Story time Review

A Mountain of Mittens @ the Library!

For our final week of this session of Story time we talked and read about mittens. Our books included One Mitten by Kristine O'Connell George, Three Little Kittens Get Dressed by Rookie Readers, The Three Little Kittens by Paul Galdone, A Mountain of Mittens by Lynn Plourde, and The Missing Mittens by Stuart Murphy. We couldn't leave out the ever classic story of The Mitten, we used Jim Aylesworth's version but told it with flannel board characters.

We used a song from the Wiggleworms CD called Clap you Hands to get the wiggles out after one of our long stories then played a game called Can You Hear a Pin Drop? I had gathered items like a pin, feather, cotton ball, balloon, penny, styrofoam ball, regular bouncy ball and a rock then we dropped them one at a time and listened carefully to see if we could hear them. The feather made more noise than the children predicted and the loudest was the rock. The cotton made no noise and a pin makes a surprisingly loud thunk when it lands on carpet. This game is excellent to get the kids settled down after a rambunctious activity.

We made some paper mittens using cardstock and each child colored 2 for each hand, then we stapled them together and slipped them over the children's fingers. I asked the children if they thought these mittens would keep their hands warm and one girl said that she thought they would but you couldn't play in the snow with them!

We also tried playing a game with some inexpensive children's mittens that I bought from the local discount store. The idea was to pass the mittens around in the circle while the music played, kind of like musical chairs. When the music stopped they were supposed to put on the mitten they were holding then find the person who had the other mitten that matched. We had trouble with the concept of passing them around the circle, then to complicate things one girl refused to give up the pink striped mitten and just kept holding onto it. I had to change the game for the other classes. We threw all the mittens in the center of the circle and marched around them then when the music stopped every one grabbed a mitten and then found their partner. This might have worked better but one bossy child decided that they wanted to dictate who got which mitten. *sigh* I guess it always can't work out like you hoped.

Since this was our final class I administered our parent survey to see how they liked the class. For the most part I had rave reviews. One question asked parents to rate different aspects of the class, one of them being the weekly themes we used. I got a couple of comments about the underwear theme that we used for week three. One mom said, "I think that subject should be private!" I totally understand but the reason I did a lesson about underwear was because another mom requested it because her 4 year old son won't even discuss wearing it and the mom is trying to get the message across to him that everyone wears underwear and therefore needs to use the potty. This just goes to show that you can't please all the people all the time, even if you try.

We will register for our next session will be on Wednesday, March 21st.
Michele, Children's Librarian