Flannel Friday: Five Snowmen

This is the very first flannel that I made (and yes, back then I did use flannel).  The lady I was hired to replace left me with a classic rhyme (I have seen many different versions, so I am not quite sure who to credit here).  My version goes like this:

Five snowmen fat.
Each with a black top hat.
Out came the sun and melted one,
Down, down, down.
Four snowmen fat!

Then you repeat until all the snowmen are melted and there are no snowmen fat.  The most important part of this rhyme comes when you say the word 'fat.'  You have to puff out your cheeks and smush them in with your hands so that you get a nice 'Ppppffffttttt' sound :)  The kids go bananas.

Anyway, I heard this rhyme and decided that I wanted a flannel to go with it, so I rigged up a melting snowman flannel.  It is really rather easy.  There is no template, sorry, but I have made several and it is not hard at all.

Simply make 5 flannel snowmen (you have to use flannel, or at least fabric here for the melting effect - fur might be cool?) and make a background.  I found a great dark blue sparkly sky and added some snow to the ground.

Next, you need to attach a string to the back of each snowman's head.  I took a small piece of flannel and hot glued yarn between that and the back of the head.

Then, you hot glue the bottom of the snowman (the outer edges of half of the largest ball) to the background.  Make sure to keep the yarn out of the way.  Once they are dried fold them down and poke a hole in the background as low as you can reach behind the snowman.  (You could poke the hole before gluing the snowman on.)  Then, poke the string through the hole and you are done!  I did add a small piece of velcro to the back of the snowmen heads to help hold them up (the sparkly felt is not very 'clingy').  I also added some velcro to the back of the board to keep the strings hidden.  Originally they just came out the bottom, but that ended with all the kids wanting to pull it.

This is a really popular flannel board at our library.  It is one of the ways that I have managed to start a toddler mosh pit :)  Also, be prepared to let the kids play with it after story time. 

I have also used this method to make squirrels climb trees and butterflies pop out of cocoons (I'll post those too someday! )

If you want to see past Flannel Friday posts you can look for this week's Round Up at Rain Makes Applesauce, find a list of past Round Ups at So Tomorrow, or search for them on Pinterest.

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.

Foamie Friday: Five Red Apples

This week I am (finally) hopping on the Flannel Friday bandwagon, though I am calling mine Foamie Friday because I like to use craft foam instead of flannel.  I find that the colors are brighter, it cuts and glues easier, and you can add details simply with a sharpie marker and they show up well.  I put a little piece of velcro on the back so they stick a little better.  (My flannels would also fall down a lot.)

Our theme this week was Apples so I used Pat Hutchin's Ten Red Apples.  Ten was quite a few apples for a 2-3 year old story time, so I modified it to five.  My tree has apples that can be removed, thanks to velcro!  I picked four animals - a horse, pig, goat, and cow, and I also have the farmer and his wife.  The tree flips around for the end of the story and has another 5 non-removable apples.

This is a great story for counting and for animal sounds.  I have the kids help me with that part.  The text goes along the lines of:

5 red apples up in the tree.
Yippee and fiddle-dee-dee.
Cow comes to take one,
Chomp, chomp, chomp.
Moo, moo and fiddle-dee-dee.
Cow! says the farmer, save one for me.

Then of course when there is 1 left the farmer says: yippee there's one left for me!  At which point his wife shows up and is sad that:
No red apples, my oh my.
No apples to back in a pie.
Boo, hoo, and fiddle dee dee.
Wait! cried the farmer,
Another apple tree!

This might vary a bit from the text of the book, but that is how I memorized it.  (Though I do keep a cheat sheet on my cart just in case I need it!)

Apple starts with A

This week it is back to the normal routine with the start of Fall Story times.  Not much has changed other that the books!  Oh, I do have a 'friend' helping me with story times this session.  He is a dragon named Sparky.  I tried for several days to come up with a good voice for Sparky, but I found that I really didn't like any, plus I was rather awful at moving his mouth while making him talk.  So, Sparky is the quiet library dragon, which works well if I need to remind kids to be quiet I can tell them to be like Sparky.  He is also my collector of name tags.  He likes to eat them, so at the end of the class the kids all feed their name tag to Sparky.  Most thought that was fun, especially when he spit them out.  They were also fascinated if the played peek-a-boo with them. 

This session we are using books from the New York Public Library's list of 100 Picture Books Everyone Should Know.  There are some great books on this list for story time, many I have used in the past.  Each week I will read 1 book from that list.  I used those books to plan my themes this fall.  

Anyway, for Week 1 we read about Apples.  That meant our letter for the day was A.  A is a pretty popular letter.  Many kids have names that either start or end with A, so that was a crowd pleaser in itself.  They also came up with Apples fairly quickly when I asked for a word that started with A.

The first book that we read was from the NYPL list and it was Eric Carle's The Very Hungry Caterpillar.  Kids love this book, it's no wonder that it is on the list.  I like to have kids help me with this book.  They have to tell me what the caterpillar is eating.  They were really good at shouting out the food as I pointed to it.  There is only one apple in this story, but I didn't hear any complaints.

Our second book was Apple Farmer Annie by Monica Wellington.  This is a nice, simple story all about Annie and her apple farm.  I like that it lists the different things apples can be used for, like cider, muffins, pies, etc. and also shows how they can be sold at the farmer's market.  We have several farmer's markets around here, so I like that kids can see the produce they get at the market comes right from a farm.  This book also has recipes for using apples.  And the text is fairly short, great for the 2 and 3 crowd.

The last story we did was a flannel board that I made for Pat Hutchin's Ten Red Apples.  Since ten apples are a lot to get through, I changed it to five.  I like this story because the kids can help me count the apples as they get eaten by the various animals.  We also do all of the animal sounds as they come to eat the apples, so that is fun for the kids, they were very enthusiastic with their animal sounds this week.

One rhyme that we did was Way Up High in the Apple Tree.  I've seen this many places, and our Rock-A-Bye Tales group (age 6 - 24 months) uses it weekly, so many of the kids were thrilled to hear something they knew so well.  It goes:
Way up high in the apple tree,
Two red apples smiled at me.
I shook that tree as hard as I could,
Down came the apples,
Mmmmm were they good!

I also found a song by Dr. Jean on her Happy Everything album called Apple Tree.  The song goes much like the rhyme but starts with 1 apple and counts up to 5 limes.  It was a good song since they were familiar with the rhyme and the repetitiveness helped them do the movements.

We also sang Raffi's Shake My Silles Out.  This is a story time staple that I use quite a bit with the shaker eggs.  It is a good song to get the kids up and moving.  The shaker eggs are not really required, but I like to do something like shakers or scarves each week.

Our last song was another Raffi, Bumping Up and Down.  It's about bumping along in the wagon, so it is a great bouncing song.  You also get to do some hammering and pliers work when the wagon breaks.  It wasn't really along the theme, but I figured you need a wagon to haul your apples around, right?

 

The craft this week also featured the letter A.  I came across this craft featuring a lowercase 'a', but I thought it needed a little more.  Using an uppercase 'A' we also made an apple tree.  The As were made using our Ellison dye cuts and the apples on the tree are just red dot stickers.  It was a fairly simple craft, always good to go simple the first week especially.  All the kids needed to do was glue the pieces on, add the stickers, then color as desired.  Then, of course, they had to show Sparky their craft so he could reward them with a sticker!   

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.

Green are the Veggies

Week 5 for storytime featured the letter V for Vegetables!  And who loves GREEN vegetables?  We do, or at least many of the children claimed to.  (We made vegetable prints for the craft and apparently many of the kids wanted to EAT them not paint with them!)  So we talked about things that are green, other than just vegetables and spotted a few kids who even wore green to storytime.  Then we talked about all of the green vegetables that we love to eat.

Our first veggie themed story was Come into my garden by Cynthia Rothman.  This book features all of the many vegetables that you might grow in a garden, even brussel sprouts, and notes that you can even stay and find lunch!  We had this story in Big Book format, so the pictures were nice and large for all the kids to see.  The story is short, which is good for this crowd, and can lead to a little discussion of other things that you might find in a garden.

The second veggie story was one of my favorites, Night of the veggie monster by George McClements.  Subjected to eat peas every Tuesday night, a little boys turns into a 'veggie monster' the second that the pea touches his lips.  Toes are curling, things are quivering, and then, the unthinkable happens, he accidentally swallows the pea only to find that it really isn't so bad.  Parents tend to get a kick out of this story, especially those who know what a veggie monster really looks like.

Our final book was another story that I tweaked.  I adapted the book Lunch by Denise Fleming into a flannel board to tell the story about a mouse who woke up hungry.  He crept into the kitchen where he found an array of vegetables.  Since we were focusing on colors, I tried to make a vegetable for every color.  But, first mouse had to put on his pink 'bib' and grab his blue fork (the two colors for which no veggie could be associated).  After eating his way through the rainbow, mouse was tired, so he went back into his hole to nap until lunch time.  This was a good participation story as the kids could tell me what the veggie was and what color it was.

Songs about vegetables seem to be scarce.  So instead we sang a song about gardening and the steps that it takes to grow the vegetables.  It went to the tune of The Wheels on the Bus:

First you take the seeds and you plant them in the ground, 
Plant them in the ground, plant them in the ground.
First you take the seeds and you plant them in the ground,
When growing vegetables.


Then you take the can and you water all around...
Watch as the plants come popping up...
Pick the veggies and eat them up...

Then to go along with the green theme, we sang Five green and speckled frogs:

Five green and speckled frogs,
Sitting on a speckled log,
Eating some most delicious bugs.
YUM YUM!
One jumped into the pool,
Where it was nice and cool,
Now there are four speckled frogs.
RIBBIT RIBBIT!

Repeat with 4, 3 ,2, 1

I have a magnet board with the frogs on a log and they jump into the pool as we sing.  Sometimes we'll stop and count the frogs between verses to keep the kids' attention or kill some time.  I guess we could have had the frogs eating some vegetables, but what frog wants to do that?

And wouldn't you know it, Laurie Berkner actually sang a song about vegetables.  The Valley of the Vegetables on her Buzz Buzz album.  I wouldn't say it was the most exciting song ever, but we shook our shaker eggs around as Laurie sang about vegetables.

We ended with Dr. Jean Feldman's Tooty Ta, which has no reference at all to vegetables, but is generally fun to do.  Although this time I got the feeling that I was doing this one alone.  The kids that were joining me were having a blast while the others looked on wondering what the heck I was doing.  If you have never heard it, it is like the Father Abraham song where you keep adding actions until every part of your body is moving.

As mentioned earlier, our craft was vegetable prints.  I set out trays of green and yellow paint along with cute up broccoli, green peppers, celery, and cucumber (the green veggies).  The kids dipped the veggies into the paint and made prints of the paper.  Some of them came out looking really interesting and of course the kids enjoyed the paint.  (We provide smocks - adult size small t shirts - for such craft days.)

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!