My Imagination!
/I have been struggling a bit to come up with themes for storytime (I need to do more without themes, I realize). But imagination fell into my lap and I just rolled with it. Kids get really excited about using their imagination. When do grown-ups lose that? We need more imagination in our lives.
BOOKS:
We read It's an Orange Aardvark! by Michael Hall and Not a Stick by Antoinette Portis. I love love love these books so much. It's an Orange Aardvark! is a great way to introduce parents to dialogic reading. (Actually now that I think about it, both of them are.) The carpenter ants repeat the color they see and then add a further descriptor. "It's green! Green like the grass!" Just brilliant. With Not a Stick, one could ask questions about the pictures. If it isn't a stick, what is it in this picture? What else do you see? My storytime is skewing younger again so these were short, to the point, and were great for pre-preschoolers and toddlers.
ACTION SONG:
I couldn't think of a good song for imagination, so I thought we'd just PRETEND we were in an elevator and sing The Elevator Song. (Seriously, this theme is pure gold, children's librarians, just whatever you want to do, you just have to PRETEND.) If you don't know the Elevator Song, stop what you're doing immediately and watch this video. The Elevator Song is one of my all time favorite songs to sing with kids. And adults from time to time.
SONG:
Our dancing/singing song at the end of storytime this week was BOTH "Dinosaur Stomp" by Koo Koo Kangaroo and "Robot Dance" by the Pop-Ups. On Tuesday, "Robot Dance" wasn't working on my tablet, so we did the "Dinosaur Stomp." Here are both videos for your listening enjoyment.
CRAFT:
I knew I wanted to do some sort of process craft with this theme, and I found this on one of those 50 Process Crafts to do with Your Kid things on Pinterest and thought, hey, old library cards would be perfect for this!
We painted using plastic cards as our paint brushes. It was interesting. Most of the kids liked it after they got over the initial weirdness of no brushes. I just love the way the art turned out. It's bright and brilliant and the paint has such a different look and texture than it would if you used a regular paintbrush.