Story Time Review

Wee, wee, wee all the way home!

Week four of our story time session was devoted to all things porcine. I read  Perfect Piggies by Sandra Boynton, Piggies by Don Wood, Everyone Hide from Wibbly Pig by Mick Inkpen to our Junior class then read Piggie Pie Po by Audrey Wood, Pigs by Robert Munsch, The Three Little Pigs by Maggie Moore and Pigs in the Mud in the Middle of the Rud by Lynn Plourde to our Senior class.

We did a couple of very fun activities this week. First we played a pass the pigs game, we all stood in a circle and passed around a couple of pig puppets while the music played (I used Marcie Marx's CD Scat Like That! The Pig Latin Polka). When the music stopped the people holding the pigs ran to the middle of the circle and snorted like a pig until the music started again. The other activity that we did went along with Pigs in the Mud in the Middle of the Rud. I laid down 2 ropes a few inches apart then the children jumped over the "road" and tried not to land in the "mud". After each round we moved the ropes a little bit farther apart until it was impossible to jump without getting a foot in the pretend muddy road.

I decided to add a little fun to the 3 Pigs story, since most of the children have heard it many times before. I found some cute graphics on Pinterest of the three houses, one of straw, one of sticks and one of bricks. Then I cut the graphic apart and glued each one to a quart sized milk carton. I filled each milk carton with the correct building material. I let the children touch each of the types of building materials and discuss if they thought it would make a good, strong house. Then we used a hair dryer to "huff & puff" our houses to see what would happen. We blew down the house of straw, we blew down the house of sticks but of course, we couldn't blow down the house of bricks. This activity really got the kids thinking about the story in a new way and was very fun. One boy kept asking to do it again, again and again. I finally had to promise him that he could do it after class so we could move on.

For our craft we glued a simple outline of a pig that was printed on pink paper onto a piece of construction paper. Then we used some homemade finger paint that I had made with flour, salt, liquid starch, Elmer's glue and a little cocoa powder for color and some corn meal for texture to make our pigs muddy. We finger painted this mud onto our pigs and some of the kids didn't want to get their hands dirty while others thought it was great fun and spread mud over the entire pig.

Next week: Goats
Michele Schumann
Children's Librarian