Last week I was at the NELA annual conference and missed storytime, so I was happy to be back to it this morning, and we had a full house even on a very rainy day!

I’ve had Mem Fox’s Where Is The Green Sheep? as an alternate for a few weeks now, and this morning I quickly made a few flannel sheep to go with it. I also found a big stuffed sheep in one of our storage closets, and that generated a lot of excitement right away, so even before we sang the hello song I let any kid who wanted to come up and pet the sheep.

After our welcome announcements (keep the door clear, feel free to come and go as needed), we sang our hello song with ASL. Then we sang the name song; there were about ten kids at the beginning of our storytime (plus a brand-new baby, sibling to one of the kids), and a few went out but more came in throughout.

• Hello Hello by Brendan Wenzel: I cannot overstate what a great first book this is. The text is so minimal, the pictures so bright and interesting, and so many opportunities for interactivity (e.g. waving arms like an octopus for “Hello bend”)
• Song cube: “Zoom Zoom Zoom, We’re Going to the Moon”
• The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle: I used the flannel board for this one, and had plenty of volunteers to remove the fruit as the caterpillar ate it. It was surprisingly orderly.
• Song cube: “ABCs”
• A Parade of Elephants by Kevin Henkes: Also such a great book for this age, with simple text but lots of opportunities for counting and movement; in the middle of the book we marched around in a circle (well, a circle-ish shape). Tie-in craft at the end!
• Song cube: “If You’re Happy and You Know It”
• Where is the Green Sheep? by Mem Fox, illustrated by Judy Horacek: I used the flannel board again, with four sheep I’d whipped up this morning before storytime started.
• One Little Blueberry by Tammi Salzano, illustrated by Kat Whelan: I hadn’t set out to do a counting-theme storytime, but lots of today’s books were counting books. Another simple book with a surprise at the end.
• Monkey and Me by Emily Gravett: This one has been a hit every time. I invite kids to stand up if they want to so they can do the animal imitations (waddle like a penguin, hop like a kangaroo), and when the girl and her monkey fall asleep at the end of the story, that quiets everyone back down again. Perfect.
• Goodbye song with ASL
• Cleaned up sitting mats
• Taped purple butcher paper to the floor and put out glue sticks and paper elephants (also made this morning – thank you, die-cut machine!). I just let them glue the elephants down wherever they wanted on the paper, but with an older group, we could have made patterns with the colors, or drawn a line and had the elephants “march” along a parade route.