Birds flying around Story Time

We resumed story times this week and once again January has been off to a very cold start.  According to the Weather Channel this morning it felt like 2 degrees about the time we were starting story time.  So, I am hoping the lower numbers are due to that.  Or, they all stayed up late to watch the Buckeyes beat the ducks (doubtful, but you never know).

 

Our books were about Birds today and featured the letter B.  When I was making my B sign with pictures of things that start with B last week I was convinced that story time was on Monday, before the OSU football game and made a scarlet and grey B and added a picture of Brutus the Buckeye.  I printed everything off and realized that it was for Tuesday story time, the day after the game.  So, I just hoped for a win (we got it - have you figured out that I live in Ohio yet?)

The first book that we read was Owl babies by Martin Waddel.  This is a great story for kids from 2 - 6 years old.  In this story 3 baby owls are waiting for mommy to come back.  But, as they wait they begin to worry causing the one owl to repeatedly cry 'I want my mommy!' (They all love that part, especially if you really play it up.)  I think the kids enjoy this one as many can relate to the worry about where mommy is when she is away.

We followed Owl babies with Carole Peterson's Penguin Song.  This is a cumulative movement song where the kids move one body part at a time until they are moving arms, legs, and nodding their head.  It is not too hard and the premise is that the kids are penguins, so it fit well.

The second book we read was Lucy Cousins' book Peck, peck, peck.  In this story a father woodpecker is teaching his little guy how to peck.  Excited with his new skill little woodpecker heads off to see what he can ind to peck.  After pecking a hole in a door the little guy finds himself in a house with a whole LOT of things to peck.  Cousins' illustrations are bight and colorful and include actual holes in each item the bird pecks so as you turn the page you can see how many holes little woodpecker has made.  The kids really seemed to enjoy this one as well.

After reading Peck, peck, peck we got out the shaker eggs for Laurie Berkner's I know a chicken.  This is a good egg shaker song where the kids get to shake the eggs fast and slow - they really get into the fast shaking.  I cut the song short, it is a little long for the 2's and 3's, but if you keep going with older kids they can shake the eggs in circle, up and down, and around and around.

Our final story was the flannel board Pippa's penguins written by Susan M. Daily.  Before the story we talked about the penguins at the zoo.  Our city has a great zoo with a penguin exhibit that you see as soon as you enter the zoo.  Most of the kids were able to tell me what a penguin looked like, so that was a good starter for the story.  Pipp goes with her grandma to the zoo and loves the penguins so much that she wants to draw one when they get home.  Grandma tries, but just can't quite get it right.  She makes a green penguin, a red penguin, a purple polka dotted penguin, a blue striped penguin, a penguin in a bathing suit, a penguin in a fancy suit and finally a black and white penguin.  You can read more about the story with pictures of the flannel board here.

We finished as always with Carole Peterson's B-Bananas.

The craft featured owls like in the story Owl babies.  I found it on Pinterest, you can see the original post here, below are some of the owls our kids came up with.

For playtime I turned our plastic wading pool into a bird's nest.  My co-worker added some birds and big eggs.  She also had the brilliant idea to use it during her story time and put kids in it for the rhyme 5 in the nest (like the song 10 in the bed but they roll out of the nest instead).  The kids played with it a little bit, but not as much as I had hoped.

I also put our some bird activity sheets that I found on worksheetfun.com.  This site has a lot of great printable activity sheets for free.  For the toddlers I try to look for sheets that have tracing, shapes, or letters and numbers that aren't too small.  We had a tracing owl and counting birds!