Story Time Review

Sharing and Caring @ the Library

For our Story time classes this week we read books on the topic of sharing. We used The Bear who Shared by Catherine Rayner, We Share Everything! by Robert Munsch, Should I share my Ice Cream? by Mo Willems, Dot and Dash Learn to Share by Emma Dodd and Rainbow Fish by Marcus Pfister.

Instead of reading the Rainbow Fish story I showed a YouTube Video  found here. I don't usually show movies since I feel like they get more than enough screen time but this video was simple and creative using the original illustrations and the text was read by Ernest Borgnine.  After the video we played a game of pin the scale on the fish. I created the fish by copying a fish outline onto poster board. I covered the fish with clear contact paper so we could stick the scales on without damaging the
drawing. For scales I used my
 1 1/2" circle cutter to cut out circles from some glitter paper and some shiny foil coated paper. For our younger classes I just let the kids each have a scale and stick it on. For the older kids we used a blind fold.  During this activity I talked to the kids about how when someone shares with us then we return the favor and share with them. We "shared" back some of the Rainbow fishes' scales.

We used the song Wonderful Friends from the CD Music Time by Johnette Downing and clapped along and followed the directions in the song for finding a wonderful friend.  We had a guessing activity where I hid a toy inside a #10 can. I had prepared the cans before by cutting a hole in the plastic lid and stretching and gluing a tube sock over the hole. The children could reach inside the sock and feel what was in the can but could not see it or pull it out. They had to guess what toy was inside that we could share. I hid a stuffed animal and a ball in them. The ball was easy to guess, the stuffed animal (The very hungry caterpillar) was harder.

For our craft I used a print out of a fish outline that included scales. I gave the children some glitter and foil papers cut into scale shapes to glue on. Then we used watercolor paint to make the fish rainbow colors.

This was the final week of our Story time session. Registration for the next session will be on March 11th at 10:30 a.m. Hope to see you there!

Michele Schumann, Children's Librarian