Flannel Friday-Babies

This week's Flannel Friday is all about babies.  I don't know about you, but our toddlers here are fascinated by babies.  Sometimes I joke that I don't need to read stories if I prop a baby in the front of the room and all of the kids would be happy.  Since babies are an object of fascination for the kids, this makes an ideal story time theme.

This week we read the following books about babies:
Ten Little Babies by Karen Katz
I Kissed the Baby by Mary Murphy

Then we did the following rhymes/games:

Five little babies were playing one day.

One saw a ball, and so she crawled away.

 

Four little babies were playing one day.

One saw a rattle, and she crawled away.

 

Three little babies were playing one day.

One saw a kitty cat, and she crawled away.

 

Two little babies were playing one day.

One saw a teddy bear, and she crawled away.

 

One litte baby was playing by herself.

She saw her mommy, and she crawled away.

 

No more babies are playing today.

 



To make your own version of this rhyme, you will need five pictures of babies.  I used baby pictures of 5 of my nieces and laminated them.  The kids really liked the real pictures of babies.  I used magnet tape on the back and made ours into a magnetboard.

The second flannelboard is a game called Poor LIttle Baby.  While I suspect that it originally came from The Mailbox, I can't guarantee it.  It requires a little set up.  You will need five round circles to be baby faces.  On 4 of them, draw a frown.  On the fifth, draw a smile.  Then you will need 5 colored squares (green, yellow, blue, pink, and red) that will cover the baby faces.  I actually used fun foam and added a strip of velcro to the top to hold it on.  (Disclaimer-I actually lost one of the baby faces and haven't made another yet.  You will see this without the pink one.)

Step 1

 

Step 2

 

The rhyme goes:

Poor little baby, are you still sad?
Let's lift the green blanket and see if you're glad!

(Pull off the green square and ask the kids if the baby looks happy.)

 

Poor little baby, are you still sad?

Let's lift the yellow blanket and see if you're glad!

(Pull off the yellow square and ask the kids if the baby looks happy.)

 

 

Continue the rhyme until you get to the last square.  When you pull the last square off, have the kids notice that this baby is happy.

 

Katie is hosting this week's Flannel Friday Round-Up at Storytime Katie.  Check out all of the great submissions in the round-up or on the Flannel Friday Pinterest page.