Fall Storytime Begins

Last week we began our new session of Story time. During this session I choose to focus on the basics, so we started with a lesson on colors last week and followed up this week with the Alphabet. The rest of the session will be Numbers, Shapes, 5 Senses and just for fun we will finish up with Nursery Rhymes.

Our colors unit lent itself nicely to the leaves changing colors on the trees. We read Dog's Colorful Day by Emma Dodd, Cat's Colors by Jane Cabrera in our Jr. Story time classes and supplemented with A Color of His Own by Leo Lionni and The Wolf Who Wanted to Change Colors by Orianne Lallemand for our Preschool classes.We sang the song Little Old Wagon from the Hello Everybody CD by Carole Peterson. We also sang to the tune of Mary had a little lamb, "Many things are colored ___________,  colored ___________, many things are  colored ___________,  Can you think of some." The kids had fun trying to think of unusual things of each color. We even sang about things colored "clear" and the kids thought of glass, bubbles, air and water. 

We played color tag. I called out a color name and the children then had to run and touch something in the room that was that color. We had a little trouble with orange since nothing in the room is orange, but we did manage to find it on some ones clothes. Which was funny because the boy wearing orange kept moving around and the kids were chasing him trying to touch the orange. We had to make a rule to touch only with one finger and softly!

We finished up the lesson by doing a craft with outlines of colored leaved printed on sheets of paper. Each leaf had three small circles in the center. I gave the children some buttons and they had to glue the matching color button in each circle.

Our Alphabet unit was a little bit trickier. I don't usually like to read alphabet books because they are all the same A is for Apple, B is for Ball etc. etc. You can't keep the attention of the two year olds very long with that format! I choose a couple of books that had kind of a story with the alphabet included. For the "traditional" alphabet book I used Tana Hoban's 26 Letters and 99 Cents for the older kids. I used Alphabet Animals: A slide and peek adventure by Suse MacDonald for our Jr. class. Then we read Kipper's A to Z by Mick Inkpen, Old Black Fly by Jim Aylesworth and The Handmade Alphabet by Laura Rankin.

We sang the ABC song, BINGO and did a scarf dancing activity to A, You're Adorable from the CD Musical Scarves & Activities by Georgiana Stewart. We decorated a large cutout of the letter that begins our names with spangles and punched a hole in the top to thread a piece of yarn through to create a necklace.

Michele Schumann, Children's Librarian