Flannel-ish Friday: Rocket Away

I had every intention of creating a flannel board this week, but I realized I already had more than enough ideas for my story time, so I decided to make rockets for all of the kids instead.  We did an outer space theme and I came up with a few rocket songs to use.  I also decided that it would be fun to get out the parachute as my summer crowd has been much smaller and would fit around the parachute.

I made up rockets out of toilet paper tubes for all of the kids.  They really were not hard to make, just a tube, paper, some decorative tape, and colored crepe paper.  I thought about putting a cone top on all of them, but that seemed to be too much work, so instead I just cut small slits on each side of the tube and slid a triangle in.  The kids loved them!  I passed them out at the time when we usually do our flannel story (toward the end of story time) and we did a song with them.  I'm sure there are many similar versions, I made this one up, it goes to the tune of I'm a little teapot:

I'm a little rocket ready to go,
Turn on my engines and watch me glow.
When I get all revved up I'm ready to fly,
Count me down and shoot me high!
10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1...Blast off!!!

As we started counting we crouched down with our rocket on the floor and then we shot them up into the air when we got to the 'blast off.'  We did this song a couple of times because they enjoyed it so much.

Next, I pulled out the parachute and had all of the kids throw their rockets in.  This was a bit hard at first because they did not want to part with them, but once they saw that we were going to shake the parachute and shoot them into the sky they were all for it.  We did this a few times.  I had planned to throw in some balls as planets, but there were some very enthusiastic shakers and we could barely get the rockets back in before they were flying out again.  When we were done they got to collect their rockets to take home (I replaced a few that came apart, but overall they held up well).

This summer we have been ending story time with the Teddy bear, teddy bear rhyme, but today we did a rocket rhyme.  I had written a second poem to do with the rockets, but we did not get to it during story time.  You do the appropriate motions as you say:

Rockets up, 
Rockets down,
Rockets zooming all around.


To the left,
To the right,
Rockets spinning through the night.


Rockets fast,
Rockets slow,
Rockets stop, then go, go, go!

I modified it to be a goodbye rhyme and we said:

Rockets up,
Rockets down,
Rockets zooming all around.


Rockets fast,
Rockets slow,
Rockets now it's time to go!


The kids really like this.  I even left the projector on after our movie so that they could see the shadow of their rockets on the screen.

You can find all of this week's round up with Miss Mary Liberry.  Past round ups  and all things Flannel Friday can be found at the website, or you can drool over the Pinterest page.