in each group was the biggest. Can't do something complex every week.

This theme was used the week of November 30, 2010.
Next week we'll be doing airplanes!

Thanksgiving

This year for the Thanksgiving storytime I decided to focus on the very first Thanksgiving and what it was like "in the olden days". So we talked about how the Pilgrims came here on a boat and they had to cut down trees, build their own houses and raise all their own food. No grocery stores back then. And we learned about how the Native Americans helped the Pilgrims grow more food the next year and they had a big feast at harvest time. I tried to include all this background information at the beginning because most of the books on the first Thanksgiving are written for older kids, with more words and more difficult vocabulary. That doesn't mean I don't use them anyway...


Books:
What is Thanksgiving by Harriet Ziefert

A simple lift-the-flap book where a mouse questions his parents about Thanksgiving. It covers both the first Thanksgiving (very briefly and simply) and the traditions we have now. It's not the best book, but I always like to start with a board book or lift-the-flap to get their attention right away and outline what we're talking about in the simplest terms.

This First Thanksgiving Day by Laura Krauss Melmed
Counting from one to twelve, this book alternates between what the Pilgrims are doing to get ready and what the Natives are doing for the same. An added bonus for a smaller group is that there is a turkey hiding somewhere on each page that the kids had fun looking for.


This Is the Feast by Diane Z. Shore
A longer, poetic book, this describes how the Pilgrims crossed the ocean, established their settlement, were devastated by disease and death, were taught by Squanto how to plant, etc. etc.. I liked all the information in this one, but it was too long for most of my groups, so I clipped a few pages together and shortened the story a bit. It still made an effective telling of the Thanksgiving story and reinforced what we had been talking about.


Activity:

This week we made feather pens. I had been looking for an opportunity to do this craft. It was something that my parents would occasionally make for us and is so simple but fun for kids to play around with. All you need is a larger feather (we used wing and tail feathers from a turkey) and a simple ballpoint or stick pen. Tape is helpful too. Cut the tip off the feather and clean out anything you can from the hollow interior. Take the pen apart, just keeping the part that has the ink and the writing tip in it. Insert the pen into the feather and tape in place. This is a good use for pens that are just about used up since you can trim them better to fit inside the feather. I explained that this was NOT how they used to use feathers to write with in the "olden days" but it was a lot less messy. I had the tables covered with paper so the kids could test out their new quills.


Happy Thanksgiving!
This theme was used the week of November 22, 2010.
Next week we'll be doing superlatives: Big, Bigger Biggest!