Today was a cold and rainy day for a story time. I wasn’t sure how many children to expect, either none at all due to the weather or a whole herd since they couldn’t play outside. A herd came. It was a good thing I had many activities planned for the day! The only regret I have was that we were unable to have our shadow puppet play due to technical difficulties. So on to the fun!
We began the day by talking about things that seem like one thing, but are another. Our first story was about a little owl who -seems- cute but is a fierce and scary hunter!
It was a good story to start with while the late arrivals filtered in. Once our group was ready we moved on to our first activity.
Dinosaurs might all seem like big scary brutes but some were nice plant eaters. I used a large magnetic book with several dinosaurs the children got to place onto the board. I held each dino out and told them the name and a little about them and then they got to stick it on. We got a little worried when they thought there were only four pieces until I turned a page to show more. We had enough for everyone with one extra.
Next we played a matching game. Using the ghost expressions from Toddler Approved ( http://www.toddlerapproved.com/2011/10/ghost-expressionsemotions-matching.html )
we matched out ghosts and I let the children tell me what they thought the ghost was feeling. There were no wrong answers. Each expression was whatever the kids wanted it to be. We followed up with the book Sad Monster, Glad Monster.
In this book we learned that monsters who seem big and scary have feelings too. We each got to share things that made us sad, glad, mad, and ended with everyone making big scary faces to scare me! We kept those scary faces in our minds as we moved on to a scary story so we wouldn’t be afraid. Next we read about a teeny, tiny woman who found a bone that was more than it seemed in Teeny Tiny.
The kids went bananas on the last page as we shouted “Take It!” to the ghost when he got back his bone. We followed up with a game of feeding letters to a hungry ghost. I can’t find a link to the blog the idea came from but I will add it just as soon as I find it. We will be doing this again for sure.
Our last story was a loud one where we got to be super goofy.
Hand, Hand, Fingers, Thumb is a very small board book with a very big potential. Before we started we all promised to keep our shakers quiet until I said it was time to make noise. We passed out maracas and shakers to everyone and I had mine in hand as we began. I read each page and when we got to the repeated ‘dum ditty dum ditty dum dum dum’ we all shook shook shook our noise makers. As more and more monkeys joined in we made more and more noise until we were all standing and jumping and shaking! At the end we all shook quieter and quieter as we sat back down and with a whispered dum ditty, we put our maracas on the floor.
We then broke off story time to move on to our craft of coloring finger puppets!
librarylobelia 