Flannel Friday-Butterflies

One of my favorite easy and cheap props are stick puppets.  You can make them in bulk quickly and the kids love them.  This week's butterfly puppet was made using our butterfly die cut, fun foam, tacky glue, and craft sticks.

My first use for these was in my sensory story times.  I had read Trish's ALSC blog post on how she uses "Butterflies Flit" by The Wiggles.  When I tried it with my groups, it worked great.  This past week I also used them with my baby story time kids (12-24 months) and they also had a good time.

This week's Flannel Friday round-up is being hosted here at Libraryland.  If you want to know more about Flannel Friday:

• Check out the official Flannel Friday blog that includes schedules and other important information.
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Chocolate Handprint Reindeer

One of our biggest activities of the year is making chocolate handprint reindeer ornaments in December. 

 

Supplies Needed:

• White cardstock circles for handprints.  We have a circle cutter that makes 6 inch circles that works great.
• With a group this size, we use 3 large boxes of chocate pudding.  Make it according to the directions on the box (so you will need a gallon of milk too).
• Disposable foil trays to hold the chocolate pudding
• 3 rolls of ribbon for hanging
• Sticker eyes
• Red circle stickers (We use Avery #5466)
• 2 rolls of paper towels
• 1 package of baby wipes
• A couple of brown crayons
• Access to a laminator

Registration:
With 2 librarians, we run through 80-90 kids comfortably in three hours. I would encourage registration. We stagger the registration times by age every thirty minutes. For example, 9 & 9:30 are 0-24 months, 10 & 10:30 are 2-3 year olds, and 11 & 11:30 are 3-6 year olds. By doing it this way, you can keep the group smaller with the babies, who will need more help (we run 10 in a time slot) and increase the attendance for the older kids (15 3 year olds). Since we do registration, we have an Avery address label already printed up with each child's name and the date that we put on the back of each circle.

Also, if you advertise the program, make sure you use "chocolate pudding" in the program description.  Some children with food allergies will not be able to do the project (or you can pull out brown crayons for them to make their "hand").

How the Program Works:
The kids come in and make their handprints using chocolate pudding.  We let each child make 1 print.  (Some of the moms will ask to redo them because they don't always look like hands, but once you add eyes and a nose, it will look great.)  We lay all of the circles out to dry.  Some will be done in an hour, but many will take 12-24 hours.

On the staff side, we add sticker eyes and a nose when the pudding is dry.  The circles are run through laminator, a hole is punched in the top, and a ribbon is strung through to create an ornament.  When we advertise the event, we also advertise a pick-up day that is 4 days later so we can get our part done.

Why we do this:
First, this is a lot of fun.  As kids make their handprints, you can also suggest to parents that chocolate pudding is a great way to fingerpaint at home (trust me, they love new ideas).  Secondly, as kids pull out their ornament year after year, they will remember that they made it at the library.  It is a great plug for us!

Miscellaneous Stuff:

• You will want a couple of brown crayons for kids with food allergies or those who don't want to get dirty.  We were really surprised last year when kids did not want to put their hands in chocolate pudding (about 1/10 of the kids).
• When trying to get the kids to put their hand in chocolate pudding, we told them to make a "high-five" in the pudding and then on the circle.  They understood this much better than their mom telling them to spread out their fingers.
• The gloppier the chocolate pudding on the handprint, the longer it will take to dry.  If you are in a hurry, you can either blot the glops with paper towel or use a plastic spoon to scrape some off before it starts to dry.
• If you use a hot laminator and there are glops, the pudding can melt and spread.

For some additional fun, here are some of the handprints that my nieces have made over the years!  After awhile, you do run out of room on your Christmas tree.

Flannel Friday-Toot Toot!

A couple of years ago I was planning a sensory story time and ran across this rhyme on an ALSC blog post.  I loved it so much that I "borrowed" it and used clip art and pictures to make the artwork for the flannelized version.  What I really like about this rhyme is the pairing of foods and the critical thinking skills that kids use when coming up with replies.  After all, what can you make with a smooshed peanut?  How about an apple?  There are many directions that you can take this from just saying the original rhyme to adding more verses with the kids.  Trust me, they will come up with MANY ideas.

The rhyme goes:

 

A peanut sat on the railroad track; its heart was all a-flutter

The five-fifteen came rushing by-Toot! Toot! Peanut butter!

 

A lemon sat on the railroad track; its heart was all a-flutter

The five-fifteen came rushing by-Toot! Toot! Lemonade!

 

 

 



A pea sat on the railroad track; its heart was all a-flutter

The five-fifteen came rushing by-Toot! Toot! Split pea soup!

 

 

 

An apple sat on the railroad track; its heart was all a-flutter

The five-fifteen came rushing by-Toot! Toot! Applesauce!

 

 

 

A strawberry sat on the railroad track; its heart was all a-flutter

The five-fifteen came rushing by-Toot! Toot! Strawberry jam!

 

If you are saying the rhyme, it makes it more fun if you pause after saying "Toot! Toot"  This gives the kids a chance to guess (or think about guessing).

 

Loons and Quines is hosting this week's round-up.  Stop on by!

Flannel Friday-The Shirt Song

I was reminded of a great song for story time this week while sitting in a session at the Michigan Library Association Annual Conference.  This song works really well with smaller groups or sensory story times (I got the idea from a special needs story time webinar).

To start off, you will need a whole bunch of flannel shirts in different colors.  This is a great excuse to raid your scrap bins!  Ask the kids to come up and pick out their color shirt from the stack and add it to the flannelboard.  As they add it, sing the song below.

To the tune of Mary Wore a Red Shirt



 

Lisa wore a purple shirt,

Purple shirt, purple shirt.

Lisa wore a purple shirt

All day long.

 

The next verse would be whatever color shirt the next child picks out.  Since you are singing a song with names, it helps if the kids either wear nametags or if you introduce yourselves as they come in the room.  To give credit where credit is due, this song came to me via Barabara Klipper from The Ferguson Library.

 

This week's Flannel Friday round-up is hosted by Future Librarian Superhero.  Have a great week!

 

 



Sensory Story Times

Background
Last year I decided that I needed to try something new so my plan was to run a series of sensory programs in spring 2011.  Working in a public library, I often see people with special needs using the building, but they don't have programming that is geared towards their needs.

Before You Start Planning
Think of this like school-before you start, do your homework.  I started by looking around the web to see what other libraries are doing and came across this excellent blog post on the ALSC blog.  It is a five-part post called Programming for Children with Special Needs by Tricia Bohanon Twarogowski.  Around the same time, ALSC offered a webinar by Barbara Klipper at The Ferguson Library called Sensory Storytime: Preschool Programming that Makes Sense for Kids with Autism. 

Next, look around your area to see if there are any libraries doing any special needs programming.  We noticed that there was no special needs programming in our county, which prompted this program.  I remembered seeing a colleague present on autism at a conference that I attended so I started asking her questions as they came up.

The Program
Let me start by saying that you will need a plan with this group and you will want to practice.  This is not a programming group to go into blindly.  This group needs to see what is going to happen in which order, whether you hang the plan at the front of the room or pass out a schedule to each child (or both).

Since I had never did this before, I borrowed the plan from Tricia's blog for her color story time.  We had 3 kids attend with their parents so it was a nice audience for my first sensory story time.

Tips & Tricks
We used a program called Boardmaker to set up our schedule.  This is a great program, but is expensive.  I was able to download a trial of the program to see if it would fit my needs, then found the program through our Intermediate School District.  I am still pushing for my library to pick up the program as it would be useful in any children's story time, but that is a work in progress.

While the kids are coloring at the end of the program, talk with the parents to see if the program fit their needs.  Is there anything that they could suggest?  They live with special needs children every day and maybe they have a tip or suggestion of something to make the program better.

What I Would Do Next Time
The biggest thing that I would correct next time is the marketing of the program.  I made an assumption (wrong, of course) that if we advertised the program in our newsletter and in the library, that people would see it.  Why would they look for it if they aren't used to having special needs programming at the library?  If you want to run a sensory story time, you have to go to the people to advertise.  In our county, I would need to go through our Intermediate School District's special eductaion programs. 

You may also get a lot of inquiries from your regular customers to see if they can attend.  I probably could have had a room of 60 2 and 3 year olds if I wanted.  They thought that the idea of a sensory story time sounded cool, but they totally missed that this was not for their child.  It is a good idea to know ahead of time who you are going to let into the program-is it just for special needs children, for special needs children and their families, or can anyone attend?