Sick Day

Since I have been sick  the last day or so I feel it is appropriate to finally post my Sick Day story time.  Our letter of the day was S for Sick Day and the featured NYPL list book was The Napping House.  I have to say, when you ask kids if they have been sick you get some interesting stories.  Of course, when I ask them about being sick I mention they probably aren't sick today because then they would not be at story time :)  This year, I had one lovely little girl talk about how she got sick and puked all over.  I have to admit that this child was my daughter and after story time one mother (who knew she was my daughter) told me she was impressed with how straight faced I was when I replied 'that must have been awful.'  Because, of course all I could think of was how awful it was to deal with!  Sickening, huh?

Anyway, our first story of the day was initially Llama llama home with mama by Anna Dewdney.  I thought that this was such a sweet story and I always love Llama books.  Little red nosed llama is so adorable with his tissue pile.  The kids however were not so keen on the story.  I think it just got a little long.


Our featured book was Audrey Wood's The Napping House.  I love the pictures in this book.  I had thought about making it a flannel story, but then you would lose the great expressions of the animals and child as they are woken up.  Since this one can get a little long as well, I had everyone whisper 'shhhhh' after the phrase 'in a napping house.'  This worked really well and kept both the kids and the adults quietly listening.

The final story was Karen Winnick's Barn Sneeze.  This is always a fun story with animal sound sneezes.  It is a good one to involve the audience as you can have them guess how different animals will sneeze.  Plus, it is simple and fairly short, with great illustrations so you don't lose those little ones with short attention spans.

We had a few songs about being sick.  One was If you are sick and you know it.  This goes along to If you are happy and you know it.

If you are sick and you know it give a cough,

If you are sick and you know it give a cough,

If you are sick and you know then you really want to show it,

If you are sick and you know it give a cough.

Repeat with:

Give a sneeze

Take a nap

Cry a lot

I also made a flannel board to go along with the song 5 in the bed.  The song goes:

There were 5 in the bed and the little one said,

‘Roll over, roll over’

So they all rolled over and one fell out…

Repeat with: There were 4, 3, 2,

There was 1 in the bed and that little one said,

‘I’m lonely!’

I designed the flannel board so that the bears would move over.  You can read more about it here.  They didn't fall out as I had hoped, but they at least moved.

We also had some other songs.  We sang Hap Palmer's Head, shoulders, knees, and toes.  This is a good versoin as it is fairly slow so those just learning it can keep up.  Hap even has it broken up so you are only doig a few motions at a time.

I like my hat by Carole Peterson had little to do with being sick, other than the fact that you may get sick if you don't wear your hat (big stretch, but I like the song!)  We use the scarves as our hats and this song always gets some giggles.

In addition we sang Hap Palmer's Five little monkeys.  This is a great movement song and that mama has to call the doctor a few times, so it related nicely enough.

Our craft was a boat made from soap.  I couldn't find much I liked for being sick, so I decided to promote hand washing to avoid being sick.  I found the idea at CraftyNoodle.  This was a really easy craft.  I gave all the kids a small skewer and that slid right into a bar of Ivory soap (supposedly the only one that floats).  Then, they taped a cardstock sail that they could color onto the stick and that was it!