Happy Birthday Sparky!

 This week at story time we celebrated Sparky's birthday.  (Actually, it was my birthday, but I decided to share it with Sparky and avoid all of the 'How old is Miss Sarah' questions.)  So our letter of the day was B for Birthday.

We began by talking about how old everyone turned on their birthday.  I had planned to talk about what month their birthday was in, but they had enough trouble telling me how old they are, so I skipped that one.  But, we talked about how on your birthday you have cake and blow out candles, open presents, and sometimes have a party and play games.

Our first book was Little Mouse and the big cupcake by Thomas Taylor.  This is a cute story about a little mouse who finds a cupcake that is so big that he cannot carry it home.  When friends come by he asks for their help carrying it, but it is too big for all of them.  But, they do ask to try the cupcake and being very good at sharing little mouse lets everyone take a bite.  Before long the cupcake is the perfect size for a mouse and everyone has had a nice lesson about sharing.

Before we read our second book Sparky came out and announced that he wanted to make some cake.  So, he got out a bowl and we put ingredients for a cake into it and Sparky mixed it up.  Last fall I had done a cookie story time, so I already had foam ingredients for the cake.  Sparky put it in the oven to cook while we read some more books.

The second book we read was Jan Thomas' A birthday for Cow!  I had a hard time telling if the kids liked this book or not.  The parents had some chuckles, so someone enjoyed it.  In the story, pig and mouse want to make a birthday cake for cow.  Duck tries to help, but keeps trying to sneak a turnip in wherever he can.  Despite duck's efforts, cow and mouse get a cake baked and decorated.  When cow comes along, he is really excited to get .... A TURNIP!!

This week's flannel story was blowing out candles on a birthday cake.  I got inspiration for it from Storytime Katie.  Since blowing out candles is the best part of a cake I made up a rhyme so that the kids could do that.  First, we lit the candles on the cake, counting as we went. 

 Then we said:
5 candles on a birthday cake.
If we blow one out, how many will that make?

Then all of the kids would blow and I pulled off one flame and we counted the flames that were left.  We repeated the rhyme with 4, 3, 2, and 1 candles until they were all 'blown out.'

We had fun singing Carole Peterson's Stinky cake song.  This song is all about baking a really stinky cake.  I gave all the kids scarves to wave in front of their noses as we added dirty socks, moldy fish, baby diapers, and a stinky skunk into the cake.  I had all of these items on hand so I would drop them into the bowl as we sang about them.  I was rather surprised by how many kids said that they would eat the cake.

Carole Peterson was busy during story time because we also did two more of here songs.  Tommy Thumb is up is a fingerplay song that I have used many times.  It is a good sitting song and is much like Where is Thumbkin.  I like that in Carole's version the kids use thumb, pointer fingers, pinkie fingers, and all the fingers; leaving off the tricky middle fingers.  We ended with B-Bananas which is a chant where the kids act like a banana, peel it, eat it, go bananas, then repeat.

Just for fun we also sang Clap your hands from the album Wiggleworms love you.  This is an active song where the kids clap, stomp, wave, and brush their teeth.

Sparky's cupcakes finished up just as story time was ending, so our craft for the day was icing cupcakes.  To make things easier I pre-portioned the icing and gave kids a craft stick to spread it with.  Then they took turns adding some sprinkles.  Most ate all of the cupcake before going, but I did have some baggies on hand for those who wanted to finish the cupcake later.