I Love Chocolate!

My love for chocolate has now spilled over into storytime! This week I read books about chocolate cake, chocolate ice cream, and a chocolate factory.

I also used two flannel board rhymes "Birthday Cake Candles" and "Ice Cream Scoops." I like to make the kids count forwards and backwards using the tune of "Ten Little Indians" but changing it to whatever I am doing that day; in this case candles. For the first I sang the following rhyme and adapted the same rhyme for the second flannel board:

Birthday Candle Colors

If you have the red one, the red one, the red one

If you have the red one, put it on the cake.

Continue with:

Blue, Pink, Orange, Yellow, Brown, Black, Green, Gray, Purple

 

The craft for this storytime was a chocolate ice cream cone with glitter "sprinkles."

St. Patrick's Day

I kicked this storytime off by asking the kids if they knew anything about St. Patrick’s Day. Two kids in a room of seventeen knew what it was and knew what a clover was. That was it! Are they not teaching this in school anymore? Are the kids in my storytime really shy and hesitant to speak up? Possibly. Either way, I told them what St. Patrick’s Day was all about and then we read the following books:

I used two flannel boards: Five Shamrocks and Leprechaun, Leprechaun What Do You See? (I used this flannel board idea and made pieces based on the pictures: http://librarystorytimeabcs.blogspot.com/2012/03/not-flannel-friday-leprechaun.html)

To end storytime we made a green lace fan for our craft.

  

Poetry

I wasn't sure how this one would go, since a lot of the books I found were very short poems and there is no true storyline. However, the kids were more than happy to listen to some funny poems from Dirt on my Shirt by Jeff Foxworthy and we read aloud together A Giraffe and a Half by Shel Silverstein. I also read Sheep in a Shop by Nancy Shaw and Me I Am! by Jack Prelutsky.

The kids helped me tell the rhymes "Hey Diddle Diddle" and "Humpty Dumpty" using flannel board pieces. I mixed Humpty Dumpty up and asked if he was put together correctly; they kept yelling at me that I was wrong every time I changed him around! I finally had a volunteer help put him together the right way.

For our craft, we recreated the poem Bear in There by Shel Silverstein, by making a fridge that folds (fridge door on the front and poem on the back) and gluing a polar bear inside. For fun I gave them stickers to put on the front like they were fridge magnets. When you get to the place in the poem where the polar bear roars, you open the "fridge" and roar. Here is a picture and the poem:

Bear in There
by Shel Silverstein

There's a polar bear
In our Frigidaire—
He likes it 'cause it's cold in there.
With his seat in the meat
And his face in the fish
And his big hairy paws
In the buttery dish,
He's nibbling the noodles,
He's munching the rice,
He's slurping the soda,
He's licking the ice.
And he lets out a roar
If you open the door.
And it gives me a scare
To know he's in there—
That polary bear
In our Fridgitydaire.