Movement

The collaborative theme for Texas libraries this summer is "On Your Mark, Get Set ... Read!" It was only logical to start off summer storytimes with movement! Here is what we did:


 We sang along with the flannelboard "Five Little Monkeys." Our craft was a drum made out of a cup, wax paper and a rubber band. I used my sample of the drum craft during the dancing feet book, and explained how the kids could sound out the syllables of their names with beats. I brought out different puppets and asked the kids to tell me what the animal was, what sound it made and what color it was, then they kept a beat while I made the puppets dance. We used scarves to dance with and used several songs from Jbrary. If you haven't checked out their videos yet, you must! I opened the storytime doors early for preschool time, and we did many of the yoga poses from You Are a Lion. Those kids had zero problems moving like a frog, butterfly, mountain, etc. I had planned on having them play with the parachute at the end, but there were way too many kids in the room and chaos would have ensued. Parachute is great for groups of 10 or less, in my experience.

Watercolors!

We have a once a month series at my library for school age children, where they work on different projects based on a theme. Our Spring series focused on STEAM themes. So far we have done volcanoes, squishy circuits, Rube-Goldberg machines and recently we made watercolor paintings. Each kid got one sheet on watercolor paper and a black crayon. They then used a random assortment of circular objects to trace overlapping circles on their paper. Next, I let them choose several watercolor pencils and they filled in the "painting". They then used clean brushes and water to "paint" the pencil markings they made. It's actually very cool to see the sharp lines the pencils make turn into soft watercolors.

Pets!

To celebrate National Pet Day, the theme for Monday's storytime was Pets! The books for toddler and preschool time were slightly different, so here is what we did:

Toddler:
What Pet to Get? by Emma Dodd
 
 Puddle Pug by Kim Norman

Preschool:
Max the Brave by Ed Vere

What Pet to Get? by Emma Dodd
 
Children Make Terrible Pets by Peter Brown



We played with a flannel board titled "Five Little Birds"; we practiced counting and colors. Typically with these types of flannel boards, I will hand them out to the children and then have them place them on the board when they hear their color, ex. "If you have the green one, the green one, the green one, if you have the green one, please put it on the board." We finished with a dog ear headband craft (just like this one from About Home). Our educational element was a dog "run"; you connect paper tubes on the wall using tape and have the kids place a ball at the top of the run and watch it fall to the bottom. In this case, it was "give the ball to the dog."

Update

This last year has been incredibly busy for me! I switched libraries within my system and have a lot more on my plate, which is nice, the days go by quickly. My husband and I also purchased the party supply store he has worked at for over 16 years, so free time has become a thing of the past. That being said, I'm going to attempt to post storytimes themes right after they happen. I don't have my first Spring storytime until February, so until then here are some of the recent displays I have put together, book stacks, and a couple of pictures from our "Build a Sweets House" and pumpkin decorating programs as well. See you in February!

Books stacks:

Displays:

 Inspired by images here and here.

Build a Sweets House program and Pumpkin Decorating Program: