Letter E

Every week I eagerly flex my alphabetic expertise for exciting storytime! This week: letter E.  Next week we take an alphabetic break to celebrate Valentine’s Day and Chinese New Year after that.

BOOKS:

We read Elmer by David McKee and The Ear Book by Al Perkins.

I really like Elmer. I hadn’t read it before (I know *GASP*), but it’s one I think I’ll have to add to my repetoire. It’s about difference, but it isn’t preachy or didactic.  It’s just refreshing.  The Ear Book was a good companion to this too.  It’s short and has lots of fun mouth sounds.  I did bring in my little rainstick to make the rain in the middle of the story.

FINGERPLAY:

I borrowed “Up the Hill” for our letter E fingerplay.

(Make one arm into a hill)
Here comes the turtle up the hill, creepy, creepy, creepy (crawl fingers up the arm)
Here comes the rabbit up the hill, boing, boing, boing (bounce fingers up the arm)
Here comes the snake up the hill, slither, slither, slither (slide fingers up the arm)
Here comes the elephant up the hill, thud, thud, thud (clap hand up the arm)
Here comes the elephant down the hill, boom, boom, boom CRASH (clap hand down the arm and clap hands for the crash)

We did this two times, switching arms for the second time.  I recently read an article about crossing the midline and how important it is for young children (brief summary: it is important for children to cross the imaginary middle line of their body with their arms and legs.  It helps the two hemispheres of the brain to communicate with each other and develop dominant hand and use both sides of our body simultaneously) and this is a good quick activity to help with this.  Children have to cross their body to make the animal climb up the hill and then completing the activity using opposite arms forces more midline crossing.

SONG:

It took me forever to find a song that would work for this.  I chose “Los Elefantes,” a Spanish folksong featured on Wiggleworms Love You, a great compilation by the Old Town School of Folk Music.  I really like this collection because it has a lot of what I think of as traditional children’s music.

This went okay.  I took out the shakers and we shook and shook and shook.  It went better the other day because I listened to it a million times to learn the words in English and Spanish.

CRAFT:

For our craft we made elephant ears!  And an elephant trunk.  Here I am sporting my awesome craft.

Yeah, the trunk was a little too wide for most of the kids.  They couldn’t quite see around it, but they really really liked playing with it and pretending to be elephants.  A total success in my book just because of that.