My standard story time includes two parts.
The first could be considered the traditional story portion, which lasts about 20 minutes. I alternate story, interactive flannel, song with movement, and repeat. I sometimes change the order depending on how well my group is listening. Since my songs are not always chosen to match my theme, I will probably not always share those.
After taking a moment to explain the activities provided, we move on to the second part of story time. This includes two crafts, a coloring page, and a sensory activity. This also lasts about 20 minutes. I will probably share all my plans except maybe the coloring page.
This weeks theme was buttons! I thought it would be a good theme because buttons can represent several different things. For instance, buttons on clothes, buttons that you push, and of course your belly button!
The Books
Press Here by Herve Tullet, is a great interactive book. The book instructs you to press colored dots and as you turn the page, the dots multiply, change color, get bigger etc. I attempted to allow my kids to participate by helping me with the pages where all dots on a page needed to be pressed. While I think it was fun and would recommend the book in general, I am not sure that it was the best choice for story time. In general, it is probably a better one-on-one type of book, but still great fun!
Joseph Had a Little Overcoat by Simms Taback is a classic. It is also a simple story, with a positive note that is just right to pair with something a little longer or more involved.
Flannels
Flannels really are one of my favorite parts of story time. Maybe it is because I remember enjoying them as a kid. For the buttons theme, I decided on a flannel version of Pete the Cat and His Four Groovy Buttons by Eric Litwin. In all honesty, I might have chosen it as one of my books, but our copy was checked out and not returned in time to make that possible. A template for making this flannel story is available at Making Learning Fun
For those of you who are unfamiliar with the Pete the Cat books, they are great stories because it is easy to make them interactive, have a positive message, have elements of song, and have just the right amount of repetition. For one of my songs, we actually listened and danced to the song version of this story. You can download the song at the Harper Collins Children's website here. In the future, I would choose to do either a flannel of Pete by himself, or the book and the song. I think the flannel and the song felt a little to much like the same thing. In any case, Pete is always a hit!
For my second flannel, I decided to make some letter puzzles and talk about the letter B. Basically, I create a big B and a little b and fill them with clipart images of words that start with that letter. I print, laminate, cut up and add velcro. I like these because it brings focus on the first letter of our current theme and then the kids get to help think of other words that start with the same letter. We don't have a ton of time, so at a certain point I just start showing them the pieces of the puzzle and they say what it is. As they come up with the words, I add them to the felt board and assemble the letters. In the end, I ask them to name what we have on the board: Big B and little b.
Crafts
I will say that I had a hard time with crafts on this one. Both crafts ended up being challenging for 3 to 5 year olds in terms of hand-eye coordination and motor skills. Unfortunatley, I couldn't think of a good way around it and the crafts ended up needing a little more adult help than I normally like. However, the kids all seemed to enjoy themselves.
The first craft was a button bracelet. The picture above was my sample, made out of buttons and plastic lace. It wasn't too hard to thread the buttons onto the lace, but it did take some patience for those little hands. In anycase, some of my participants left sporting button necklaces because that is what suited their fancy.
The button flowers were really cute and some of the kids really got into them. I had the flowers cut out before hand and punched holes in the center to feed in the pipe cleaner. The cleaner then went through one hole of the button, looped around through another to twist around at the back of the flower. The kids used tape to tape the pipe cleaners to their paper and then glued the flower pot on top.
At the end of it all, it worked out pretty well. Hope you enjoy!
At the end of it all, it worked out pretty well. Hope you enjoy!
