Flannel Friday: Jeremy Draws a Monster by Peter McCarty

Last week, my preschool story time was all about imagination. In addition to several picture books, I also shared this flannel board adaptation of Jeremy Draws a Monster. In this story, Jeremy, a bored, lonely boy, draws a monster. The monster is rude and demanding, and asks Jeremy to draw him all kinds of things. When the monster takes over Jeremy's bed in the middle of the night, Jeremy finally wises up and sends that monster packing!

Here is Jeremy when he first draws the monster. My Jeremy is a clipart image from mycutegraphics.com. The monster is also from mycutegraphics, but I recolored his outline in Microsoft Word to make him look more like a drawing. I made sure to use blue so he would match the monster in the book as much as possible.

I found line drawings on Google Images of each of the drawings the monster requests, and recolored them in Word to match the color scheme used in the book. I tried to use a special text effect to make them look even more like pencil drawings, but some of the lines were too thin, so that didn't work out.

When it came time to show that Jeremy had gone to bed, I used a piece of blue felt as his blanket.

This picture shows the monster with his hat, which is the last item he asks Jeremy to draw, and the bus ticket and suitcase Jeremy draws to get rid of the monster.

This is the bus and the group of kids who appear at the end of the story. As the bus left the flannel board, I prompted the kids to say goodbye to the monster, which they did with great joy.

My preschool group responded really well to this story, and after story time, I brought out the picture book and many of the kids could  retell the entire thing from the book, after only hearing me tell it with the flannel board once. Monsters and ways to catch them figured heavily into the pictures the kids colored, and we had lots of discussion about what else Jeremy could have drawn to get rid of his monster problem. This was probably the most successful flannel board I've ever used with this age group.

This week, for my beginning reader story time at the main library, I created some more flannel board pieces to use with this story. I created a speech bubble for the monster, so the kids could interact with the story and call out the names of  the various things he wants Jeremy to draw. Though I only wound up seeing two kids, this was a  really effective way to tell the story, and both enjoyed it.

This week's Flannel Friday host is K Leigh at Storytime ABC's. Learn more about Flannel Friday at the official site.