Dragons in Story Time

So, we are already in the fourth week of this sessions story time and I am just now getting around to posting about the first week of story time.  That's what happens when real life hits, blogging falls to the back burner.

 Anyway, for our first week of story time this fall I wanted to feature dragons so that I could introduce my dragon puppet, Sparky.  Sparky actually started doing story time with me last fall, but there are lots of new two year olds who have not met him.  So, we did a dragon themed story time with the letter D for Dragon.

The first week is always a little hectic, I lay out a few guidelines (such as keep all adult conversation for after story time because we are role models for our children) and that takes up a little time at the beginning.  I also introduce myself and give a little overview of how a typical story time goes so that they know what to expect.

After all that housekeeping we read our first dragon book Me and my dragon by David Biedrzycki.  This is a cute story about a boy who wants a fire breathing dragon for a pet.  He talks about all of the fun things that he would do with his dragon and throws in a few funny anecdotes (like why feeding broccoli to a fire-breathing dragon is bad).  Before reading this book we talked about pets and what would be a good pet..lion?...puppy?...elephant?  And then everyone yelled what they have at home as pets.  No dragons though...

Our second book was James Mayhew's Who wants a dragon?  This is the story of a sweet little baby dragon who just wants someone to love him.  Trouble is, most people in the kingdom are afraid of him.  Luckily, baby dragon finds someone who will love him.  The dragon in this book is very cute and not at all scary.

For our final story I took Eric Kimmel's I took my frog to the library and I dragon-ized it.  You can read all about it here.  Basically, I wanted to talk about good library behavior and use dragons.  So, I had dragons that brought different forms of havoc to the library - such as knocking down books with their tails, making messes they didn't clean up, ruining books, and even setting fire to the librarians hair!  

Since dragons songs are on my list of 'what children's artists need to sing more action songs about' (I admit it is a very wishful list) we did some monster and dinosaur songs instead.  Laurie Berkner's We are the dinosaurs is always a very popular song with my story time crowd.  Many know it already and that seems to make it all the more fun.

My new favorite artists Mr. Eric and Mr. Micheal have a song called We are monsters on their Bouncy Blue album.  This is a fun song that involves lots of roaring.  (Warning - it did make one little girl cry, but all the rest has SO much fun that I will keep it in the rotation.)

We also pulled out the shaker eggs for Shakable you, a super fun song by the Imagination Movers.  You shake different parts of your body then you shake and jump!  This turns into a what looks like a toddler rock concert.  I can only imagine what the people walking by my story time think we are doing at the library.

Our craft was a fire breathing dragon.  I found the idea at the KangarooBoo blog.  I modified it a little.  For the eyes I cut a slit near the bottom of the cup and the kids could slide the circles into that.  They also had stickers for the eye balls.  The 'fire' is crepe paper stuck on with double sided tape.  I poked holes in the bottom of the cup and they put a straw (cut in half) into it.  They loved that the dragon actually blew out fire.  It worked really well if you tucked the crepe paper into the cup before blowing.