PJ Storytime: Superheroes!

The “Every Hero Has a Story” SRP is well underway. June we focused on Community Heroes, but July is our Superhero Training Academy (more info coming soon) and that calls for a Superhero Storytime. I was more theme focused this week than usual and tried some new songs.

Continue reading

PJ Storytime: Father’s Day

To be honest, in years past, Mother’s and Father’s Day have completely slipped my mind. But since we are parents this year they are more in the forefront. I’ve always been ok with skipping these celebrations (I don’t do holiday storytimes either) since there’s so many ways to make a family. My compromise this year has been to do some non-traditional tales and add a fully inclusive Family picture book.

  

Continue reading

PJ Storytime: Everyone, Everywhere

As far as themes go, this one is a little less concrete. Inspired by “Everyone Sleeps, but Not Fred” I thought about other books with an “everyone” feel.

Say Hello by Rachel Isadora

I’ve used this book in storytime before and always have a great response. We have families that speak other languages at home and the children love introducing me to even more words, as well as learning other ways to say “Hello!” Everyone says hello, but they don’t all say it the same way.

The Bus is For Us! by Michael Rosen

I like trying out new books and I’ve heard this one mentioned here and there. It fit with my theme, the bus is for ALL of us. As the vehicles got more imaginative, it was a great book for open ended questions and my literacy tip:

Asking children open ended questions about the story as you read allows children to develop their own ideas and discover the words to express them.

A short read, which left time for a 4 book storytime.

Is Everyone Ready for Fun? by Jan Thomas

If I’m ever going to do back-to-back books in my storytime, it’s because of books like Is Everyone Ready for Fun? We were up on our feet jumping and dancing along, so it works more like an action rhyme than a story. Always a hit. Thank you, Jan Thomas!

Everybody Sleeps (But Not Fred!) by Josh Schneider

Lyrical, silly rhymes about a creative selection of creatures sleeping and dreaming, all end with the refrain But Not Fred! I thought this would be perfect for my PJ crew, but they just didn’t seem too into it. I did have a smaller, quieter group, so I’m willing to give the book another chance, but this round I skipped ahead to the end.

And just to make sure none of my kids went to bed that night, we finished with the parachute!

We Sang:

Hello and How Are You? from Wiggleworms Love You by The Old Town School of Folk Music

I’m too intimidated by my poor French to attempt this one without the CD, but it’s great for adding a bilingual element to your storytime. My only complaint is that the English and Spanish are a direct translation, but something else is being sung in French.

Elevator Song

Wheels on the Bus

Parachute Play:

We sang the Elevator Song again but this time with the parachute. I always try to start with a song that will keep the kids from immediately scampering underneath the chute so we can practice a little executive control. Then I invite the kids to run underneath while the grown-ups sang Come Under My Umbrella. We ended with a big balloon that got everyone underneath and sang our good-bye song.

PJ Storytime: Eggs

Spring is in the air! And with spring comes some of my favorite storytime themes, maybe because it is one of my favorite seasons. There’s something magical about the transformation from the barren brown of winter to the eruption of new life if the spring. To me, nothing represents this better than the magic of an egg. And egg shakers are super fun, so any excuse to use them in storytime is a bonus.

Continue reading

PJ Storytime: Crocodile vs. Alligator

This idea has been percolating in my brain, and the end result is quite different than I thought it would be. I’m surprised by how many crocodile books I really love. I will have to fit some of them into other themes. I decided to add a non-fiction book to this storytime, which is not something I’ve done very often. I chose a book that compared alligators and crocodiles, since kids tend to use them interchangeably (I’m guilty of this myself sometimes).

 

Continue reading

PJ Storytime: Good Day/ Bad Day

The book Bad Bye, Good Bye has been on my shelf for a little while, waiting to be a storytime. I love the illustrations, but I didn’t want to do “Moving” as a theme, so a paired it with a few other goo/bad, happy/sad books that were a lot of fun. All of these books had very sparse text, with much of the story being told by the illustrations, so it was a great storytime to model dialogic reading for the caregivers at my storytime.

  

Continue reading

PJ Storytime: Opposites

It was fun with opposites at storytime last night! I had an interesting crowd, I think the cold and snow kept a lot of families home, so at 7 pm I was walking the floor gathering up any kids I could find. I started with four kiddos and it grew as storytime progressed. There was a bit of improvising since the four children had never been to my storytime before, they weren’t getting into my traditional opening song. I switched it up and asked if anyone knew “Open Shut Them” to which one little boy exclaimed, “I know that from school!” I had 2 kindergartners and their older siblings, who were a little skeptical, so I started out with a book on my display table “Black? White! Day? Night!” in hopes of engaging the older two. I decided to save “Big Bug” for another day with a younger crowd.

Continue reading
https://storytimebandit.wordpress.com/category/talking-2/
storytimebandit.wordpress.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2020-29
70758
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:IRKDHQIMANXATOXZY2SCDNJGQAPUSPIV
<urn:uuid:19add76d-19ef-4fd7-a4fb-0ae2adeebf18>
2020-07-02T21:52:06Z
192.0.78.12
text/html
sha1:HO73IJOEEN4VNVCX4AGOQOI76J4ZQOSI
<urn:uuid:8ebf0dc3-164a-48fe-8e0a-3cc02acfb2ae>
https://storytimebandit.wordpress.com/category/talking-2/
response
<urn:uuid:d2a49127-6d53-4035-9a51-ad6c1a4eb66a>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2020-29
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for July 2020
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-67-67-83.ec2.internal
software: Apache Nutch 1.17 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 1.2-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: http://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/