Colors Everywhere

Oh my goodness, it has been a long, long time since I posted a storytime overview on my blog.
Time to get back to work!


Today's theme was all about COLORS ... and naturally when deciding what to wear today I was not thinking and essentially dressed in all black (note to self : when prepping for a color-themed storytime send yourself a note to wear an outfit with lots of different colors).

To start storytime I introduced the classic song "I Can Sing a Rainbow" (I learned this in Girl Scouts, copious YouTube links of this song exist,). I enhanced the song with flannel pieces which I placed in an arc as I sang the song to form a rainbow -- this works much better than laying out strips of curved flannel ... which never line up and display crooked.

Our letter of the day today was the complicated letter "C" ... I explained that sometimes the "C" makes an "sss" sound, like the word circle, and sometimes the "C" makes a "kkk" sound, like cat, cookie and color. Ah English, always tricky ...

The books I shared varied in length and complexity. I always front-load my storytime with the longer stories and end with fairly simple books that use lots of dialogic reading (for those restless toddlers and young preschoolers who are pretty much done with storytime 15-20 minutes in).

I shared the story "Lunch!" by Denise Fleming with a grab bag of colored food and a hungry mouse puppet. Very fun ... except when storytime was over I realized I'd left the sad blue blueberry inside the bag. Oh well, no blue food for my mouse today.

Finally I re-told the story of Emma Dodd's dog from "Dog's Colorful Day" with a fantastic flannel

created by one of my co-workers. This led to my activity sheet for the day based on the early literacy tip "Talk Together" which was designed not only to reinforce color recognition but to encourage caregivers to extend the story with their child by talking about the different objects that went into making dog so colorful by the end of the story.