MUD

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We had some good clean fun with messes and mud in storytime this week.

BOOKS: 

We read Harry the Dirty Dog by Gene Zion and The Pigeon Needs a Bath by Mo Willems.

Pigeon went over a little better than Harry, though my preschool kids did really enjoy Harry and predicting what would happen to him.

FLANNELBOARD:

A few years ago I made a Dini Dinosaur flannelboard that I reused for this storytime!

Once I explained how it would work (basically by showing an example and asking questions right away), the kids loved it.  They liked telling him what piece of clothing he had to take off to get clean and scolding him: "Silly Dini Dinosaur! Don't you know?!"

SONG:

We used our shakers and pretended to clean up as we listened to "Oh My Goodness, Look at This Mess!" by Sweet Honey in the Rock.  LOVE this song.

CRAFT:

For our craft, we glued pigs to a piece of construction paper and gave them a mud bath!  I prepared the mud using coffee grounds, water, and a little bit of brown tempera paint.  It was fast, quick, relatively clean, and satisfied everyone.

Messy

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It's kind of spring here in Northern Minnesota.  I say kind of because it's only the beginning of March, and, while most of the snow has melted, there's no guarantee that it won't blizzard again before May.  So since everything's melting and snow is getting dirtier (we call it snirt here) and mud is making it's way out, it's the perfect time to do a messy storytime.

BOOKS:

We read Duck in the Truck by Jez Alborough and Harry the Dirty Dog by Gene Zion, illustrated by Margaret Bloy Graham.

Full disclosure: I love Duck in the Truck.  I'll use any excuse I can get to read it.  So using Duck in the Truck, while not directly about messes, was a no brainer for me for this storytime.  I remember reading Harry the Dirty as a youth and thought that would be great for storytime.  It's a little long, but not too bad and the kids liked the story.  

FLANNELBOARD:

I used Scott's Dini Dinosaur flannel idea to make my own set of Dini Dinosaur flannels.  

We received our copy of DIni Dinosaur the day after my last storytime.  Next year, it'll be all Dini for messy storytime, but for this year, the flannels worked really well.

SONG: 

We jammed out to "Messes" by the Funky Mamas.  This was super fun.  I LOVE the violin in this song.  This is a great shaker song too.

CRAFT:

We did some non-messy fingerpainting.  I don't want to make mortal enemies of any of my storytime moms, so I tend to avoid the messiest of crafts or at least give them lots of warning.  We've done fingerpainting in bags before, but this gave the kids a little more freedom to create.  I got the paints out and gave each kid a piece of paper on a larger piece of tin foil.  They squeezed whatever paint on in whatever amount they wanted and then we covered it all up with saran wrap and they moved the paint around on the page to make cool designs.  When they were done painting, it was easy to just fold the tinfoil around the edges to make a little frame and it kept everything neat and tidy.