Hats on for Story Time

This week's theme for story time was Hats.  Talking about hats was appropriate this week as it is rather cold out and everyone wore at hat to story time today.  We began with our usual letter of the day -H- along with some 'H' words like horse, hand, heart, and helicopter.  Then we talked about hats and why we might have worn one today.

The first book that we read was A hat for Minerva Louise by Janet Morgan Stoeke.  This book fit right in with the weather today as it was snowing and in the story Minerva loves snowy mornings but all the other hens stay inside with their heads buried under their wings.  Minerva decides to go out and explore, but she needs to stay warm in the snow.  She looks for warm clothing and sees a scarf (a garden hose), shoes (gloves), and begins to search for a hat.  She tries on a flower pot and a boot before deciding of a mitten and discovers that now she has two hats - one for her bottom!  The kids enjoyed this and were able to tell me what the 'hats' really were.

We followed A hat for Minerva Louise with the song Hat, jacket, pants, and boots by Carole Peterson.  This is a version of head, shoulders, knees, and toes but you sub in the words for clothing.  I like this version as it begins rather slow, but is then repeated 4 times getting faster with each repetition.  The kids were able to keep up at the end too, which is always a plus with toddlers and preschoolers.

The second book that we read was Brian Won's Hooray for hat!  Elephant wakes up grumpy but is cheered up when he finds a box that contains several hats.  He set off to show his friends who are all also grumpy but cheer up when Elephant shares a hat with each of them.  However, Giraffe is not feeling well and they have run out of hats!  The solution - everyone puts their hat into a box and they present it to Giraffe.  this is a great book that has lots of repetition and shows how friends can cheer you up.

After reading Hooray for hat we sang another Carole Peterson song, this one called I like my hat.  In this song she sings 'I like my hat so I put it on my __' and names a variety of body parts that are not the head.  This resulted in lots of giggles today (especially when we put the hat on our bottoms).  In the past I have used this song with scarves (once I folded paper hats) but we have a small collection of doll sized straw hats, so I passed those out to the kids.  It was very amusing before the song to watch them all put the small hats on their heads and then tell me that the hats didn't fit them!

Our last book was Which hat is that? by Anna Grossnickle Hines.  In this story a small mouse talks about what she is going to do and describes the hat that she will wear.  Then, the kids can guess the type of hat and we lift a flap to see if they got it right.  They enjoyed getting to shout out the answers on this one.

We ended with the flannelboard game Little Cat.  I have seen many versions of this, some with a mouse in a house, some with a bug in a rug, etc.  The rhyme goes;
Little cat, little cat,
Are you in the ___ hat?

You could do this with colors, but we had more occupational type hats.  The kids really enjoyed this game.  I can see why many librarians use it weekly.  I let them pick which hat we would look under.  We found the cat about half way through, but as a surprise I also hid a grumpy cat, so we looked for him too.

I also made up a career hat match game where they could match a hat to a mode of transportation.  I put it out as a game during playtime, but we also talked about it before ending story time.

As always we ended with Carole Peterson's B-bananas.  I am always surprised when they get so excited for this song (the parents too).  Although, as a result it is impossible for me to eat a banana and not sing this song.

Our craft was a very simple color/decorated a hat.  I gave them the outline of the hat, markers, tissue paper, feathers, and pompoms and let them decorate as they wanted.

During playtime we put out all of the costume hats that I could round up in the library.  Many of them enjoyed playing with these.

We also has some snow sensory bins.  The most exciting one was the snow 'goo.'  It was made by combining equal parts of glue and water and slowly mixing in the same amount of liquid starch.  For fun I also added glitter, sequins, and other sparkly things.  You can read more about the goo here.  I did realize that the original post calls for clear glue, I did not have that but it turned out fine with white glue.  I just made sure to use colored glitter and sequins so they would show up.  The kids had fun digging out whatever they could find hidden in the goo (some of the parents enjoyed it as well).

Finally, as an extra activity or take home, we put out some hat coloring sheet that my co-worker found.  They had to read (or be told) the color and then color the hat accordingly.

Flannel Friday: What color is your underwear?

Our story time theme this week was Underpants, so we had stories all about underwear.  For my flannel story I decided to adapt the book What color is your underwear? by Sam Lloyd.  On its own this is a really cute book.  It has lift the flap pieces that reveal what color underwear different animals are wearing.  The book has rhyming text, but we left that off and just asked each animal 'what color is your underwear?' and once revealed the kids shouted out the color.

I did preface this book with a rule that we should never ask people what color their underwear is, but since our story has animals it is ok to ask them.  (I also prefaced the entire story time with our number one rule that we NEVER show ANYONE our underwear.)

So, this is an easy one when you have the kids helping.  Just ask each animal, 'what color is your underwear?' and then reveal it on the board.  There are several animals, I used the some ones from the book in case I want to use it in the future with the text from the book.  But, you could use any animals that you want.  And looking at it now I really wish I had spiced up the undies some.  How did I forget the glitter?

Here is the horse, turtle, crocodile, and spider.  I gave the spider a web to hide behind, but in the book she is in a cupboard.

On the other side of the board we have the cow, sheep, and elephant.

 

 

Here they are showing off their underpants.

And surprise!  Elephant John forgot to put his on!

The looks on the kids faces when they realized the elephant had no underpants was priceless.  I ended the story by say, 'Oh well, he is an elephant and doesn't need to wear underpants anyway!'

This week's round-up is being hosted by Meghan at Busy Crafting Mommy.  You can find links to all of the past round-ups with Anne at Sotomorrow, or you can click the Flannel Friday link at the right to find all posts on Pinterest.

Underwear in the library!

I finally did it, an entire story time dedicated to Underwear!  It was a lot of fun too.  I was a bit worried about offending some people, but all of the parents seemed to enjoy the humor of our theme as opposed to being offended.  We featured the rarely used letter U for Underpants.  I was impressed with my little toddlers as they came up with words like Umbrella, Up, and Underwear.  Once our theme was announced I told them that there was a very important rule, we NEVER show ANYONE our underpants.  Of course they were welcome to tell me if they did wear underpants, which many were excited to share.  I also took the opportunity to plug our collection materials for potty training for anyone who might be interested in wearing underpants.

The first book that we read was Aliens love underpants by Claire Freedman.  This is a cute book about why your underpants may go missing - aliens like to take them!  The story is told in rhyme, though sometimes it is a bit stretched.  The whimsical illustrations are very colorful and feature aliens doing all kinds of silly things with the underpants.  One great feature of this book is its end papers (any KSU alums out there?).  There are all sorts of colorful undies to look at on the end pages of this book.  That in itself was a fun thing for the kids.  This author also has a book titled Dinosaurs love underpants, which is just as silly, but ends with the dinosaurs killing each other in a war over underpants - good for the cavemen, not for story time.

Our second book was Brian Sendelbach's The underpants zoo.  Another cute book with rhyming text, this one features a zoo where all of the animals wear underpants.  I like this silly story that features lions, elephants, and monkeys in colorful underpants.  A favorite was the crocodile in pink frilly undies and the penguins wearing icicle laden boxers.

The final underpants story was What color is your underwear by Sam Lloyd.  This a a fun lift-the-flap book, but I turned it into a flannel board.  The book would be great on its own, but with the toddlers I have found flannel boards are a big hit and this book lent well to that.  I did have to preface this book with another rule: we never ask people what color their underwear is.  But, since our story has animals, it is ok.  So, then I had all of the kids help me ask each animal, 'what color is your underwear?'  Then they would tell me the color.  The best part was the confused faces at the end when the elephants forgot to put his underwear on!  You can read more about the flannel board here.

Since there are really no good songs about underpants that I can use in story time, we just did some favorites and silly songs.  We sang Row, row, row by the Old town school of folk music.  This is a great re-make of the classic where the kids row, twist, bounce, rock, and tickle in their boats.

We re-visted The Wiggles' Shake your sillies out from a few weeks ago.  Kids don't mind repeating, especially when they get to use the shaker eggs.

I did make up an underpants-ish song.  We turned Head, shoulders, knees, and toes into Head, shoulders, knees, and underpants.  And the second verse was eyes and ears and mouth and underpants.  This got lots of giggles from the kids as well as the parents.

Our final song was Sue Schnitzer's All the fish.  This is a fun song with various water creatures and each verse ends with a literal 'splash!'  One adorable little boy burst into giggles and jumped with each splash.

This week's craft was a cute peek-a-underpants sheep that I found.  The original craft can be found here at librarianmade.com.  There was no template that I could find, so I made my own sheep.  Here are the pictures, you may be able enlarge it to use.