Tuesday, June 16, 2015

Love the Library




So I had really high falootin' concepts about trying to do a Library themed storytime in honor of National Library Week. But as I keep learning, again and again...this is almost never a good idea with preschoolers, for a number of reasons.

1) They are already library users. Their caregivers already value our services, otherwise they wouldn't be at storytime. So, I'm preaching to the choir.

2) It is really hard to find picture books written about libraries that A-appeal to preschoolers and B-are short and fast-paced enough to hold a preschooler's attention.

3) There are almost NO transitional activities or songs that are library related.

So, after beating my head against a wall for about a week. I gave up and decided to free-form the story time. I picked out books that I like to read.





We told Eric Carle's The Very Hungry Caterpillar with a Puppet.




We did read A Library Book for Bear by Bonny Becker .


I played my ukulele and we sang There was an Old Lady who Swallowed a Fly. We read If you Give a Mouse a Cookie by Laura Joffe Numeroff.


I let them play with egg shakers while we sang Ten on the Bed.



For our craft, I just emptied out the odds and ends of our craft storage onto a table. We had puff balls, googly eyes, pipe cleaners, beads and jewels all stored up and inherited from past librarians. So I dumped it all out with some glue and paper plates and I told the kids to build an animal that might live in the library. 


All in all an awesome Storytime. We didn't even haveta bother with nametags.




Monday, June 15, 2015

Alphabet Soup Letter P



Okay so I've been bad blogger. I got caught up in Summer Reading Program prep and all of my weekly *cough cough* blogs went by the wayside. However I still have the handouts and remember most of the goods, so here it goes.

So for the Letter P, I was sorta scraping the bottom of the barrel looking for P books in verse. (April was National Poetry Month)

Pirate vs Pirate by Mary Quattlebaum

We started out with Pirate vs. Pirate : the terrific tale of a big blustery maritime match written by Mary Quattlebaum and  illustrated by Alexandra Boige. It has some great parts that allow for change of voice and character, but I found it to be a bit long for the preschoolers. So I put it last for my second group (my largest) and lost it completely for the third.

I switched our Mystery Bag letter recognition activity up a little bit. Instead of picking items out of a bag, I had the kids dig them out of a sand box as if they were pirate treasure. For the last group, this did require me to give them a preface about pirates, due to the loss of the story tie in.



Our second story, Tony Baroni loves Macaroni by Marilyn Sadler, featured all different kinds of pasta. It was a lovely story with great rhymes, but it would likely be better suited for an individual sit-down storytime between the kids and their caregivers. I'm not sure the concept carried over well to the room as a whole. But like I said, I was kinda scraping the bottom of the barrel. 

Originally, I was going to try to do the old camp song "Princess Pat" after the second story, but "Peanut, Peanut Butter...and Jelly" worked a lot better. It originally was a fingerplay type song, but the kids love gross motor play. So, I added in a few jumps and twists to keep it interesting.



Then we read Parts by Tedd Arnold. This book first caught my attention when it came across my desk for repairs. It is in rhyme, and it covers lots of body recognition. But what got me was that it gives a gentle primer on anxiety for children. 

As the protagonist encounters different bits of his outer body falling off (skin flaking, belly lint, etc.), he starts to worry that he will unravel altogether. His mind blows everything out of proportion until he is so anxious, he starts wrapping himself up in tape. His parents have to sit him down to explain what's what. The story gave us an opening to talk about worries, and how family can help.



We ended with a great playdough activity involving this recipe I found on The 36th Avenue website for homemade Kool-Aid Playdough. It smells fantastic! I made a number of colors, including plain for a little girl with food coloring allergies. I asked the kids what they smelled. (The plain evidently smells like oatmeal.)

I put the playdough in Easter eggs, because this was done right after Easter. The kids got to take the playdough out and form it into a letter P using some paper printouts I made. At that point I told them that they could let the playdough dry on their paper, or they could ball it up and take it home in a plastic baggy. 

This was our last lettered program of the year. But I think next year, I'm going to see if we can do minimize the letter themed days in favor of other themes. We already have individual activities that promote letter recognition. We now have an awesome story carpet!


And I think the kids are ready to expand as well.