Recycling

When I first started doing storytime on my own (in September – which is when I started this job), I had no idea how many crafts to prepare or color sheets to copy.  Most days, I still only guess and sometimes I’m right on and sometimes I’m way over.  Our cruddy cold weather hasn’t helped either.  I’ve canceled storytime at least once this winter.  ANYWAY, I almost always have leftover pieces from storytime and I decided a while ago to do a recycling storytime where we use up all of the leftover pieces for our craft.  The week has finally come.

BOOKS:

The Dumpster Diver by Janet s. Wong (illustrated by David Roberts) and Joseph Had a Little Overcoat by Simms Taback

The Dumpster Diver is cute, but doesn’t hold kids’ attention as well, probably because the story is narrated rather than just happening.  It violates that primary writing rule: Show, don’t tell.  The illustrations are wonderful, though, colorful and eyecatching -lots of detail to attend to.  Joseph Had a Little Overcoat worked well.  It was repetitive and the kids could guess what Joseph would make next out of his overcoat.  I really wanted an easy nonfiction book about recycling, but we don’t have any (yet).  [UPDATE: We just got Compost Stew in by Mary McKenna Siddals and that was PERFECT for this theme.]

SONG:

I was lucky enough to find Five Bottles of Juice on Mollie Kay’s What Happens in Storytime blog.  The song is easy and familiar so moms can sing along and the kids really like any of the flannelboards that we do together.

Five Bottles of Juice on the Wall (Sung to the tune of 99 bottles of Beer on the Wall)

Five bottles of juice on the wall
Five bottles of juice!
Put one in the recycling bin
Four bottles of juice on the wall

(Continue until none are left)

CRAFT:

This was such a successful craft.  I did do a demo ahead of time, just because I wanted the kiddos to have an idea of what they could do, but I wouldn’t even have needed it.

Here is both sides of the illustrious craft cart.  We did this Iron Chef style – I put all of the craft pieces on the cart and kids could come up and take what they wanted.  They repurposed things into other stuff and colored on everything.  I’m just amazed at how they immediately went to imaginative play land.  I have done some reading on different storytime blogs about process art vs. product art.  The best definition I found was from an article Katie Salo did for the ALSC blog:

Process art is when the emphasis is placed on making art and using different mediums whereas product art is when the emphasis is placed on following instructions to achieve an expected result.

For the past six months, I had been focused on product art, partially because that is what my predecessor had done and partially because I had never had a craft time in any of the storytimes I had done before.  I want to do more process art – and judging by the kids’ reactions, it’s a good idea.  It’s good for them to think outside of the box and to use their imaginations, but it’s also good for them to be able to do whatever they want (within limits) sometimes too.  I’ll post a gallery with samples of their artwork.