The Audrey and Don Wood storytime

This week we read great books by Audrey and Don Wood. The storytime crowd is very familiar with these authors and that made for a great storytime.

We started with The Napping House.

I am so glad I started with this one because I discovered this book is a favorite of many of my storytime kids. I have read it before and the results are always positive.

Next we read Silly Sally.

I had never seen this book before. The Woods have an extensive catalog, which makes them a great candidate for this type of storytime. It was fun to use something completely new. This book is very silly (obviously) and also lots of fun.

Finally, I closed with Piggies.

This is a sweet story about all sorts of different piggies, which live on a child’s fingers. It’s a great book to read to a group because it encourages them to play with their own little piggies. I could also see sharing this one on one with a child and having equally great results.

For our craft, we made our own hand with piggies. I will be honest, this wasn’t the most successful of all crafts. I am not sure that kids really got the tie-in with the piggies and the hand BUT they did really like tracing and cutting out their hand. My group is on the younger side and so sometimes things just don’t go as planned. No big deal.

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The “I Love You” Storytime

Happy Valentine’s Day! Storytime falls midweek so we celebrated a bit early at storytime. Generally speaking, I don’t like Valentine’s Day books for storytime because they are long, a bit too sweet and just not great to read to a group. So, instead I went with an “I Love You” theme today. There are TONS of books about love and this is a concept preschoolers are familiar with.

We started with The Cuddle Book by Guido van Genechten.

My group was very active and talkative today. They had a lot to tell me since we missed storytime last week due to the blizzard. I was a bit unsure about how well this book would captivate them and it turns out I had nothing to worry about. This is a very nice book about cuddling. Each spread shows different animals and how they cuddle. “For crabs, cuddling is hard.” Very cute.

Next we read How Do Dinosaurs Say I Love You by Jane Yolen and Mark Teague.

I am constantly singing the praises of the dinosaur books by Yolen and Teague. I really love these books and think they are great to share with a crowd. I have read discussed two titles previously: How Do Dinosaurs Say Goodnight? (here) and How Do Dinosaurs Eat Their Food? (here). How Do Dinosaurs Say I Love You does not disappoint. What I like about this book is it is very reaffirming about love, even when the dinosaur does something naughty, the parents still love him or her.

We closed with My Heart Is Like A Zoo by Michael Hall.

This is a great rhyming book featuring animals made out of heart shapes. It’s super simple but very nice to read a loud. The kids really enjoyed it and especially enjoyed the frog- everyone spontaneously started hopping like frogs! Moments like these are the best part of storytime. This is a great book and it was the perfect tie-in for our craft.

We made heart animals. This consisted of different sized hearts cut with the die cut machine, crayons and a whole lot of imagination!

I really loved this frog. The yellow individual next to the frog is its friend because according to the young man who made this, “everyone needs a friend.”

How cute is this butterfly? I don’t know if youc an tell, but my favorite part is it’s face! She was very proud of her work.

We haven’t had an interactive flannel board in a while and the kids really love those. It makes them feel special and involved. This time each child was given half a heart and they had to find a mate for their half. It was very cute and surprisingly worked better than I thought it would. Here is what our completed board looked like:

Lots of beautiful hearts! Very nice! I would like to add that they decided to match the colors together, I didn’t think that would happen but they did it on their own.

The storytime that never happened.

My usually scheduled storytime happens Wednesday mornings. This is what I was doing Wednesday morning (well afternoon, but you get the idea):

Not a storytime! Due to the snowpocalypse in the Chicagoland area this week’s storytime did not happen! Usually, I’d just save the theme for a later date and use it then, but the Tuesday kids already heard the books and they deserve something fresh.

So, while I don’t have any cute kid reactions for you, I do have a storytime to share nevertheless.

This week’s theme would have been The Library. There are lots of books about visiting the library out there and this theme was all about finding the right ones. These are the books I would have read if there had been a storytime:

No T.Rex in the Library by Toni Buzzeo, illustrated by Sachiko Yoshikawa.

This is a great book about a girl who visits the library and has some adventures with a T.Rex who gets loose from a book! This is a great book to read aloud it is exciting and has great illustrations and large bold text.

A newer book that I could not wait to read in storytime (looks like I might need to find another place to use it, huh?) is The Library Gingerbread Man by Dotti Enderle, illustrated by Colleen M. Madden.

I was excited to read this because I sort of wanted to see how it would work in a storytime. It’s about the gingerbread man who escapes in a library and is chases by lots of other characters from books. Enderle uses the Dewey Decimal System to come up with the characters that are chasing him: “When he came to 629.892, a cranking, grinding robot droned, ‘Stop. Stop. You. Are. Misplaced.’ The Gingerbread Man just whizzed on by.” As a librarian, I found this very clever and funny. I am not so sure what the kids would have thought. I love a good Gingerbread Man story- they are SO FUN to read- so I think that might have been enough for the kids.

Another great book is I Took My Frog To the Library by Eric A. Kimmel, pictures by Blanche Sims.

Most of the books in this storytime are newer, having been published in the last year or so. This book is not new, it was first published in 1990, but it is a great book for this theme. It’s a simple story, a girl takes her menagerie to the library with predictably disastrous results. Even though it’s predictable, it is very funny and a good standby.

Finally, Lola Loves Stories by Anna McQuinn, illustrated by Rosalind Beardshaw is a great addition to this storytime and the reason I wanted to do this theme in the first place.

I mentioned this book in one of my Storytime Contenders posts. It’s a great story about a girl who visits the library and uses her imagination to act out what she’s read about with her father. There is another book by this author, Lola at the Library that would also be great for this theme.

I had the craft planned, we were going to make our own books.

When you fold the paper, it makes a little book.

I gave them crayons and stickers to decorate. At our storytimes, craft time is a time for parents and children to work together so they came up with lots of great stories to take home.