Jumping, Dancing Feet

For the final week of Fall storytimes our theme was all about Feet.  We featured the letter F for Feet, but we read books about socks and shoes as well.  Originally I had wanted to do a theme with socks, but I was having trouble coming up with enough material that I liked, so I went the route of feet in general.  We talked about what you can do with your feet, walk run dance, eat? (some kids claim they do this) etc; then we talked about what you can put on your feet, socks and shoes.  This led to a discussion about the color of everyone's socks and shoes.  Sometimes when they get overly chatty like this I will say 'If your shoes sparkle, raise your hand... if your shoes do not light up raise your hand...' and so on for a minute or two so they can all get the participation bug out.  Usually it helps.

Our first story was Duck sock hop by Jane Kohuth.  This book kind of kicked off the theme when it came in on the new cart a few months ago.  I thought that it was a cute, rhyming story about a bunch of ducks who have a sock hop every week.  They start off with some great colorful and unique socks, but as the hops goes on the socks get destroyed.  The illustrations are simple and bold and feature fun, sock wearing ducks.  My Monday group did not seem too keen on this book, but they were probably coming off of a Halloween sugar high and the groups later in the week seemed to enjoy it more.

The second book that we read was Lindsey Craig's Dancing Feet.  This is a fun book about the dancing feet of various creatures.  It begins with the little ladybug's tippity feet and has other animals, such as the ducks with slappity feet and the elephant with stompity feet.  The feet are shown on one page with the full creature when you turn the page so it was fun for the kids to guess what the creature was.  At the end of the book there are kids with stompity feet, so we all stood up to do some stomping.

I decided to throw in Pete the Cat: I love my white shoes by Eric Litwin as our flannel story.  I try not to repeat books too often and I had read the book version of this one in the spring.  But, when it is a great story like this and I can do the flannel instead of the book I had to use it.  It felt wrong to do a theme about feet without including Pete.  If you are not familiar with this book you NEED to grab a copy RIGHT NOW.  Then, you can read all about Pete and his white shoes that get turned different colors when he walks through some piles of fruit and sing along with the catchy song.  I love this book and so do the kids.  Most of them were singing along with me.

For some of the groups I used this Pete I made for Pete the Cat and his four groovy buttons.

For other versions I used my generic Pete.

 To go along with our feet theme we used lots of jumping and dancing songs.  The Learning groove has Mr. Eric's jumping song.  This is a fun, very energetic song that gets the kids jumping, clapping, and  wiggling.  This song is fun, but it always leaves me short of breath.

So, we followed the jumping song with Carole Peterson's Tommy thumb is up.  This is a nice slow fingerplay song that you can do while sitting down and catching your breath before reading another story.

Carole Peterson also has the Shaker hop, which went well with our theme.  The music is the bunny hop tune, but instead you are putting shakers in and out and hopping, of course.

Sue Schnitzer's All the fish is not really hopping or dancing, but you do jump up at the end of each verse.  It is also a popular song with our storytime crowds, so I threw it in for the last week.

We have these great eye stickers, but the black dots are all different sizes.  So, our turkeys all looked a little crazed.

Because there were no feet crafts that appealed to me (other than those that involved painting feet and stepping on paper - a little too messy for 2 year olds in the library) we made turkeys.  Thanksgiving is only a few weeks away and parents appreciate those crafts that they can sit out as table decorations.  So, each kid got a turkey body to color and a paper plate to glue feathers onto.  They used a toilet paper roll to attach the two so that the turkey would stand up.  A few turkeys ended up a little top heavy with feathers, but in general most were able to stand on their own.