The Beach (AKA trying to think warm during winter)

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It's cold in Minnesota in the winter.  (If you live here or Up North, I know you're thinking DUH!  If you're not from around here, you have no idea what I mean by cold.)  After a straight week of below zero temperatures (with -20+ windchills), I decided that we couldn't keep doing storytimes about cold things (read penguins, snow, winter, etc.), so I scheduled one about BEACHES.  (No, not the tear-inducing movie, those places by lakes or oceans)

BOOKS:

We read To the Beach by Linda Ashman and Surf's Up! by Kwame Alexander.

Both of this worked...SWIMMINGLY! (I slay myself!)  To the Beach was fun because we could talk about prediction - after the second or third time going back home, I asked if the kids thought the family would EVER get to the beach.  (Most said no, btw.)  We also talked about rhyming words and phonemic awareness.  I wasn't sure if Surf's Up would work.  I haven't had a good track record with books that are only dialogue.  This worked well though.  I think because there were only two voices, the text was in two different colors (which I could've pointed out as a text awareness piece, but didn't think of until now), and the characters were pretty distinct.  I had a good Surfer Dude voice going and then just my normal voice.  It's a great book. I like it way more than I thought I would.

ACTION SONG:

I borrowed "The Sea" from Storytime Katie's Beach storytime.  I like that this can be a gross motor skill activity.  We did a lot of moving and grooving to this song.  With waves, we raised our arms up high in the air and then bent and brought them down to the ground.  For sharks, we used our whole arms to make shark jaws and clapped our hands together to make the snaps.  For fish, we put our hands together and swished them back and forth.  And for boats, we just pulled on our horn to toot it. 

The Sea
(To the tune of "The Wheels on the Bus")

The waves on the sea go up and down
Up and down, up and down
The waves on the sea go up and down
All day long!

2nd verse: The shark in the sea goes snap, snap snap!

3rd verse: The fish in the sea go swish, swish, swish

4th verse: The boats on the sea go toot, toot, toot.

SONG:

I love the jazzy upbeat storytime songs.  This would've went well with shakers, but instead we practiced jumping, swimming forward and backward, and diving!  Wonderful fun.

CRAFT:

I've seen a million and a half of these make-shapes-and-animals-out-of-handprints crafts but I've never actually done one in storytime.  Partly because paint is always iffy with parents (and don't get me started on washable paint - IT NEVER LOOKS LIKE REGULAR PAINT JUST REDDISH GOO) and because painting on oneself is never usually a good idea.  In lieu of a better idea, I decided to try one out and it worked pretty spectacularly.  We made these crabs.

This is mine, as you can tell, because it's ginormous like my huge man hands.