BABIES and a storytime fail

Babies are always an appropriate storytime theme.  Kids who have baby siblings like to talk about them, and most kids like to pretend to be babies occasionally as well.

BOOKS:

We read Waiting for Baby by Harriet Ziefert and Baby Day by Susan Heyboer O’Keefe.  I tried to read Oh, Baby! by Sara Stein at Tuesday’s storytime, but I hadn’t read the whole thing before I started reading out loud.  BIG BIG BIG MISTAKE.  I had read the first couple of pages which have short clear text and nice bright pictures.  I missed the later pages, like the one with the breastfeeding mom (not too big of a deal), or the one about the baby’s “bowel movement” (YES THAT IS A DIRECT QUOTE) and all the dirty diapers.  UGH.  Thankfully, most of the kids who have been attending storytime lately have been toddlers and they didn’t notice that I skipped three pages and then abruptly stopped reading halfway through the book.  Jeez.  Classic case of needing to read the WHOLE book before choosing it for storytime.  Waiting for Baby is super cute.  I love the partial page to represent the days that Max is waiting for baby.  I love the illustrations in Baby Day but wish it had a little more solid of a story.

SONG:

We listened to “Rollin’ Baby” by Elizabeth Mitchell and You Are My Flower from Blue Clouds.  I was super disappointed that I couldn’t find a video of this so you could hear it, but she has other stuff available from Smithsonian’s Folkways.  I highly recommend her stuff.  It’s zen and mellow and pretty.  “Rollin’ Baby” was perfect for our theme and we got to use shakers.

CRAFT:

I will admit: I think this craft kind of sucks, but everyone seemed to like it.  We made spoon babies and put them to bed in a toliet paper roll crib with a blankie.

We used plain old plastic spoons, googly eyes, red hole punches for mouths, a pipe cleaner for arms and a toliet paper roll cut in half for the crib.  I had excess flannel from when I made my flannel board so I cut some of that up for the blankies.  It was really easy and we had all the materials on hand.  I was surprised that so many of the kids liked it.  I must just have much higher standards for my crafts than anyone else.