Baa Baa Black Sheep

I love bringing nursery rhymes into story time and one of my favorite is Baa Baa Black Sheep.  There is so much you can do with it, from rhyming to talking about colors.  This morning for story time, I made envelope puppets out of different colored sheep.  If you have never made an envelope puppet before, seal the envelope and cut off the end 3 inches or so.  You can make two puppets out of each envelope.  For these, I used different colored die cut sheep and used double-sided tape to stick them to the envelope.  While I could collect them back and reuse them, I like to send them home with the kids to retell the rhymes.  They are cheap and easy to make so I don't mind losing them.

After I pass out the sheep, we say the rhyme using the different colors.  For example:

Baa Baa Black Sheep, have you any wool?

Baa Baa Blue Sheep, have you any wool?

Baa Baa Red Sheep, have you any wool?

In this case, the kids who had each color held up their puppets as we told their verse.

 

Flannel Friday Round-Up

It's a wrap!  Check out the great ideas from the week below.

Kate from Felt Board Magic (and one of our Southern Hemisphere participants!) shows off Apple Colour Sorting.  While it would be a great addition to a fall story time, I am totally stealing this one for our felt board that we have out all the time.

Kate also shows off Five Grey Elephants Balancing Step By Step on a Piece of String.  I had never heard this song before, but it is big in Australian play schools.

I show off my easy envelope puppets here at Libraryland and how I use them in story time.  This week's version was Baa Baa Black Sheep.

Jane at Piper Loves the Library gets into the holiday spirit with her post about the Nutcracker program that they held with the Connecticut Concert Ballet.  It is precious and looks like a lot of fun! 

Jen at Adventures in Storytime shares her snowflakes and the songs/rhymes that she uses them with.  Since winter starts in a week, this is a great one to add to your lineup! 

Amy at One Little Librarian shares her Do You Want to Feed the Reindeer? prop.  Not only is she injecting some play into her program, but the food items have letters and numbers on them.

Shawn at Read, Rhyme and Sing has a Christmas version of Little Mouse using jingle bells and sleighs.

Wendy at Flannel Board Fun shares a bunch of variations of Little Mouse using various rhyming words. My wheels are already spinning on this one!

Mary will be hosting next week's round-up at Miss Mary Liberry. 

 If you want to know more about Flannel Friday:

• Check out the official Flannel Friday blog that includes schedules and other important information.
• Search for images and links on our Pinterest page.
• Discuss story time stuff (and other ys stuff) on the Flannel Friday Facebook page.
• Follow #flannelstorytime on Twitter.

It's been awhile!

It's been awhile since I have posted and some of you have expressed interest in what I have been doing.  Here's some of the neat stuff that I have been doing this fall (posts to follow someday):

• Our school outreach program got pushed into high gear by participating in the ConnectED Library Challenge.  Our goal is to give every student in our service area a library card. Our library district hosts 47 schools in five districts, plus residents in a sixth.  We brought our first (and largest) school district on in September to great success and are slowly rolling this out to the other districts.  Our challenge right now is keeping up with demand and figuring out what is sustainable. 

•  Along with that, I have done 4 presentations on our school outreach program since the beginning of October.  While one was for our library board and another for our coop, our school outreach librarian (plus some others for 1) have also presented at our state library association annual conference and our state media specialist preconference.  I now have a presenting break until PLA-if you're there on Thursday afternoon and are interested in school outreach, stop by our presentation.

• Last week I attended Family Place training in New York.  It was a great experience and I highly recommend it to everyone.  My brain is currently spinning with future changes to go along with that certification. 

So that's where I am at.  This is on top of my manager duties, reference desk, programming, and other miscellaneous tasks that make up my day.  I will be honest-I still haven't put away our Trick or Treat supplies as many days lately I drop a pile on my desk and grab another to go off again.  I will be back and will have some great stuff for you all!