Flannel Friday: A rainbow horde of dinosaurs

Dinosaurs have been a big part of summer reading this year with the digging theme and all.  So, of course no story time session would be complete without a dinosaur week.  There are so many options for dinosaur books and flannel boards that I had a hard time picking ones to use.

So, as I made my flannel board I tried to keep in mind the multiple possibilities and create pieces that could serve several purposes.  Thus I give you my rainbow horde of dinosaurs!

I made the same dinosaur in all the colors of the rainbow, plus two with rainbow spots just for fun.  (I really had to hold myself back on making some glitter dinos, maybe in the future.)  You can use them with all sorts of dinosaur rhymes and stories.  If you need some ideas just check the Flannel Friday Dinosaur Pinterest Board.

With my Baby Time group we used the dinosaurs for the story 'Dinosaur, dinosaur what do you see?'  (Much like brown bear only the colors of the dinos change so the kids or parents shout out the next color of the dinosaur.  This is a great concept that you can use with many different themes.)

For toddler time we did a story my co-worker passed along from Jean Warren called Dotty the Dinosaur.  I modified the original story some, mostly because I did not want to memorize the rhyme, so my story was a little more like the Chocolate Chip ghost.

So, we have a dinosaur who is green because she eats only green foods:

One day she finds some new food and tries that, but she finds that there is a crazy side effect to eating something not green.  Since turning different colors is fun, she tries a new food each day.

Finally, she decides to eat all of that yummy food a once and...

I have two options for Dotty at the end :)

She likes the fun colors and decides that she is going to keep eating all that yummy (and healthy) food and be a rainbow dinosaur forever.

I had also planned to sing 5 little dinosaurs but we ran out of time.  I found the song that I wanted to use at Recipes for Reading and it goes like 5 little ducks but involves lots of roaring.

You can find this week's round-up with Miss Angie at Mrs. Andre's Library.  All things Flannel Friday can be found at the BLOG and all contributions a pinned to the Pinterest Boards.

Flannel Friday: Dog's Colorful Day (with a dinosaur)

For one story time session a few years ago I wanted to focus on colors, so each week we had book that featured colors.  I had also wanted to do a dinosaur theme and needed a color book to go along with that.  So, I took Emma Dodd's book Dog's colorful day and changed Dog into Dino.  I told the story pretty much as it is; big Dino was easily bumping into things and getting messy.

For the flannel board I put my green foam Dino up.  He had small pieces of velco all over so that the colored pieces would stick to him as they were added.  At the end we gave him a bath and said each color as it was washed away.

This was a really easy one to make.  I found a dinosaur coloring page to use for the shape and then free handed all of the colored spots.  Each spot has velco on the back to stick to the pieces on Dino.  The great thing about a story like this is that you can put all of the colors in order to help remember what goes when.  And, if you do forget, you can just make up something and they will probably not notice!

Did you know that Flannel Friday has its own website now?  Yay!!  You can get there by clicking here.  There is all kinds of information about how to get involved if you are interested as well as links to current and past round-ups, the round-up schedule, Flannel Friday on Pinterest, and the Flannel Friday Facebook page.

This week's round-up is being hosted by Linda at Notes From the Story Room, so stop there to get all of the newest Flannel Friday posts.

Roar Like a Dinosaur!

Who doesn't love dinosaurs?  That is why week 4 of storytime was all about Dinosaurs.  Our letter of the day was D for dinosaur and our color of the day was blue.  The kids knew lots of words that start with the letter D, like Daddy, dog, dragon, and of course dinosaur.  They also knew some things that were blue, many of them were wearing it.  There was also a lot of excitement when I asked who had blue eyes, apparently it was a lot of them!  (Sorry to all the brown-eyed kids we forgot week 1!)

Our first book was Dinosaur Dinosaur by Daniel Kirk.  I like this story because the dinosaur behaves just like a toddler or preschooler would.  He wakes up grumpy, loses a shoe in his messy room, throws a fit when playtime is over, I love books that both the kids and parents can relate to!  The rhyming text flows well and the illustrations are also nice and bright in this book.
 

The second dinosaur book we read was Ten Terrible Dinosaurs by Paul Stickland.  Stickland has written several dinosaur books that are great for the toddler / preschool group.  This story starts with 10 dinosaurs, but they begin to drop off as they play too rough or need to go home for a nap.  The last sleepy little dinosaur is woken from his nap by a 'roaring surprise' that catches the audience off guard as well.  The illustrations are mostly the dinosaurs, so they are easy for the kids to see.

Our final story was one that I modified to fit our dinosaur theme.  I took the book Dog's Colorful Day by Emma Dodd and changed dog to Dino.  I created the story as a flannel board to share with the kids.  Dino starts the day with one black spot, but as the day goes on he accumulates a variety of different colored spots.  By the end of the day he is a colorful mess!





While dinosaur books were plentiful, dinosaur songs that I liked were harder to come by.  But, I did find this song on another storytime blog here and we modified it slightly to have dinosaur names that I could confidently pronounce!

The Dino Goes
(To the Tune of the Wheels on the Bus)
The Tyrannosaurus Rex went roar, roar, roar,
Roar, roar, roar
The Tyrannosaurus Rex went roar, roar, roar,
When he roamed around.

 Repeat with:
Triceratop's horns went poke, poke, poke
Pterodactyl's wings went flap, flap, flap
Stegosaurus' tail went swish, swish, swish

We also sang If you're a dinosaur and you know it, just like If you're happy and you know it, only we did some dinosaur actions of stomping around, swinging our tails (or arms for those of us without tails), and giving a nice loud roar.

Not that is has a dino theme, but we sang the song Flitter Flutter by Johnette Downing and danced our scarves around to the music.  This song has a nice tune for fluttering the scarves around.

Our final song was We are the Dinosaurs by Laurie Berkner.  This is a favorite of mine as it has lots of action at the little dinosaurs march, eat thier food, take a nap, and end with a nice loud surprising ROOOAAARRR!!!

The craft we did was just ok in my opinion, but the kids really seemed to enjoy the process.  I try not to repeat crafts too often, so we made dino puppets out of white paper bags.  The kids had 2 green cricles (outside of the eyes), 2 white circles (inside of the eyes), 2 green paper strips (arms), 2 white triangles (teeth), and a red paper strip (tongue).  They assmebled the dino puppet and the part they really enjoyed came in when the used large circle stampers to decorate the dino.  The kids loved the stamping action and didn't seem to care the the dinosaur was a strange dinosaur/lizard/snake/alligator combination!