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!

Penguins marching through story time

After last week's huge crowd our 54 on Thursday seemed small.  But, it was nice to have a little more elbow room at the craft table this week.  For the second week of story time our theme was Penguins featuring the letter P.

The first story that we read was Penguin by Polly Dunbar.  I really like this book, but I am sometimes worried about reading it as one one page a lion eats a boy.  Don't worry, the lion spits him out and the lion is rather friendly looking, you just never know how kids (or their parents) will react to that.  But, judging from the parental laughter it was not much of an issue - it is funny, the lion eats the little boy for being too noisy.  The little boy is noisy because his penguin will not say a word, even after being shot into space and offered to a passing lion.  This one was a crowd pleaser.

Our second story was Keith Faulkner's pop-up book The puzzled penguin.  This is a cute book with great animal pop-ups.  The little penguin isn't sure that he really is a penguin so he goes around asking the other arctic creatures if he is.  So, they point out all of the things that make him a penguin.  And, it is fun to read because this little penguin is cold, so he stutters some.  Plus there is a whale, walrus, and polar bear that you can do a nice booming voice for.

I read the book If you were a penguin by Wendell and Florence Minor instead of Penguin to my Monday group because of the boy-eating-lion scene.  I don't know if it was the first week and they were a little more wiggly or what, but this book kind of flopped.  It seems to be a great book for a toddler story time.  There are great, bold illustrations with only a sentence or two per page.  The book talks about all of the things a penguin can do and how they look and the various funny names that they have.  Whatever it was, the book fell flat, so for the rest of the week we read Penguin.

My flannel story this week was a version of Pippa's Penguins.  I first saw the story on the Rovingfiddlehead Kidlit blog, but it was originally written by Susan M. Daily and can be found on her website along with templates for the penguins.  I changed my story a little from Susan's story to better fit my style of story telling.  I started be asking who has seen the penguins at the zoo (our local zoo has a great penguin exhibit right at the front, so most kids have seen them).  For those who had not seen them at the zoo, we had penguins on our name tags so all of the kids could tell me what colors the penguins are.  So then I told them that our story was about a little girl who went to the zoo and love the penguins so much she asked grandma to draw her a picture of them when they got home.  First, grandma got the colors wrong...

Then she gave the penguins some odd patterns...

So, the little girl told grandma that a penguin looks like he is wearing a suit...

No grandma!  Not a bathing suit, a fancy suit...

Well, maybe not that fancy.  At this point I had the kids describe the penguins again for grandma, who finally got the picture right.

We actually had a decent selection of penguin songs this week.  Carole Peterson has the Penguin song that is a good, cumulative movement song.  You start by moving one arm and end up moving tow arms, two legs, and nodding your head.  A few of the combinations were hard for some of the 2 year olds, but many of the kids did a good job of keeping up.

Linda Arnold had a song call It's a penguin party that has really fun music.  I passed out scarves to wave along with the Caribbean-esque music.  The kids also waddle, swim, and dabble (we stepped from side to side).  I did stop this one a little before the end, but it was fun.  And she sings in English and Spanish throughout the song.

We also sang If I was a bird from the album Wiggleworms love you.  There aren't any penguins in this one, but we got to fly like a bird, swing our elephant trunks, hop like a kangaroo, slither like a snake, and run (in place) like a cheetah.

In addition we sang If you're a penguin and you know it.  Just like If you are happy and you know it but change 'happy' to 'a penguin' and then flap your wings, stomp your feet, and waddle around.

Finally, for our craft we made a penguin out of the letter P.  I saw something similar on Pinterest, you can see it here.  I modified mine some so that I could use our dye cuts more.  I discovered that the inside part of the P that gets punched out made a great little wing!

Hootin' Good Story Time

This week our story time theme was owls.  Our letter of the day was O for owl and our featured picture book was Papa, please get the moon for me.  I was surprised that there were very few kids with a name starting with O.  I guess all the Owens and Olivias weren't here this week.

The first book that we read was Martin Waddell's Owl babies.  I love this story about three little owls who wake to find their mother is gone!  My favorite part is the one little owl who keeps repeating 'I want my mommy!' over and over.  It is fun for me to start off making him sound a little sad and get whinier as the story goes.  I think toddlers can really relate to that :)  Although, after saying 'I want my mommy' several times, they wouldn't say it when I prompted them to. (Although several parents chimed in!)

Our second book was the feature book from the 100 picturebooks everyone should know list.  We read Papa, please get the moon for me by Eric Carle.  Not quite an owl book, but it gave us a chance to talk about how owls come out at night and then the kids told me other things that are our at night.  Bats was the most popular answer.  But this is a great story about a little girl who wants her papa to get the moon so she can play with it.  It has fold out pages for Papa's very long ladder to reach the moon and a really big foldout of the moon.  Most kids this age seem to have a fascination with the moon, so this book is great for the 2's and 3's.

The final story we read was Tim Hopgood's Wow! said the owl.  I read this story and really liked it.  I love the owl's excitement over everything she sees when she stays up during the daytime.  It is also a great book for colors.  However, I felt like I lost the kids some during this book.  Even when I was prompting them to tell me what colors the owl saw most of them were off in la la land.  Hopefully it was just that this was the last book and we ran a little long this week.

We also did an owl flannel story called Five Hoot Owls that I found at the Sunflower Storytime Blog.  I made my own owls out of craft foam.  I realized as I was setting up that I should have made a tree branch for them to sit on.  The rhyme goes like this:
Five hoot owls sitting in a tree,
One flew away, how many do you see.

I like having the kids count with me as we put the owls up and after each one flies away.  We still count all of them slowly, even when the older kids shout out the answer.  I like to give the younger kids a chance to see how many there are for themselves.

Songs about owls are not very abundant, but I found quite a few about birds.  We sang If I was a Bird from the Wiggleworms Love You album.  There are several animals that the kids pretend to be in this song, so it is fun to do the different motions and make the appropriate animal noises.

Flitter Flutter by Johnette Downing is about birds, butterflies, and bugs flying around.  We used scarves with this song to add to the 'fluttery-ness.' 

Dr. Jean has a song called Mother Gooney Bird.  This is a fun song along the lines of Father Abraham.  You start with one motion and keep going until until you a doing several things.  But, the motions are simple enough that the 2 and 3 year olds can do them.  You flap each arm, march your feet, and nod your head.

We finished with a paperbag owl craft.  I saw one here and modified it a little.  I gave the kids Ellison dye cuts of a hand for the wings and on the belly we sprinkled dry oatmeal to make the owl look a little feathery.

One for the Birds

Week 3 of winter featured the nursery rhyme Two Little Blackbirds along with stories about Birds and the letter B.  This was a great nursery rhyme to feature since it has the fingerplay to go along with it.  Somehow I kept pulling owl books for this one, but I managed to keep the owls to just one book and the craft.

So, our first bird book was Little Owl Lost by Chris Haughton.  This is a really cute story about a little owl who can't find his mother and a somewhat crazy rabbit who doesn't quite seem to know what an owl really looks like.  The illustrations are muted and simple, great for storytime sharing and this book is fun to read because the rabbit tends to be rather excitable.

Our second book was Grumpy Bird by Jeremy Tankard.  Bird woke up so grumpy that he did not even want to fly so he had to walk past all of his friends who's many questions only made him grumpier.  But, as good friends do, they kept at him until he was no longer grumpy.  The illustrations for this story are bold and bright so that grumpy bird and his friends are easily visible.

The final story featured penguins of all kinds in Bob Barner's Penguins, Penguins, Everywhere!  Penguins go about their day doing things like eating, playing, staying warms in cute, cartoony pictures.  The really simple text makes this a great last book since it is short and has eye catching illustrations.




Since our storytime was featuring Two Little Blackbirds, we did the fingerplay:
Two little blackbirds sitting on a hill,
One named Jack and the other named Jill.
Fly away Jack and fly away Jill.
Come back Jack and come back Jill.
If you have never done this fingerplay before, you simply use your pointer fingers as each bird.  Wiggle each one to indicate which they are then hide them behind your back when they fly away and bring them back again.  This is really simple for the children to mimic even if they do not know the words.

I was really excited to find the song Two Little Dickey Birds / Roly Poly on the Teach a Toddler: playful songs for learning cd by Priscilla Hegner and Rose Grasselli.  This way we could do the fingerplay again with music and it wasn't too repetitive.

We also sang the song Flitter Flutter by Johnette Downing that features birds flying in the air.  We used the scarves with this and did flapping motions with our arms.

Our final song was Sue Schnitzer's All this Fish.  The kids just really love this song, so it seems to be one of my go to songs when I don't have something that really fits the theme.  However, there are seagulls in this song, so it did work out!

The craft was a simple owl made with cut tissue paper glued to an owl outline.  I also gave orange paper for a beak and construction paper for the tree branch.