Family Storytime: Arctic Animals

Our second week of storytime kicked off yesterday with an arctic animals theme. It was a little parallel to the snow theme, but worked out just fine and was just as much fun. 

After going over some of the different types of arctic animals that were on the covers of books being displayed and talking about their cold climate, we shook our sillies out to our bean bag song and jumped right into our first book.

 Blown Away by Rob Biddulph was a great book to start out with for this theme. It's a cute story about Penguin Blue and his arctic friends who go on a kite adventure and realize that they are better suited for the arctic and not in the sky or jungle. The group really seemed to enjoy this one and I liked how a lot of different types of arctic animals were represented in the book.

Next, I put up a flannel polar bear on the felt board and asked the group what type of arctic animal it was and what color was it. All the kids love coming up to the flannel board and interacting with it, so I handed out different colored felt balls/circles and told them polar bear wanted to play ball. I called out different colors and each in the group had to bring up their ball color when it was called. We went over all the colors and counted how many balls polar bear had. We got our colors and counting in!

The second book I read was The Lonesome Polar Bear by Jane Cabrera. This is one of my favorites that usually makes every group say "aww" at the end. It is such an adorable story! Polar Bear needs a friend and tries to play with arctic friends who are made of snow, but they keep melting. Needless to say, there's a happy ending!

Since the group seemed more interested in stories than the flannels this time around (yay!), I just did a quick rhyming flannel about five fat walruses using some subtraction. 

We moved on to the last story of the evening, Penguin and Pinecone: A Friendship Story by Salina Yoon. This story is about a friendship between a cute penguin and a cold pinecone. One child mentioned how they liked the drawings in the book.

 As always, the group was eager to get to their craft. I told them we will be making a penguin for our arctic animal theme and then I asked them what letter does penguin start with...P! We made penguins out of the letter P. I was worried they might have some trouble lining up the die-cut P to the white cutout for Penguin's belly, but everyone did great and was rewarded with polar bear stickers!

Since we did a penguin craft, I thought I would post a picture of the beginning of the year penguin display I duplicated from Pinterest. It was fun making this one, but took some effort.