Flannelboard: Cats

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

I used this flannelboard for my cat storytime. I loved Stack the Cats so much that I based the cats for my flannelboard off of the illustrations for the book! I'd love to make even more cats in this style at some point so I can do the whole book as a felt story.

Songs, Rhymes, Games, and Fingerplays

“Five Little Cats”

Five little cats playing near the door, one ran inside and that left 4.

Four little cats underneath a tree, one heard a dog bark and that left 3.

Three little cats wondering what to do, one saw a little bird and that left 2.

Two little cats sitting in the sun, one ran to catch his tail and that left 1.

One little cat looking for some fun, he saw a butterfly and then there were none!

Source: Narrating Tales of Preschool Styorytime

Flannelboard: Robots

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

I used this flannelboard for my robot storytime. I really love how this one turned out and if I have time in the future I might make more robots in a similar style for a robot counting flannelboard as well!

Songs, Rhymes, Games, and Fingerplays

“Where is Robot?”

Robot, robot, we know you’re here!

Are you behind the (color) gear?

Source: I made this one up myself!

Another "Mouse in the House" variation, which are always popular with my group!

Storytime: Cats

Books

Stack the Cats by Susie Ghahremani

Where is Tippy Toes? by Betsy Lewin

Cat Nap by Toni Yuly

Is There a Dog in This Book? by Viviane Schwarz

They All Saw a Cat by Brendan Wenzel

Quackers by Liz Wong

After this storytime, Stack the Cats became one of my new favorite books! It's a counting book, but it has so much more than just the standard one to ten. Other math concepts, like division, are included in the way the cats are stacked! A cat theme is very easy to find books for. In addition to Stack the Cats, I really enjoyed They All Saw a Cat for discussing how different animals and people have different perspectives on the same thing. We may see a cute and cuddly pet where a mouse may see a fierce and frightening predator!

For extension activities click read more.

Ukulele: Picked a Berry Chord Chart

I made another chord chart for a song I used my berry storytime (write-up coming soon™) so, as promised, I am sharing it with all of you! This is a sweet little song about picking berries. You can add additional verses with different berries in them. Strawberry, blueberry, and raspberry are all great options!

The song is to the tune of "Oh My Darling Clementine" which is in 3/4 time as noted in the bottom corner of the sheet. Keep that in mind when you choose a strum pattern. when I play it, I use D-DUDU.

Feel free to download the pdf from my Google Drive and use it for your own story times!

New Storytime Write-ups

Pretty soon I will be posting a huge backlog of storytime write-ups. Because these are older storytime plans, I probably won't go into much detail about with how it went or about which books and songs on the list that I ended up using for each storytime. I just want to get them all written up and posted ASAP so I can get back on track with my blog updates. I might end up doing less extensive write-ups in the future too and just post a list of books, songs, and rhymes for each theme so I can get the posts up more quickly. Hopefully this still works well for anyone who follows me. I figured it's better to get shorter posts up than let a backlog of drafts languish while I work on write-ups!

Ukulele: Random Song Activity

Activity

I finally mustered up the courage to start playing ukulele during storytime and it was magical! I am by no means a great ukulele player, but children's songs are quite simple to play and the kids and caregivers enjoy it even if you aren't great. When I brought out my uke for the first time the kids were enthralled. I think we could have probably done this activity for the entire storytime if I had wanted to. They were that into it! If you have a ukulele and haven't used it for storytime yet, do it! If you don't have a ukulele I definitely recommend getting one. I have a ukulele beginner's guide that I wrote after buying my first ukulele to help get you started. The ukulele I bought for myself is not the one I use for storytimes though. I was fortunate enough to have some grant money left over to buy a ukulele to keep at the library. I bought a durable polycarbonate ukulele from Outdoor Ukulele for my in-house uke. I'll do a review of their ukuleles later!

I came up with a really fun way to get the kids involved in the ukulele activity beyond just singing. Eventually I will be making a song cube, but for now I put icons representing each song in a bowl and have the kids pull one out to decide what we should play. Almost all of the songs I chose to use are pretty ubiquitous children's songs. Because they were such familiar songs, the kids could easily tell what the song was just from the simple icon on the paper.

Songs

I chose six different songs to use for this activity, though I'll come up with more to use in the future to help keep things fresh! The songs I used are:

1. Pop! goes the Berry
2. You Are My Sunshine
3. I'm a Little Teapot
4. Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star
5. Itsy Bitsy Spider
6. Mary Had a Little Lamb

All of these songs can be played with just three chords: C, F, and G

Fingering charts from Coustii

In all of these songs you can replace the G chord with the G7 chord if you prefer it. I used to find G7 much easier to play than G. Some of these songs had G7 instead of G when I looked up the chords, but after practicing other songs, I find G easier to transition to, so I switched it for my preference. Use whichever you are more comfortable with! There will be songs where you can't switch G and G7 and still have it sound right, but I have yet to find a children's song where this is the case!

For chord charts for six different songs, click read more!

Storytime: Robots

Books

~*1 Robot Lost his Head by Marc Rosenthal

*Bitty Bot by Tad McCanna

~*Hello, Robots by Bob Staake

~Beep! Beep! Go to Sleep! by Todd Tarpley

Junkyard by Mike Austin

Sometimes I forget You’re a Robot by Sam Brown

I'm finally finishing this write up though I did the storytime quite a while ago. Books marked with ~ were used for the toddler storytime and ones marked with a * were used for the preschool storytime. There are tons of great books about robots out there so this was a really fun storytime to do! I was inspired to do the theme when I saw Bitty Bot on on the return shelf waiting to be re-shelved in the children's area. It looked so cute and I thought there must be some other fantastic robot books out there. Hello, Robots has some great silly mishaps, so it's a lot of fun to read and have the kids tell you what the robots are doing wrong.

Click read more for extension activities