Letter L

We have languidly lounged through the alphabet until reaching the delightful letter L, long make it live in luxury.

BOOKS:

I did a little mid-week revision to the line-up this week, so I have featured all three.  We read Feathers for Lunch by Lois Ehlert, a chapter from Little Bear by Else Holmelund Minarik and The Grouchy Ladybug by Eric Carle.

I started out with Feathers for Lunch and Little Bear but wasn’t loving Little Bear after Tuesday’s storytime.  I grabbed my copy of The Grouchy Ladybug from home (because we don’t have it.  WUT?) and read that for Wednesday.  Really, though, The Grouchy Ladybug was getting a little long by the end too.  Sometimes when picking books we’re walking a thin line.  We want our storytime books to be interesting, engaging, and quality books, but we also don’t want to lose our audience halfway through a story.  I’ve found lately that Easy Reader books don’t lend themselves well to storytime for precisely the reasons they were created – they are often full of repetition and simple words (sometimes even rhyming words or words that have the same stems) because they are written to help children learn to read.  That was the problem with Little Bear.  Don’t get me wrong, I love Little Bear.  I think it’s frequently overlooked because it is “old,” but the story and characters are actually fun.  Who doesn’t want to make birthday soup or go to the moon?  I do.  Treasured classics are sometimes quite a bit longer than the picture books that are coming out or are popular now.  The Grouchy Ladybug follows the same formula as The Very Hungry Caterpillar but has more words, making it longer and a less enjoyable read aloud.  I’d love to hear what other storytime practitioners think about this and how they deal with lost attention or encourage engagement with longer or repetitive texts.

FLANNELBOARD:

I used Sarah’s template from Read Rabbit Read to make flannels for the book Lunch by Denise Fleming.  I have a little mouse finger puppet who ate ALL of the lunch.  Here’s a picture of my completed flannels.

SONG: 

I got out the shakers and we listened to “Wimoweh (The Lion Sleeps Tonight)” by Laurie Berkner.  We practiced shaking quietly and slowly and quickly and loudly before we listened to the song.

CRAFT:

We practiced lacing for our craft this week.  I cut out big construction paper letter Ls and punched holes in them and then cut out long yarn pieces.  We used half pieces of pipe cleaner (or chenille stem – whichever is your preferred craft term) and bent them in half to use as needles.  This was a great deal more difficult for the kids than I thought it would be.  Let’s face it, most of them wear velcro shoes and shoe tying is still a few years away.  I didn’t think about the intricacies involved in lacing.  You go in one hole and pull the string through and then go in another hole, but you have to reverse directions.  Down into one and then up into the other.  Maybe if I had explained a little better it would have gone more smoothly for our children.  Regardless, it was a great small motor skills exercise for everyone.