Shoo Fly!

I never thought that a story time about Flies could be quite so much fun!  The inspiration for this theme was the NYPL list book Old Black Fly.  I really am not a fan of flies (not sure that anyone is) but it turns out that in books they can be (almost) endearing.  For the fly theme, our letter of the week was F.  This was another tough one for the kids.  None of them had names with the letter F, but we did come up with the word frog - and you know what frogs like to eat!

The first book we read was Old Black Fly by Jim Aylesworth.  This book was great for story time.  I had all of the kids (and adults) chant 'shoo fly, shoo fly, shoo' with me when it appeared in the story.  This really helped to keep the kids involved and avoided the adult side conversations.  I think the end of the story is funny (there is a swat - here you can clap or slap your leg for a nice sound effect - and then the fly is 'done buzzin around) and you can either assume the fly is dead or got away :)  (For the 2's and 3's I tell them he flew away scared.)

Our second little book was Michael Rosen's The Tiny Little Fly.  This is a great new book.  I love the large illustrations that are great for story time sharing.  I also like the repetitive text and the story itself is just the right length for the 2 year old crowd.  You could have the kids repeat 'I'm gonna catch that fly' but I had already done that with the first book. 

For the last story I went with a flannel board this week since the kids have seemed to be getting wiggly by the end of our sessions.  I found the rhyme There's a Bug on the Teacher by Kalli Dakos on Miss Mary Liberry's blog.  So, I made my own version and changed the poem to say fly instead of bug.  (I made 'foamie' me!)  This is a short poem and the fly works his way from the teacher's foot to her nose where she sneezes him away.  I had all of the kids pretend that their pointer finger was a fly and they did the rhyme along with me.  You can find the text on Miss Mary's blog by clicking on the link above.

Since flies and bugs go hand in hand, we sang Hap Palmer's Itsy Bitsy Spider.  This song is always a favorite of mine because I love the part where the spider climbs on the kids.  It is good for learning body awareness of just good old tickle fun with whoever brought them.

Of course we couldn't do a fly theme without singing Shoo Fly, and Greg and Steve have a good version on their album On the Move.  This version has the kids acting like other animals in between each round of the Shoo Fly verse.  Thankfully my coworker knew this one, because the version I had did not have as much action and I try to keep my songs really active.

We ended story time by dancing with scarves to Johnette Downing's Shake Your Scarves.  This is a good scarf song where the kids move them up and down and in and out etc.

Our craft was simply a fly on a stick and a paper person.  They each got a black fly (an Ellison bumble bee that I modified by cutting off the antenna and stinger) and a piece of paper with the outline of a person.  They decorated each with crayons and stickers and then had a fly that could land on the person's head, toes, tummy, nose, etc.