Family Storytime: Winter

Winter storytime sessions officially started today. I had some new families who were a pleasure to have added to the group. We started off storytime with a winter theme.

The kids absolutely love the bean bag song I use, so we shook our bean bag until it was time for our first winter story.

When previewing books to pick, I knew I had to read A Very Special Snowflake by Don Hoffman. It's on the longer side for my group, but I read it first and the kids enjoyed the story so much, they listened wonderfully throughout the whole text. A Very Special Snowflake is about a dog named Snowflake who goes missing. Out of all the books I read, this one had a cute storyline to go with winter. The other books are mostly explaining the season of winter so this was the most fun. I find that the shorter books I need to use for storytime sometimes lack an interesting story and is more instructional on the topic. This one did not disappoint. 

Since the kids had their best listening ears on, I took advantage of that and read our next book, When the Snow Falls by Linda Booth Sweeney. This was about all the things we experience during winter in poetic short sentences. 

To break up our reading, we did a matching mitten game on the flannel board. We went over all of the different colored mittens and I handed them each a color. I kept one of each of the colors to put on the flannelboard and they each had to match their colors as we labeled each color mitten. They love interacting with the flannelboard and one of my new attendees was understandably shy, but wanted to put up his flannel piece like everyone else so he bravely added his mitten to the board. 

Next, we read Into the Snow by Yuki Kaneko. What is snow like through a child's point-of-view? 

The group practiced their counting with Ten Warm Hats, a counting flannel board rhyme.

To get the group's wiggles out, we used bean bags and shook along to "I'm a Little Snowflake" on Laurie Berkner's Whaddaya Think of That children's cd. I could have came up with my own movements for this song, but shaking our bean bags along to the music worked just as well for this short song. 

I decided to read one more short story before we got to our craft. I See Winter by Charles Ghigna has adorable illustrations. This author creates perfect books for storytimes. 

For our craft, we made a winter scene using construction paper tree trunks, ripped paper for a ground covered in snow, and white paint with q-tips for snowflakes. We usually don't use paint in storytime and reserve that for other programs, but every once in a while it's a nice treat for the group. They had fun with the paint and it was good motor skills practice with the q-tips. The parents seemed to like this craft because a lot of them either wrote their child's name on their craft or had their kids practice writing their name.

It was a milder day here, but winter still came in this storytime!