Spring Is Coming!

Story Hour began in the usual manner, and we were happy to have our new member Victor join us this morning. The children are now getting to know each other a bit and are beginning to share toys during playtime. We are still working on left and right in our Wiggle Song.

At the weather board we finally got to take down Winter and put up Spring! One of my little girls quickly informed me that it is still cold! We discussed how seasons change slowly, but that we can watch for some changes. So we sat on our carpet and I shared pictures of baby animals that may soon be born and we discussed their names. Our morning laugh came when I asked for the name of a baby cow and received a chorus of "moos". We then learned a new word... calf! They also had trouble recognizing the calf as it was a reddish color. I guess we still have a lot of those black and white Holsteins in Wisconsin! The other animal baby that was unfamiliar was a colt. We will do more with baby animals in late April.

Instead of one book, we read parts of books this morning:

Our first one was First Comes Spring by Anne Rockwell. 

We only read the first 6 pages, but pages 5-6 had a great picture of activities that take place in spring and I had the children tell me about things they noticed were happening. They couldn't figure out what Mamma Bear was doing to the windows. Oh, how I wish I didn't know that Spring meant washing windows! But they did remember the rainbow in the sky from last week's discussion because someone thought it had a treasure with it!

Spring Thaw by Steven Schnur

Then we discussed some of the pictures from a beautifully illustrated book titled Spring Thaw by Steven Schnur. There were melting puddles, a raccoon coming out of his winter sleep, baby lambs cuddled up together while sleeping and a wonderful picture of a warm, golden sunset.

Next we went to our snowman board and discussed how the snowmen were now going to melt and what would be left if they did that. This was a rather difficult topic for the children, but once we got started they could pick out things that would be on the ground [a couple still kept thinking the snowballs would be there, probably because there is still snow on the ground around us].

Our project for the day was to create our own "melted snowman". I provided the children with a "puddle" and as they told me [sometimes with hints] what might be left we glued the pieces to the puddle. I am so pleased to notice how much better the children are getting at using the glue sticks. Most of them now do very well on their own.

Lauren and Sadie were happy to show you how their melted snowmen turned out.

Spring Snowman a story adapted by Jill Barnes and written and illustrated by Fusako Ishinabe

The morning ended with my telling them the basic story of Spring Snowman a story adapted by Jill Barnes and written and illustrated by Fusako Ishinabe. It is about a cute little snowman and his six animal friends who plan to tell him all about Spring, but can't find him. They finally discover that a patch of flowers in the shape of a snowman has grown where he used to stand.

If you come to Story Hour next week, and I hope you will join us, please bring anything with you that is pig related [pictures, a toy pig, a pig book, etc.]

Children's Librarian,

Mitzi Manthey