Flannel Friday: Bedtime for Monsters

The final week of our summer story times brought the theme of Things that go bump in the night.  What goes bump in the night?  Monsters!  I wanted some fresh ideas for this one since I did a friendly monster theme around Halloween.  Not that I don't love Big Green Monster, but new things are fun too.

I found a Flannel Friday post by Cate at Storytiming for a book called Bedtime little monsters by Emma Harris.  Cate gave the overall idea of the book, all of the monsters run and hide at bedtime and so a monster hunt ensues.  Unfortunately, we do not own a copy of the book and I had to request it from another library knowing there was a good chance it would not arrive by my story time.  (Have I mentioned I enjoy last minute planning?)  So, I went with the idea anyway and made it my own.

For my version of the story I placed an empty bed on the board and had several objects with monsters hidden behind them.  I told the kids that for our next story we had some monsters that were ready to go to bed, but they needed to hear a lullaby first.  We talked for a minute about good bedtime songs and settled on Twinkle, twinkle, little star.  Then, I turned to the board to sing the monsters to sleep only to discover that they were all missing!

I told the kids that the monsters were all hiding and we had to find them and put them in bed.  They would shout out an object that they saw a monster behind, I pulled the object away, and the kids would tell me what color the monster was.  Then, I said:

Time for monsters to rest their head,
Let's put the PURPLE monster to bed!

And we continued finding all of the monsters and repeating the rhyme according to the monster color until they were all in bed.  Then, we sang Twinkle, twinkle, little star and those rascally monsters finally fell asleep!

Ironically, the book arrived the morning of story time.  They gist of the story was the same, yet still rather different.  I had the monsters hiding in some of the same places.  I used many of the same places that Cate had.  I loved her shower curtain, so I made my own.  She had also asked for suggestions for more places and a cookie jar and trash can were brought up and I liked those ideas.  The dog, car, and couch are all pieces from other flannel boards.  I figured that my extensive collection gives the added bonus of reusing pieces for other stories.  Why make more if you don't really need to?

All of the pieces are craft foam except for the bed which is a foam frame with a flannel mattress and blanket so that the monsters would stick once inside.  The shower curtain was cut from a sandwich bag and decorated with Sharpies.  The dog, cookie jar, trash can, and monsters were all free handed and I used clip art as templates for the other shapes.

You can find this week's complete round-up with Kay at Storytime ABC's.  All things Flannel Friday can be found at the blog, or see all post visually arranged on the Pinterest boards.