Preschool Story Time, 5/17/17 (Garden Theme)

Opening Song: Story Time is Starting

Book: The Tiny Seed by Eric Carle
This book was long, but the audience was attentive. It probably helped that they seemed to know Eric Carle's style.

Song: One Seed

Book: The Rose in My Garden by Arnold Lobel, illustrated by Anita Lobel
I hesitated to use this book because it's long and the pictures are hard to see but I wanted to try it anyway. To keep the kids engaged, I had the whole room buzz every time I mentioned the bee. I would probably not use it again without turning it into a flannel board or something more easily seen from a distance, but I was pleased with how well it went over, all things considered.

Song: Head and Shoulders

Song: Put Your Hands Up High

Song: Mr. Sun

Book: My Garden by Kevin Henkes
I think this was the favorite of the session. The chocolate bunnies are always a hit!

Song with Ukulele: My May Garden
In addition to the verses shown in the link, I also added one of my own: Bees in the flowers, buzz buzz buzz... I played the ukulele and let the group make up their own motions, and they did better than if they had been following me!

Book: Lola Plants a Garden by Anna McQuinn, illustrated by Rosalind Beardshaw
This was a new-to-me book and I liked the way the story connected to the Mary Mary Quite Contrary nursery rhyme. I think it might have gone over better as the opening book to the session, but I would definitely use it again.

Songs with Shaker Eggs: 

• Can You Shake Your Egg with Me?
• Shake Your Eggs and Stop (with ukulele, to the tune of Ella Jenkins's Stop and Go)
• ABCs/Twinkle/Baa (with ukulele)

Song: Chickadee

14 Literacy Activities About Flowers

Last month's April showers inspired a post about Rainy Day Literacy Activities. Now that it's May, let's think about activities that will help welcome those May flowers!

Action Songs & Rhymes

These five activities are some of my story time favorites for the month of May. Each one encourages movement - either of the hands, or of the entire body.

• Flowers Tall, Flowers Small 
  This rhyme can be done as a fingerplay, using your middle three fingers as the tall flowers and pinky and thumb as the small ones, or you can have a group of children pretend to be the flowers, making themselves tall and small, and then counting themselves off out loud. 
• One Seed 
  The chorus of this song makes a perfect story time extension activity. Follow the motions suggested by Laurie Berkner in the music video (linked above), and watch how quickly kids and parents begin to act them out along with you! 
• Sunny Day
  This soothing song by Elizabeth Mitchell is a good calming down song for the end of story time, or perhaps before naptime at home. The lyrics lend themselves to simple motions, which you can easily invent to suit your needs. 
• There's a Little Flower Growing...
  Take the tune for There's a Little Wheel a-Turnin' in My Heart, and using paper, foam, or tissue paper flowers, have your kids pretend there is a flower growing on their heads, arms, legs, toes, elbows, and anywhere else that will make them giggle. (This activity would pair well with a silly book like Daisy Head Mayzie.) 
• I'm a Little Daisy
  Sung to the tune of I'm a Little Teapot, this song gives kids the chance to stand like daisies, showing off their stems, leaves, and petals. 

Flannel Boards

These activities are best used on a flannel or magnet board.

• Five Little Flowers 
  Any five flowers will suit this simple rhyme, which is about picking flowers in a garden. For Mother's Day, add in the final stanza (included in the link above), which talks about collecting the flowers to give to mom. 
• Oh, Yellow Flower
  This folk song recorded by The Carter Family (and later, by Elizabeth Mitchell) has a simple tune that is very easy to learn, and with a few lyrical adjustments it lends itself very well to flannel board use. See more in my Flannel Friday post about the song. 
• My Garden 
  I wrote this rhyme about flowers growing in a garden when I needed a rhyme for use with a specific set of felt flowers I bought at a craft store. The colors you need are pink, blue, orange, yellow, and green - but orange and pink can be changed to other colors if necessary, as the rhyme scheme does not depend on them. 
• My May Garden 
  This piggyback song by Jean Warren based on Skip To My Lou provides a simple lesson on what is needed - seeds, sun, and rain - to grow a garden. Though the title refers to May, there is no mention of the month in the song itself, so it can really be used any time!
• Five Little Seeds
  I have never used this rhyme myself, but it was featured as a guest post on Storytime ABCs a few years ago, and it's a slightly different take on the "five little flowers" idea. In this garden, three seeds become flowers, but the other two become weeds! This rhyme appears in a few places around the Internet, including Can Teach.

Games & More

Here are some more great ideas from around the blogs that will make great activities to celebrate flowers at home, in the library, or at school. 

• Flower Letter Sorting Cups 
  The Childcareland Blog has a great idea for practicing letter recognition. Print out some flowers labeled with letters, then sort them by letter using plastic cups. Though the free printable has expired, the idea itself would be so easy to recreate using homemade flowers. The template is also available through the blog's Members Area, but there is a fee. 
• Flowers in a Row 
  This game idea from Mailbox Magazine is similar to the sorting cups above, but it allows kids to pretend to "plant" each letter flower in a box of sand or soil. 
• Spring Tulip Name Puzzle
  Last Spring, Sarah from How Wee Learn shared this great idea for teaching kids to spell their names - a flower-themed puzzle! Though Sarah's flower of choice was a tulip, you could use any flower you like. (I'm thinking a chrysanthemum, to accompany a certain Kevin Henkes mouse book, which is all about names...) 
• Flowers in the Garden
  This coloring sheet from Crayola gives kids the opportunity to imagine their own wacky flowers. Provide some crayons or markers, then stand back and see where their imaginations take them!

Dig Into Reading (Gardening): Preschool Story Time, 6/21/13

 Dig Into Reading (Gardening): Preschool Story Time, 6/21/13

Yesterday was the last day of school and the last time that preschool story time will be held on a Friday this summer. Because of that, I expected a very small group, and I was right.  We ended up with just one child and her mom. That was just fine with them, but it was a bit of a bummer for me, as I was really excited about sharing  this theme with a larger group. I might hang onto it and try to repeat it again later in the summer.

Book: And The Good Brown Earth by Kathy Henderson
This book would have worked with the usual Pre-K-ers who attend this story time, but it wasn't as appealing to a three year old.

Song: One Seed
I happened to know that the little girl loved to sing, so we sang this song a few times. It was the only time until we got around to coloring that she wasn't lying on the floor ignoring me.

Book: In the Garden: Who’s Been Here? by Lindsay Barrett George
This book had too much text for my one-girl audience, so I cut out most of the dialogue and just talked about what each animal had done before revealing it. That worked better. 

Flannel Board: A Garden Game 
I didn't use the words to the rhyme I linked here, but I would have if this had been a group and not just one child. What we did, though, was match the flowers to their markers, and say the names of the flowers aloud. (The little girl's first language is Spanish, and her mom took the opportunity to encourage her to try some English pronunciation.)

Coloring Page: Flowers in the Garden

I use the same hello and goodbye songs at almost every session. Click here for the tunes and words. For descriptions of each of my story times, click here.

Dig Into Reading (Gardening): Toddler Lap Time, 6/21/13

Dig Into Reading (Gardening): Toddler Lap Time, 6/21/13

Book: Flower Garden by Eve Bunting
This book was much better-suited to this small group than the larger morning group. I think it also helped that it was first, as it was the most complex of the three books we read.

Flannel Board Song: My May Garden
The kids loved this, and I think we might keep using it in future weeks as an alternative to some of our other action songs that are starting to get a bit stale. 

Flannel Board Rhyme: My Garden
Toddlers love a good counting flannel board! I had a couple of helpers who assisted me in "picking" the flowers. 

Book: Up Down and Around by Katherine Ayres
As I mentioned after Thursday's story time, I did ask the kids to make motions for up, down, and around as we read this book, and that made it a lot more fun.

Rhyme: Corn Grows Tall
Another fabulous rhyme that the kids just loved!

Book: Ten Seeds by Ruth Brown
Once again, this book is where it all began to unravel. I quickly finished it because it was so short,  and moved onto a more interactive activity that all the kids could participate in.

Activities with foam flowers:

• Rhyme: Flowers Up, Flowers Down
• Song: There's a Flower on My Head

Songs with Puppet:

• Flutter Flutter Butterfly
• Fly Like a Butterfly

Song: Hands Up High

Song: ABCs

Song: If You're Happy and You Know It 

Song: The More We Read Together

I use the same hello and goodbye songs at almost every session. Click here for the tunes and words. For descriptions of each of my story times, click here.

Dig Into Reading (Gardening): Drop-In Story Time, 6/21/13

 

Dig Into Reading (Gardening): Drop-In Story Time, 6/21/13

We had a bit of a difficult morning, because two nannies in a row complained to me on their way into story time that the other adults are too noisy so they can't hear me when I'm reading. So I did try to crack down a bit more on the chattiness during the first book, only to find one of those self-same nannies talking to her neighbor not five minutes later. Honestly, I think I do a good job of keeping the chaos to a minimum in a room of 100 toddlers, and it annoys me when someone acts like I'm not trying. But aside from the somewhat contentious start, this story time was perfectly fine, and the kids seemed to have a lot of fun.

Book: This is the Sunflower by Lola M. Schaefer and Donald Crews
This book is always a crapshoot. Today was one of its better days, even though I did have to stop twice to ask the adults to stop talking.

Flannel Board Song: My May Garden
I put the sun, rain, and seed up on the flannel board and also showed the kids some motions to do for the sun shining, the rain dripping, and the seed growing. They did so well, we did it twice.

Book: Flower Garden by Eve Bunting
I have always liked this book, and the kids seemed mostly into it. I might even think about using it again in this afternoon's toddler session instead of What Does Bunny See?

Song: So Many Plants (based on Stars Shining Bright)
So many plants growing in the ground!
Tell me what color plant I found.

I neglected to come up with a suitable verse to sing after the color had been identified, so we sang: 

Red plant grow! Red plant grow! 
Red plant grow in the deep, deep ground.

That's pretty awful. I will come up with something else before I use this again. The kids did like identifying the different colors, though, and the only tricky ones for them were orange and yellow.

Book: Planting a Rainbow by Lois Ehlert
This book is another one that can sometimes flop, but not today! I saw a couple of moms who even seemed to be enjoying it.

Song: Sunny Day
Part of me just wanted to keep doing this song over and over, because it has such a calming effect on the whole room - adults and kids. But we just did it three times.

Magic Envelope: Bird
Today, we had a bird come out of  the magic envelope. We put in feathers, wings, a nest, a beak, and a "tweet tweet!" sound. The kids couldn't quite name the objects  this time, but I don't think that's a problem, as it gave them some exposure to some new vocabulary. The nannies also actually helped me name the objects the kids didn't know, which made it feel more like a group effort.

Song: Way Up in the Sky
I feel like the "big reveal" in the magic envelope has been pretty anti-climactic, and that there hasn't been a real sense of what we're doing with the final product once it comes out of the envelope. This time, the item that came out of the envelope - the bird - was actually a flannel board piece, so I was able to put it on the board and we sang this bird-related song. After  the song, we put the bird away and sang goodbye to the envelope. It wasn't perfect, but it's getting closer to working the way I want it to.

Songs with Ukulele: ABCs / Twinkle Twinkle Little Star / Baa Baa Black Sheep

Song: Hands Up High 

Song: If You're Happy and You Know It

Song: The More We Read Together 
I have to start out this song higher because I'm hitting the low notes at a point lower than my singing range, and I don't think everyone can hear me.  They also don't listen when I talk, so half  the room thought we were singing The More We Get Together.


I use the same hello and goodbye songs at almost every session. Click here for the tunes and words. For descriptions of each of my story times, click here.

Dig Into Reading (Gardening): Toddler Lap Time, 6/20/13

 Dig Into Reading (Gardening): Toddler Lap Time, 6/20/13

Book: What Does Bunny See? by Linda Sue Park
I liked this for toddlers, but it would have been better with a group of threes who might have been able to guess at the colors. Still, the kids liked this, and several of them kept pointing and saying "Bunny!"

Flannel Board Rhyme: My Garden
This went over really well, and the kids were excited to help me name the colors and help me count to five. We did this rhyme twice.

Book: Up Down and Around by Katherine Ayres
This is a great book for learning simple directions. It has just the right amount of text for toddlers, and though I didn't have the kids do hand motions, it would have been lots of fun to have them put their arms up and down and turn their hands. Maybe I'll try that  tomorrow.

Rhyme: Corn Grows Tall 
This was probably the best I've ever seen this rhyme go over. I think it helps that we do a lot of songs with pointing up and down because almost all the  regulars were able to do that easily.

Book: Ten Seeds by Ruth Brown
Things kind of unraveled a little bit at this point. There was one girl who I believe was about a year too old for this story time, and she just ran amok from this point on, and her mother seemed powerless to redirect her. I tried, but ultimately decided my priority was to keep the other 15 kids' attention instead of catering to one bored wanderer.

Song: Way Up in the Sky

Activities with foam flowers:

• Rhyme: Flowers Up, Flowers Down
• Song: There's a Flower on My Head

Song with Puppet: Flutter Flutter Butterfly

Song: Hands Up High

Song: ABCs

I use the same hello and goodbye songs at almost every session. Click here for the tunes and words. For descriptions of each of my story times, click here.

After School Read-Aloud & Craft: Gardening Theme, 3/22/12

This was a nice program. The kids loved it, the parents got involved, and I actually read books to an interested group. Plus, the craft came out great! Here's what we did:

The Craft: Cupcake Wrapper Bouquets 

I. Supplies 

• Colorful cupcake wrappers
• Buttons in assorted colors
• Straws in assorted colors
• Ribbon 
• White glue
• Scotch tape
  

II. Prep 
There was minimal prep needed for this craft, which is honestly part of why I chose it. For an example, I made three flowers - two with the cupcake wrappers left right-side out, and one with the wrappers turned inside-out - then tied them together with a ribbon. The kids instantly understood that they were flowers, and most of them were eager to make one.

III. Process 
Most of the kids had an adult with them, and were old enough, really to do the entire thing on their own. Only one little girl needed my help. I had three nice compliments. One came from a dad who said it was a great idea, another from a mom who said her two-year-old loved it so much they made two, and the third from a little boy who announced, "This library has the best projects!" 

Here's one of my flowers:

The Read-Alouds: Books About Gardens 

Book 1: In the Garden: Who's Been Here? by Lindsay Barrett George (2006)
This book was great for the group I had - mostly preschoolers, and one little girl who might have been in kindergarten. They loved guessing at which animals might have been in the garden,

Book 2: Muncha! Muncha! Muncha! by Candace Fleming, illustrated by G. Brian Karas (2002)
Another hit. The kids thought it was neat how the rabbits kept outsmarting Mr. McGreely, even if the ending did seem to leave them hanging.

Book 3: Inch by Inch by Leo Lionni (1960)
This book opened up a discussion about who does and does not love worms. A set of twin girls was split on the decision, and a little boy announced that he definitely doesn't like them.

The Display: More Spring and Garden-Themed Books 

• This is the Sunflower by Lola Schaefer, illustrated by Donald Crews
• Planting a Rainbow by Lois Ehlert
• Grandpa Green by Lane Smith
• A Gardener's Alphabet by Mary Azarian
• On Meadowview Street by Henry Cole
• Two Old Potatoes and Me by John Coy
• I Love Spring! by Steven Kroll
• And Then it's Spring by Julie Fogliano, illustrated by Erin Stead
• The Carrot Seed by Ruth Krauss, illustrated by Crockett Johnson
• The Gardener by Sarah Stewart, illustrated by David Small
• Miss Rumphius by Barbara Cooney
• Tops and Bottoms by Janet Stevens

Baby/Toddler Story Time, 4/12

This was the most disorganized morning, and I was barely prepared for the 10:00 session.  I actually went into the room and sang three songs before I realized I hadn't brought any books into the story time room with me! I quickly put on Shake Your Sillies Out (thank God for Raffi!) and snuck out to grab them, but because I was so flustered, I didn't really feel like I was in control for the rest of the session.

Between sessions, though, I regrouped, and did the following program for the second group, which was huge and had at least 45 kids! (I used the same books and most of  the songs, but changed the order around quite a bit.)

Opening song: Hello song

Song: ABC's (a cappella sing-along)
I put the letters up on the flannel board and pointed as we sang. It's a great sing-along because all the adults know it, as do many of the older kids. I think I'll be doing it for a few weeks, just for a change. My goal is to get away from farm animals for a bit, before I get completely sick of them. 

Song: The Wheels on the Bus

Song: If You'd Like to Read a Book

Book: Garden of Opposites by Nancy Davis

This book is really bright and exciting to look at, even if there aren't many words.  I read the words, and then pointed out different interesting things about the illustrations. I don't think the concept of opposites necessarily made sense to the babies and toddlers, but they definitely loved seeing the inside of an apple and they also really liked the sharp gardening scissors which are the opposite of a dull shovel. I had another book on deck, in case this one didn't work, but it worked quite well, and I'd recommend it for a Spring- or flower-themed story time.

Song: Head, Shoulders, Knees & Toes


Song: I'm a Little Teapot

Book: Counting in the Garden by Kim Parker

This one is a floral counting book where animals and insects hide among the blossoms and stems of different plants. I got everyone involved by having them count the different animals and bugs with me. Things got a little bit tricky as the numbers got bigger, though, because the inchworms and butterflies blended in so well, I almost couldn't find them all. The parents were very understanding, though, and when I found inchworm number nine, one mom actually said, "Good job!" 

Song: One, Two, I Love You (Numbers Are Our Friends) 

Song: Five Little Ducks (from Where is Thumbkin?)
This is a new one for my story time group, and this version is a little bit faster than I would like, but we used ducks on the flannel board and during the second session, especially, the kids really seemed intrigued. 

Song: Monkeys on the Bed


Rhyme: Five Pretty Flowers (I borrowed this from Mel's Desk, and then adapted it slightly)
I butchered this rhyme completely for session one, so I actually wrote a cheatsheet for session two. I didn't like leaving the ending just hanging, so I added my own verse to the end. Unfortunately, some little fingers couldn't resist "helping" me with the flowers, and the end of the rhyme got cut off by his grown-up coming to get him from the front of the  room. I also think this group is puzzled by rhymes and would rather have songs, which I don't fully understand. Still, though, I think it's a good one. I'm a sucker for rhymes about counting to five, and I do plan to try it again.

Out in the garden

Growing in the sun

Were 5 pretty flowers

And I picked one...

(count down until there are no flowers left)

Out in the garden 

growing in the sun

Are five new flowers I planted

Count them one by one

Book: This is the Sunflower by Lola M. Schaefer, illustrated by Donald Crews

This story is a cumulative rhyme about a sunflower growing night and day in the narrator's front yard. Donald Crews of Freight Train fame is the illustrator, and I love the way he shows the effects of different types of weather and light on everyday things, like flowers and buildings and even grass. There is a page in this book where it's raining that I just absolutely love. I also love the surprise ending, when one sunflower becomes a whole patch.

Song: There's a Little Wheel a-Turnin' in my Heart

Goodbye Song: Skinnamarink