African Folk Tales

There are several ways you can make an African American Month themed story time: African folk tales, famous African Americans, African animal tales, etc. This year I chose African folk tales and here is what we read:

Who's in Rabbit's House? by Verdi Aardema
The Talking Vegetables by Won-Ldy Paye
Konte Chameleon, Fine Fine Fine! A West African Folktale by Cristina Kessler
Why Mosquitoes Buzz in People's Ears: A West African Tale by Verna Aardema

We used the "Head, Body, Legs" flannel board based on the book Head, Body, Legs: A Story from Liberia by Won-Ldy Paye. We also used the "Uwungelema Tree" flannel board. This blog entry has both the story and clip art. We finished up storytime with a dangling spider craft.

Valentine's Day Origami

 

This Thursday I had a pre-teen and teen origami program focused on a Valentine's Day theme.  We had lots of fun projects to make and the hour flew by. I let parents and younger siblings come in the room and I'm glad I did, because I definitely needed some adult help with all the questions kids had. I tried to add a little bit of tech to the program and had two instructional videos, one that I made and one from the internet. The wifi ended up not working in the room I conducted the program in and I had to devote a lot of time to showing kids how to make a multi-petal flower because the internet video would not work. That is something I will have to fix in the future. Otherwise I think they had a good time. Here are the instructions I made:

Valentine's Fun

This Valentine's Day family storytime was full of hearts and cute cards. We read the following books:

The Valentine Bears by Eve Bunting
Love, Splat by Rob Scotton
Louanne Pig in the Mysterious Valentine by Nancy Carlson
Ruby Valentine Saves the Day by Laurie Friedman

We used the flannel board for "Valentine Tree Rhyme" and "Colorful Hearts." Valentine Tree comes from the book Best of Totline and a great example of it can be found here: http://busycraftingmommy.wordpress.com/2012/01/20/valentines-day-flannel-friday/ For colorful hearts I handed out a large amount of different colored hearts and then sang:
"If you have a red heart,
a red heart, a red heart,
If you have a red heart,
put in on the board."
I continued with all the colors until we had no hearts left.

We finished with a heart pop-up card craft.

Chinese New Year: Year of the Snake

Today was all about Chinese New Year! We read two books about Chinese New Year traditions and two books about snakes (this year's animal).  Here they are:

This Next New Year by Janet Wong
Red is a Dragon: A Book of Colors by Roseanne Thong
Class Two at the Zoo by Julia Jarman
My Snake Blake by Randy Siegel

I made a flannel board last year and titled it "Chinese New Year Animal Word Match". I know that I got it from somewhere else, but currently I cannot find my source information. We ended storytime with a snake paper chain craft. More great craft and game ideas can be found here: http://www.dltk-holidays.com/china/index.htm.