Connect with Story Time Secrets via Social Media

Now that I have consolidated my blogs, I have a bit more time to keep up with social media. Here's where you can find me.

On Facebook, I make daily updates to the Story Time Secrets page, which include story time songs and rhymes of the day, quotations from and about children's books, links to interesting library and literacy related articles, and story time outlines from my archives relating to upcoming holidays and events. I'm also starting to invite more comments and interactions from my followers.

On Twitter, I am @mrskatiefitz. I retweet interesting comments and links from authors, publishers, and librarians, and share my comments on things like the ALA Youth Media Awards, Cybils, and other major news in the kidlit world. I also talk a little bit about parenting my two-month-old.

On Pinterest, I have a visual archive of all my reviews and every story time I performed in 2013, along with story time activities (flannel boards, crafts, rhymes, etc.) sorted by theme. I also curate boards about babies, homeschooling (for future reference), and writing, and I pin to two boards for The Library Adventure: Library Adventure Contributors and For Librarians Only.

On Goodreads, I keep track of every book I read and give star ratings. I try to post comments there on books I don't have time to blog about, and I also provide links to reviews on this blog.

I'm also slowly getting used to using Sulia, Google+, and Tumblr, and you're welcome to follow me in any of those places as well!

Flannel Friday: Mother and Father and Uncle John

 

If you use bounces in baby story time, you probably know this one:

Mother and Father and Uncle John
went to town one by one.
Mother fell off!
Father fell off!
But Uncle John...
went on and on and on and on and on and on!

(If you're not familiar with it, you can see the ladies from JBrary perform it here.)

Today's Flannel Friday post will show you how you can share this same rhyme with an older (preschool) audience using the flannel board.

Though the rhyme doesn't explicitly say how the family is traveling to town, it's pretty likely to involve a horse, so you can begin with Mother, Father, Uncle John, and their horse on the flannel board. (The people in this photo are clipart images from kizclub.com and the horse can be found here. The "flannel board" is actually just a piece of felt stapled to a file folder, which is all I had at home, but it does the job!)

To emphasize the rhythm of the rhyme, clap or tap as you say it and invite the kids to do the same. After saying the rhyme a couple of times to get everyone familiar with it, start to get the kids involved. Give each child a turn to name another way that Mother, Father, and Uncle John might travel to town. If you have a good assortment of transportation-themed flannel board pieces, the kids probably won't name anything you don't have on hand, but if you want to limit the selections a little bit, you could have them either choose from a pile, or give each child a piece on the way in to story time and call each child up to identify the one he or she was given when it's his or her turn.

Here are Mother, Father, and Uncle John riding some vehicles that typically fascinate three and four year olds: bulldozer, motorcycle, cement mixer, ambulance. Others would probably include school bus, pick-up truck, dump truck, garbage truck, and car.

To really personalize the kids' choices, and to add some variety to the rhyme itself and not just the visuals, you can also substitute the child's name into the rhyme and ask the child who he or she would like to ride with him or her. You might wind up changing the rhyme to "Sarah and Alice and Santa Claus..." or  "Dylan and Aidan and Knuffle Bunny..." or any other number of fun combinations.

If you decide to provide options for the kids to choose from, or if you just want to end the presentation of the rhyme on a silly note, you can also bring out some unlikely choices. Below, Mother, Father and Uncle John travel by elephant and unicorn. If you're working with an animal theme, you could easily substitute other wild animals like a cheetah, giraffe, or zebra, for the elephant.

By adapting this rhyme for preschoolers, you provide them with opportunities to strengthen their transportation (or animal) vocabulary, to take an active part in the events of story time, and to share their own interests and preferences in an organized and controlled way.

Flannel Friday is hosted this week by Christine at Felt Board Ideas. For more about Flannel Friday, visit the official website.

At the Children’s Desk: “Can you find me this Rainbow Magic fairy?”

Who can resist those beautifully colored Rainbow Magic paperbacks? Though they are beginning chapter books intended to be read independently, they are just as popular with the preschool set as with second graders, even though the preschoolers can’t read a word of them. Now and then, one such excited preschooler will come running to the children’s desk, plop down a book, point to one of the fairies on the back cover and say, “Do you have her?”

The first time I got this question, I was stricken like a deer in headlights. All the fairies look the same! I thought. How am I supposed to know if we have her?! I could have sent my little patron back to the shelf and forced her to look through every book until she found the fairy wearing the exact outfit that had struck her fancy. But even a four-year-old with a fairy fascination deserves good library service, so that’s not what I did. Instead, I asked my little friend if I could see the book. I flipped it over to find out which of the many groups of fairies the one she was looking for belonged to.

Thankfully, the Rainbow Magic series is pretty clearly labeled, so the front cover makes it clear which series we’re talking about. I’m equally thankful that Rainbow Magic has such a visual website. The next thing I did was type in rainbowmagiconline.com and find the series we were interested in. I allowed the preschooler to stand beside me while I looked so she could see the fairies as well. As soon as I found the right set of fairies, she pointed at the one she had in mind. I typed her name into the catalog and from there, we were able to locate the correct book.

I really wish I had a good enough memory and enough time to memorize the hair color, wand, and style of dress of each of the hundreds of fairies created by the pseudonymous Daisy Meadows, because nothing would make me more popular with preschoolers than the ability to name them on demand, but until that day comes, this system is pretty foolproof, too.

Flannel Friday: Who is Tapping at my Window?

This week, I am sharing another flannel board idea based on a poem I recently read to my daughter. It is entitled "Who is Tapping at my Window?" and was written by A.G. Deming. It can be found in A Child's Book of Poems by Gyo Fujikawa, and thanks to Google Books, you can read it online.

I like this poem as a read-aloud because it's very repetitive and has a strong rhythm that becomes really obvious when speaking the words out loud. It also reinforces kids' understanding of familiar animals (dog, cat, hen), but also introduces a few that kids might not know about (hare, cony, wren).

The clipart images I used in the Google Drive presentation below all come from kizclub.com. Many were in the flashcards and clipart sections, but for a few, I had to comb through the story props section. Also, they didn't have a wren or a cony, so I used a generic bird and a rabbit. I added in speech bubbles as well, but I would definitely consider those optional.


This poem works well for an animal theme or weather theme, or just as an easy way to slip some poetry into story time. Find my animal-themed story times here, and my rain-themed story times here.

Today's Flannel Friday round-up is hosted by Lisa at Thrive After Three. For more on Flannel Friday, visit the official website.