Theme Thursday: Cars! Cars! Cars!

Song: Good Morning Dear Earth
Flannel: Little Mouse, Little Mouse
Flannel: Alphabet Soup- CAR
Song: We're Driving Very Fast (to the tune of She'll Be Coming Round the Mountain)

We're driving very fast, very fast
We're driving very fast, very fast
We're driving very fast
We're driving very fast
We're driving very fast, very fast

Additional Verses:
We're driving very slow
We're driving in the rain
We're waving out the window

Book: My Carby Byron Barton



Poem: Windshield Wiper

I am a windshield wiper
This is how I go
Back and forth
Back and forth
In the rain and in the snow

Song: The Wheels on the Bus
Song: Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes
Song: Grand Old Duke of York
Book: Cars Galoreby Peter Stein



Flannel: Lots of Cars by Nancy Stewart

Cars are based on Bob Staake's illustrations from Cars Galore

I didn't care for the Nancy Stewart song/rhyme in practice, it didn't work particularly well with my style or my kids. We did talk about the biggest and smallest car and all the different colors that cars can be. When I reuses this flannel set here's the rhyme I'll be using.

One little car who just happened to be blue
Met another car, now there are two

Two little cars racing down the street
They saw a third car, oh what a treat!

Three Little cars headed to the store
Found a car in the parking lot and now there are four

Four little cars returned home at last
And there was the fifth one, he'd run out of gas!
Song: Turn Around from Hap Palmer's Getting to Know Myself

Make and Take Craft:

Car Puppets!

Supplies:
-Car body puppets (prepped beforehand)
-Black wheels (black construction paper circles)
-Leftover summer reading stickers
-Crayons
-Glue Sticks

Process:
Before we sang the Turn Around song, I introduced the craft and showed my example. After story time was over the kids gathered at a table where I laid out the glue sticks, stickers, crayons and wheels. I then gave each kid a puppet and let them decorate. Caretakers helped the smaller ones with getting the wheels on right, but the stickers and the crayons were all them.

Time:
Prep took about 40 minutes with cutting out the car shape and gluing each one to a Popsicle stick. Again, total craft time depended on how into decorating the car each kid was. It ranged from 3 to 12 minutes and some took home extra wheels or even puppets (in the case of the kid who tore his first one) to work on later.