Toddler Tales! I've been on a super traditional toddler story time kick lately and this one, for ages 2-4 at our branch library, was tons of fun! It was a 3-week-session with a different theme each week. The first week we did animals, the second week we did food, and the third week we did bugs. Today I'm blogging about week 2 and my all-time favorite storytime theme-- Food!
First we started with the book Little Green Peas by Keith Baker, which is great for this age group because it gets them to name colors and it's also super silly! Peas flying kites? Peas sailing boats? Peas living in royal castles? So silly!
Then we moved on to the (loosely food related) Pete the Cat: I Love My White Shoes by James Dean and Eric Litwin. I use this book, basically, as often as I can get away with. It was also on Sadie's Top 5, Ages 18-24 Months list. This one is a favorite for SO MANY kids. If you're not yet familiar, this is the story of cool cat Pete who loves his white shoes so much that he sings about them. The book has singing, color recognition, and lots of silliness! Plus, there's a super-cool, positive message at the end. It makes for a big hit with a pretty large age group. Pluuuuuuus it ties really nicely into this great, simple food song called Picked A Strawberry, thanks to Jbrary!:
When I sing Picked A Strawberry with Pete the Cat: I Love My White Shoes, I usually have us pick strawberries first and blueberries second. This follows along with the order of the berries in the book. Then I have the kids name other things we can pick. For this particular storytime, we wound up picking apples, peaches, oranges, carrots, and bananas. One kid also suggested chocolate! If only!!
Last, we read Hi, Pizza Man by Virginia Walter. This is a great one because a lot of kids don't know it and a lot of parents/caregivers don't either. It's about waiting for pizza and speculating who will bring it. Will it be a pizza man? A pizza woman? A pizza dog? A pizza cat? A pizza snake? Once again, this book has great repetition and lots of silliness. And, instead of having the kids name colors, this time they get to name animal sounds. A little variety!
Then we sang one last song, P-I-Z-Z-A, another perfect tie in, and also taken from Jbrary:
I had all the letters, P I Z Z A, hung up so I could pull them down for a little visual as we sang. See the photo above.
Then it became craft time! We all marched down the hall to the small, sunny craft room to make paper plate personal pizzas (that's a lot of P-words!).
This was a fun craft that required a lot of prep on my part! Each pizza has crayon sauce (I only put out red and orange crayons), collaged paper toppings (This was the majority of my prep work. I cut piles of yellow cheese, red pepperoni, and green peppers.), and tissue paper crust (I cut brown tissue paper squares, thinking the kids would ball them up before they glued, up but some just glued them on as is-- that's ok too!). Here are a few delicious looking finished products:
What worked least: While the pizza craft worked, I had some anxiety about it going in. I worried that it would be too fast. Like, I was afraid that it would only take the kids 5 minutes to make. But actually, it was totally fine! In fact, a craft that took any longer probably wouldn't have held the interest of the kids in this age range anyway. So, aside from the prep work and somewhat obnoxious clean up, all was well!
What worked best: It's a tie between Pete The Cat and Hi, Pizza Man! While Pete The Cat is kind of a guaranteed success, Hi, Pizza Man! is also a fun title that most people don't know, and that gets the kids involved and participating. Overall, basically, this was a storytime worth blogging about.
