Fun on the Farm!

We began with the usual sign-in and then going upstairs and outside to check the weather. Even the children said it was time for us to "find the sun", as once again it was cloudy and rather cold. Someone even noticed that our breath made "little clouds in the air".

Today's lessons were focused on farm animals, and we sat down to listen to our first book: The Noisy, Noisy Farm by Stephanie Stansbie. The children loved being able to push the buttons that made the realistic animal sounds in the book: a cat, duck, sheep, cow, chicks and a rooster. It was also a chance for them to predict each sound, and the only one that gave them difficulty was the "Cock-a-doodle-doo" of the rooster.

Everyone gathered around to push the buttons when ALL the animals cried out for the rooster.

For our movement this morning we were to move like the animals in the book. I would name one of the animals and the children moved as they thought that animal would move. And move we did!

In the picture below the children are being the duck and flapping their wings.

Here they are being the sheep or the cow.

Then it was over to the craft table to make some roosters to take home. I had printed a rooster onto heavy card stock paper and using the rooster in our story as a guide the children selected colors and found the correct areas to add color to their roosters. Once the coloring was done we used our glue and added feathers to the wings and tails.

See how cute our roosters look!

After all that hard work it was time to listen to another story. This time it was a silly story about a herding dog who lived in the city and had to spend a lot of time napping and was tired of doing this, so he started rounding up the rug and the chairs. This bothered the parakeet who told him to go out and find a cow. The problem was, the dog did not know what a cow looked like, and so he assumed many different animals were cows and that got him into trouble each time. The book is Find a Cow NOW! by Janet Stevens and Susan Stevens Crummel and you need to get it from your local library to see how the story ends.

As a take-home project I had a cow printed on heavy card stock paper and suggested they put spots on it... perhaps with a Q-tip and black paint.

Next week is our last session until later in January or February. I hope you are able to come for a couple Christmas stories and some fun.

Thanks for reading our blog, Please leave us a comment.

Mitzi
Children's Librarian

"T" Is for Tiger

New faces came to Story Hour this morning, and that was a good thing as the regulars were unable to attend. They were all sadly missed and I hope to see some of them again next week.

The children weren't too sure about heading outside without putting on coats [to check the weather] but I assured them we wouldn't stay out long. As soon as we came back inside we determined that the symbol to put up was cloudy as we couldn't see the sun at all this morning.

Even though none of the children had been at our last session I reviewed the letter "M" and the word "MOO" that was on the board. I then wrote the letter "T" and Tess immediately recognized it as the beginning letter to her name. Good job, Tess!  I also told them that it was going to start the name of our animal for today... tiger.  

We then sat down to read the book, Who Is the Beast? by Keith Baker. It was one of our Story Hour BIG books, and the jungle illustrations were absolutely wonderful. At first the children thought the 'beast' was naughty and frightful, but as the story developed we learned, and so did the tiger, that he was just like many of the other beasts [creatures] of the jungle. The children had a lot of fun finding the animal eyes, ears, tails, etc., hidden in the jungle.

Everyone was so good during our reading of the story that it was then time to get up and do some wiggling around. As everyone was new I decided the best way to do that was to use the bubbles once again. It worked beautifully! The children could take turns blowing bubbles, but mostly they were happiest just trying to catch or pop them and there were lots of giggles.

Then it was off to the table to create our tiger faces. We made the tiger's black face stripes by putting down a drop of black paint and blowing it with a straw.  We then added ears, green eyes [to match the tiger's in the book] and fuzzy whiskers. They turned out so cute.

Our morning ended with a matching and counting game. We each had a sheet with rows of  wild animals on them. I had created a die with a different animal on each side. I also had a matching regular die. The children took turns rolling both dice and then finding the animal that was on top, figuring out the number on top of the second die, then marking off that many of the specific animal on their sheet. When a row was filled they received a prize... and everyone ended up with a prize.

Before we called it a morning we had some animal crackers to eat and we received a tiger picture with the letter "T" on it to take home and color.

Thank you, Niesha, for taking pictures on your phone this morning.

We hope to see everyone back next week when our theme is farm animals.
Please leave a comment if you are reading our blog.

Children's Librarian,
Mitzi