Octopus storytime!

To continue with our Make Waves theme for Summer Reading, we had an awesome octopus storytime today.

We began by reading Herman The Helper by Robert Kraus, pictures by Jose Aruego and Ariane Dewey.

This was a great book to start with. I am a HUGE fan of the Kraus/Aruego books and this one did not disappoint. It’s all about Herman who helps out everyone he knows. He is a small green octopus who does not take up a lot of space on the page so we had a lot of fun finding him on every page.

Next we read An Octopus Followed Me Home by Dan Yaccarino.

Dan Yarrcarino is another of my favorite authors to read in storytime. This is a great story about a girl who brings home an octopus who is reminded by her father of all of the other animals who have also followed her home. This book has fun illustrations and is quite silly.

Finally, I closed with I’m the Biggest Thing in the Ocean by Kevin Sherry.

Ok, so I know that this is a book about a squid and not an octopus this is something we discussed prior me reading the story, but I couldn’t resist using it. This is also one of my favorite books (looks like this was a week of faves!) and I love reading it to the kids. I have used it many times before and its previously been mentioned on this blog.

For our craft this week we made octopuses. I wasn’t too pleased with the one I made, I thought it looked like a jelly fish. However, the ones the kids made were really great!

Check out this guy’s mouth! Very scary!

I especially like this octopus’ eyes. Very awesome!

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Hats!

This week for storytime, we did a hat theme. I originally chose this theme because I wanted to read the book, Caps for Sale by Esphyr Slobodkina.

I really like this book and thought it would be lots of fun to share with my storytime group. However, I didn’t get to this book this week. It’s on the longer side and I had some fun games/activities I wanted to include this week.

The first book I actually did read was Twelve Hats for Lena by Karen Katz.

This is a great book about a girl named Lena who has a special hat for each month. This was a great book to read in storytime because it not only dealt with hats but also discusses the months of the year. It was fun for the children to guess which holiday her hat represented and additionally, each child told the group their birthday month.

Next we read Aunt Lucy Went to Buy A Hat by Alice Low.

This is a very funny story about a woman who wants to buy a hat but ends up getting sidetracked by lots of other thing on her way to buy the hat. It’s a silly, rhyming story but I think that it was a bit complex for some of the younger kids.

For craft this week, we made hats with paper bowls.

This was a super easy craft that the kids really enjoyed. All I did was get some paper bowls and set out lots of good stuff for them to color with and stick onto their hats. Very easy and very fun!

Also, I pulled out a sombrero and we did a few different things with it. First we marched around it and with our bean bags and then we threw our bean bags into the hat. Also, I wore the sombrero for part of the storytime. I looked very cool, if I do say so myself!