Story Time Review

What Shape is Story Time?

This week we explored more shapes in our Story time classes. We read Mouse Shapes by Ellen Stoll Walsh, The Shape of my Heart by Mark Sperring, It Looked like Spilt Milk by Charles Green Shaw, What Shape? by Debbie McKinnon, and  I am a Blop! by Herve Tullet. Although I wanted to focus on shapes I found that a lot of these titles were also good at discussing that everything has a shape, not just what we call "shapes". It is a bunny shape or a house shape or a people shape. To help with this line of thought I used balloons and filled them with a variety of things. Salt, beans, water and corn syrup etc. They all had the same shape of a balloon but when the children held them and squished them they were very different. Some were hard some soft, some smooth and some bumpy. I loved this activity but one of our mom's in our Jr. Story time class is highly allergic to latex! Oh, I felt so badly for exposing her. She ran upstairs and took allergy meds and we had to make sure that her daughter washed her hands very well at the end of class. I usually am aware of things like peanut allergy and that is why I don't often give food to kids during our classes but this was a new and scary allergy to worry about.

We got out the Sound Shape drums and played around with different ways to play them. Fast, slow, loud, quiet, on the side, on the bottom, with your fingers, toes, elbows and head. Lots of fun and really noisy for the library. We danced along to the tune We are Rolling from the CD Smart Moves II.

For our craft we used heart shapes, stickers and markers to make some "Love Bug" valentine day cards for someone in the child's family. A lot of pieces but they were super cute when they were finished.

Next week: Valentine's Day/Love
Michele Schumann, Children's Librarian