Flannelboard: Houses

If I come up with more rhymes and songs to go with this set, the post will be updated to reflect that. If you have ideas for other ways to use the set, please share!

Flannelboard

Mouse in the House is a storytime staple. When I decided to do a city themed storytime and found the "Five Little Houses" rhyme, I knew I had to make a mouse to add to the set too. Both the houses and the mouse, like most of my flannels, are my own design. I've used this flannelboard for many storytime themes including: city, Dr. Seuss, mice, and opposites. I'm sure that I'll be bringing it out for future storytimes too.

Storytime: City

Books

Wow! City! by Robert Neubecker

Subway by Anastasia Suen

*City Animals by Simms Taback

*City Shapes by Diana Murray

City Street Beat by Nancy Viau

Good Morning City by Pat Kiernan

Books marked with * are the ones we used for this storytime. There are lots of great options for city themed books! I had a big group with a wide age range today so I chose one book with a bit more text, City Shapes, and one with very simple text and lots of interaction potential, City Animals. I wanted to include Subway as well, but we just didn't have time today. City Shapes is a fantastic book with nice rhyming text. There are great opportunities to ask the kids to point out different shapes and colors on each page. As a bonus, the child who leads readers through the city is an adorable little black girl, based off the illustrator's daughter, and there is lots of diversity in all the people on the pages. City Animals has large pages that fold out to slowly reveal a city dwelling animal after giving different clues. The kids had a lot of fun guessing what the animal was, some were much easier to guess than others. The fold out pages and big images were great for the larger group to see.

 For songs and rhymes click read more!