Interactive Bulletin Boards: Shapes

There's a great Bulletin Board in the Children's Section of the library I work in.  It's right over a couch and the children have been fiddling with it for years.  So a few months ago, I thought - why fight them?  We're on our 3rd Interactive Bulletin Board and each one has been extremely popular.

I'm not the greatest photographer - so this is the best I was able to do.  I know you can't read the title, it's, "Shape Your Imagination."  Believe me, it looks way cooler in person

This is quite possibly the easiest bulletin board I've ever done.  I cut out shapes that I printed using Word.  (Because I don't trust myself to be able to draw a straight lined square or round circle.)  And then went to town on the felt.  What you see in the picture isn't even half of them.  One little girl was having a marvelous time this afternoon organizing them into piles of shapes.  Hey, whatever floats your boat.  And, hey, that's good for early literacy, too!

To make the board, I went to my store of felt and found the biggest piece I had.  I was so excited - it was huge!!  And then...I put it up against my board.  It was short.  :(  So, I did the only thing I could think of - I made up the difference with another green.  My OCD is going crazy because of the difference - but the thing I've been hearing from the parents is they like the "offset different color."  So, let's go with that...yeah...um...that was intentional.

Since I put it up on Tuesday (a mere 2 days ago), the shapes have gone all over the room, have been in many different designs and one 2 year old yelled "Shapes!" so loud that her mother was quite embarrassed. Me?  I was thrilled that she was so happy to find shapes.

I'm looking forward to watching what the children do with this.

Trains and Trucks

This was an afternoon storytime with about 20 attendees.

Since afternoon storytimes are so much smaller, I tend to be a little more loose - choosing what I'm going to do about an hour before we do it.  Today, since I decided to wear my new train earrings - I thought that trains and trucks would be fun.

Hello!
We sang our hello song and then jumped into the books.  I always use the same hello song, it's my own version of the Dragon Tales Hello Song found here: http://youtu.be/CpTLdI3Jpn4


Train  by Elisha Cooper
         This one was a bit long for the group, even though we started with it.  They held in there until the end, though.  I spiced it up by asking them questions.  We even pretended to be a server in the dining car, bumping up and down and holding our pretend plates.  That was a hit.



Train Trip  by Deanna Caswell
    This one was definitely a better book for the group.  It has rhyming, and not many words on the page.


Giant Pop-out Vehicles (no author but published by Chronicle Books in 2007)
   Honestly, I've never had a bad time in storytime doing Giant Pop-Out anything.  I love that it's a guessing game in a book - and they loved it too.  The kids were all yelling out the answers, there was so much participation!

Stand up and stretch!
   Usually, I do Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes at stretch time.  Today, though I thought it would be fun if we pretended to be trains and trucks.  I loved when one of the kids yelled out that we should be Motorcycles and we all revved our motors.

Fingerplay
This fingerplay was a little too young for most of the audience - but they did it anyway.

"I'm a Windshield Wiper"
I'm a windshield wiper (bend arm at elbow and hold fingers up)
This is how I go (swing arm back and forth)
Back and forth, back and forth (continue motion)
in the rain and snow.

We then talked about how windshield wipers on our cars go alternately, so we did that, too.



A Truck Goes Rattley-Bumpa by Jonathan London
    Even though my version was falling apart (note to self: try not to do storytimes with books that are falling apart), this went really well.  We talked about big and small and then we got off on a tangent about "what if a truck had eighteen thousand wheels?" "what if it had ten hundred?"  Sadly, I didn't think to get us to infinity, but that was pretty good.


Down By the Station  by Jennifer Riggs Vetter
   Always a hit - especially if the parents can read the words to sing along with you as well (or have checked out the book so often that they now have it memorized.)

Goodbye!
I don't remember where I found my closing song.

To the tune of "She'll Be Comin' 'Round the Mountain"
Now it's time to say goodbye to all our friends (goodbye!)
Now it's time to say goodbye to all our friends (goodbye!)
Now it's time to say goodbye
Wave a hand and wink an eye
Now it's time to say goodbye to all our friends (goodbye!)

I offered them a hand out with connect the dots  trains on one side, trucks on the other.