Thursday, December 15, 2011

Storytime Review

Merry Christmas to All!

Many thanks to all our Story time students from this session, they have been fun to teach. Our final week we talked about Christmas and Santa Claus.  There are so many fun Christmas books in our collection I had a hard time settling on the ones that I wanted to use, but here are the few that made the cut. Merry Christmas Big Hungry Bear by Don Wood, Counting Christmas by Karen Katz, The Three Bears Christmas by Kathy Duval, Merry Christmas Splat! by Rob Scotton and Where's Prancer? by Syd Hoff.  My favorite of the bunch was The Three Bears Christmas because all of the children know the original and it is a fun twist on that classic. I also really like the author of Where's Prancer, Syd Hoff, he is a classic children's author whose books always bring a smile.

We sang a fun song about Santa to the tune of London Bridge:
Guess who's beard is long and white.
Long and white
Guess who's beard is long and white.
Dear old Santa!
(alternate verses about boots, shiny and black, tummy that is big and fat, hat is pointy and red, eyes are sparkly bright and many others) We did actions to match the words of each verse.

 We also sang Jingle Bells and each child got to hold and ring their own bell. We also used the bells to do the dance, Ring those Bells from the CD, H.U.M All Year by Carole Peterson. We played a game similar to Duck Duck Goose called Santa put the present down! I wrapped an empty box to use with this game and the children would take turns playing Santa. We would chant Santa, Santa walk around, put that present down! The child who was Santa would then set the "present" down behind one of the children in the circle and they would run around the circle to see who would have to be Santa next. Some of the children had played this type of game before but for many it was a new concept so we had to have lots of parent help. Thanks to our moms and grandmas for jumping in to help us play!  The older classes also played a guessing game where we shook a gift box and tried to guess what the present inside could be. I had some fun guesses from snowman to snowballs. We hid things in there like toy cars or mini frisbees. Once I put a rock in the box and we talked about what would be a good gift and what would not be a good gift.

We made some cute paper plate Santa masks using red paper triangles for hats and decorated with cotton balls. This was our final class of the session and will now have a short break for Christmas and New Year's then we will register for our next session on January 10th at 10:30 a.m.

Michele, Children's Librarian

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