Theme Thursday: Colors

One of my New Year's Resolutions was to do more themed story times and parents have started asking for more make and take crafts. It's a lot of extra work to come up with and prep a craft that works for birth-4 for every story time, but I'm pretty sure I can manage one a week.

And that's how Thursdays have turned into Theme Thursday here at the library.

I made a list of everything I thought I could possibly plan a story time around and am going to work my way through it over the next 21 weeks-- that's how many themes I came up with, although I'll probably try to space out "bears" and "teddy bears."

After a Valentine's Day Extravaganza two weeks ago we continued our new routine last Thursday with a story time about colors.
Color Story Time

Song: Good Morning Dear Earth

Flannel: Alphabet Soup "COLOR"
Book: Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? by Bill Martin Jr.

Flannel: Mary Wore Her Read Dress
Rhyme: Big, Big, Big
Song: Color Dance Song
Song: Heads, Shoulder, Knees and Toes
Flannel: Rainbow Poem
Song: Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star

Book: Color Dance by Ann Jonas

Song: Turn Around by Hap Palmer from Getting to Know Myself

Make and Take Craft

The dancer's in Color Dance use gauzy sheets to demonstrate color mixing and making new colors out of primary colors. For our make and take craft we made our own Color Dances.

Supplies:
-Color Dance Frames (prepped before hand, white computer or construction paper with a colorful construction paper "frame")
-Colorful tissue paper cut into different shapes
-Glue Sticks
-Crayons

Process:
After story time I let the kids go and anyone who wanted joined us at a table where I spread out tissue paper shapes all over the table and handed each child their own color dance frame and enough glue sticks to share. Some kids drew with crayons and then glued down paper on top, others just got really into layering the tissue paper.

Time:
Prep took about a 20 minutes before story time began and the craft ranged from 5 to 15 minutes depending on when the kids got bored.