MUD

We had some good clean fun with messes and mud in storytime this week.

BOOKS: 

We read Harry the Dirty Dog by Gene Zion and The Pigeon Needs a Bath by Mo Willems.

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Pigeon went over a little better than Harry, though my preschool kids did really enjoy Harry and predicting what would happen to him.

FLANNELBOARD:

A few years ago I made a Dini Dinosaur flannelboard that I reused for this storytime!

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Once I explained how it would work (basically by showing an example and asking questions right away), the kids loved it.  They liked telling him what piece of clothing he had to take off to get clean and scolding him: "Silly Dini Dinosaur! Don't you know?!"

SONG:

We used our shakers and pretended to clean up as we listened to "Oh My Goodness, Look at This Mess!" by Sweet Honey in the Rock.  LOVE this song.

CRAFT:

For our craft, we glued pigs to a piece of construction paper and gave them a mud bath!  I prepared the mud using coffee grounds, water, and a little bit of brown tempera paint.  It was fast, quick, relatively clean, and satisfied everyone.

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Pigs

Farm animals are a thing with kids around here.  We have plastic farm animal toys that get played with, slobbered on, and sometimes stolen.  Kids always know what sounds farm animals make and what they look like (which is kind of funny – I’m willing to bet that only a minority of them have actually seen farm animals in the flesh).  But yeah, I hadn’t done a farm-yard storytime yet and we have LOTS of books about pigs.

BOOKS:

Pigs to the Rescue! by John Himmelman and The Three Ninja Pigs by Corey Rosen Schwartz

In all honesty, I chose this theme thinking that I would have volunteer read these for next week while I’m a PLA, but once I read the two books I had picked, I had to swap hats out for pigs.  The volunteers get hat books.  Pigs to the Rescue! is hilarious.  The pigs try to fill in for Farmer Greenstalk and the rest of the Greenstalk family when things go awry.  Pigs to the Rescue! is a book that really needs to have the pictures “read” as well as the text.  The second group of storytime kids I had (more preschoolers) got into it, seeing what those crazy pigs would do next.  Three Ninja Pigs is THE BEST!  I did the voices, I read the limericks, I got more into it every time I read it.  This book works for me and my storytime style.  Also any author who writes a book made entirely of limericks gets two thumbs up from me.

SONG/FLANNELBOARD:

I am learning more and more new children’s songs each day.  This one – Five Clean and Dirty Pigs – is sung to the tune of Five Green and Speckled Frogs, which I didn’t know (Thanks Jbrary!).  I made felt pieces to go with it, based on Storytime Katie’s pieces.  Here’s the song:

Five Clean and Dirty Pigs

Five pigs so squeaky clean
Cleanest you’ve ever seen
Wanted to go outside and play. Oink! Oink!
One landed in the mud
Landed with a mighty thud!
Now there are four clean squeaky pigs

(Repeat while counting down)

And my flannels:

The only problem I had with these is that you could see the brown spots faintly through the pink felt so the clean pigs weren’t as clean as they could have been.

CRAFT:

This craft was cute and simple and I tied it into body parts.  They had to glue the nose on the pig first and his nostrils so he could breathe and smell and then the eyes so he could see, ears and feet were last.  When our toddlers got down and were talking around I had them show me the parts of the pig and their parts – their eyes, ears and nose.