Flannel Friday: Fat Cat

And I'm back. One new FancyPhone and picture taking capabilities later, I've got some Flannel Friday catching up to do. Let's start with a prop story that I made for my Denmark story time, way back when my library system was celebrating the European Union (oh, there's an Ireland one coming up, don't you worry.)

The story of the Fat Cat is a pretty standard Scandinavian tale. Basically, one animal eats a lot of stuff you wouldn't expect it to be able to. This prop goes along with Margaret McDonald's version, and it goes something like this...

Once there was a cat who was always hungry. This cat was made out of poster board with a clear stomach (one side of a gallon ziplock bag and a paper bag taped behind it). His mouth was also a hole, which can be hard to see with the black background.

On his back he had 3 dots of velcro that helped him stay on the board and keep the path from the mouth to the bag open.

This cat went around eating everything he could get his greedy little paws on. In this case it was photocopies of the books illustrations, blown up and glued onto heavy cardboard.

And when the cat ate the pieces, they showed up down in his stomach!

This one was a huge hit with the toddlers who just wanted to stuff every single piece down the cat's mouth at once. To that end I would recommend reenforcing the mouth area and if at all possible laminating the smaller pieces. I normally like to leave flannels out for kids to play with after story time but I quickly had to take this one away for fear of it getting utterly destroyed.

And there you have it. Oh it feels good to be back. Flannel Friday is being hosted this week by Cate at Storytiming. If you're interested in learning more about Flannel Friday or browsing past editions, check out the official website!

Theme Thursday: Toys

Oh toys, we can never have enough, can we? Here's a story time dedicated to favorite playthings.

Song: Good Morning Dear Earth

Fingerplay: I Had a Little Turtle

Flannel: Alphabet Soup -TOYS

Book:The Marvelous Toy by Tom Paxton

 

Song: Open, Shut Them

Book: Where's My TRUCK? by Karen Beaumont

 

Song: Jumping and Counting from Jim Gill's Irrational Anthem and More Salutes to Nonsense by Jim Gill

Song: Baby 1,2,3 from Sing it! Say it! Stamp it! Sway it! Vol. 3 by Peter and Ellen Allard

Song: Clean Up Song

Flannel: A Hunting We Will Go (framed as putting toys in their proper place)

Book: Tell Me About Your Day Today by Mem Fox

 

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

Make and Take Craft: Paper Bag Puppets

Supplies:

-Paper bags

-pom poms

-crayons

-scissors

-glue sticks

-construction paper

-pipe cleaners

-bottle glue

Process: There's virtually zero prep, just have all the stuff out and ready to go after story time. Working with caregivers the kids can create faces for the paper bags. Stick your hand inside the bag and use your hand to manipulate the flap as a mouth.

Time: 5 minutes for prep, which was basically gathering all the materials into one place, and 30 minutes for the craft.

Bloggirversary

So while I was on my mini-hiatus, a very big thing happened. The blog turned one year old. That's right, I've been doing this for an entire year (and one month). I was going to do something special to celebrate what seems like a pretty big milestone to me. But of course, without regular posts during some of October and all of November, I forgot. 

But never fear! I know from experience that some of the best moms out there forget their own childrens' birthdays (to her credit she remembered like 4 minutes later and called to apologize (I love you Momma)), so we'll just do what you gotta do in that situation- suck it up and have a 13 month celebration featuring a look back at the last year.

First of all, I wanted to say thank you to everyone out there who reads this blog, and have stuck with it through the fallow period. When I started I thought it would be me, my family and a few friends that I could guilt into reading it. I'm pretty sure that's still my core audience but getting feedback from others in the library and kids' crafty business has been beyond valuable and a thrill.

As of today there have been 17,790 total page views for In the Children's Room (that's almost 20,000 y'all!)

The most viewed post is Little Mouse, Little Mouse.

The most viewed post that isn't related to Flannel Friday is the 3-Dimensional Sign tutorial.

The most popular search that brings people to the blog is some variation of learning how to make Hunger Games parachutes.

26 people have searched for my blog by name!

And Google and Pinterest are responsible for over 77% of traffic referred to the blog.

Speaking of Pinterest...

The most pinned most was the Flannel Friday (surprise, surprise) Monster Lunch.

The most liked pin was the super cute Paper Plate Masks we made with our farm themed story time.

So that's the year looking back. Thanks to everyone who made it as much fun as it was. Looking forward, I'm going to spend the next few weeks re-learning what keeping a regular blogging schedule feels like, as well as back-date some posts to fill in some of the two month gap. I'm hoping to find the time, patience and learn the wherewithall for a redesign at some point in the next year. 

Thanksgiving Wreaths

I realize that a Thanksgiving craft posted two days before Thanksgiving isn't very helpful but, since we just made these yesterday, I didn't have much choice. Save it for next year or adapt it into a wintery wreath with season greetings or gift wish lists.

We start by cutting out hands in fall-like colors. 

Lots and lots of hands. 

We'll also need some of these rings, that's where we'll glue our hands when we're ready to make the wreath.

Decorate some of the hands with things that you are thankful for this holiday season (Below is the beginning of the wreath that I made to take home. I may have been sucking up to my best roommates ever. Just a little bit.)

We also decorated some to look like turkeys. Everyone loves a good hand turkey.

Finally, arrange the decorated hands and some un-decorated hands as filler around the construction paper ring and glue.

Voila! Festive wreaths for all your holiday decorating needs.

You can also go very sleek and modern and deconstructed like some of our more sophisticated kids. No turkey hands for them.

However you make your wreaths, be warned that there's a fair amount of clean up to do after. If I could add one thing to my thankful wreath it would be for awesome kids who clean up without me asking them to.

Costume Swap

My big idea for Halloween this year was to host a costume swap- bring in old costumes and get a new-to-you one in return. The Halloween party was planned to coincide with the opening of the Costume Swap Shop, where families who had brought in costumes could come and browse the selection before turning in the ticket that they got when they dropped off their costume for a different one. I had visions of spreadsheets detailing exactly who had brought in what(I love a good spreadsheet), fancy tickets and hot apple cider. A festive shopping experience for everyone.

But a costume swap is only as good as how many costumes you can get and we only got 9. We were able to make a few matches- a mom who brought in her son's old Iron Man get-up was able to take a pumpkin costume for her infant daughter, a few fairies traded in for princesses, and someone got the cutest turtle costume I've ever seen. Seriously, I want that in my size. The leftover costumes were offered back to their original owners and then either given to library kids on actual Halloween who didn't have costumes or donated to a local non-profit pre-school that's always looking to improve its costume chest.

Along the way I figured out a few things to try if we do it again next year. I think my biggest problem is that I only advertised in the neighborhood. Next time I'll go city wide to cast a bigger net. 

The main reason I'm dedicating a blog post to the sad, sad costume swap is I don't think we talk about things that fail often enough. I like results, so when things don't work the first time I'm 1) surprised and 2) discouraged. I expect things to work like I imagine the very first time and that's just not how it goes.

Has anyone out there tried a costume swap? What did you do to increase the number of costume that came in?

Theme Thursday: How Does Your Garden Grow

The local public schools celebrated "Growing Healthy Schools" week last week, where kids learned about school gardens, chefs came in and did demonstrations and local foods were highlighted in the cafeterias. In conjunction with the schools, and in a preview of Summer Reading 2013, our story time this week was all about things that grow.

Song: Good Morning Dear Earth

Finger Play: I Had a Little Turtle

Flannel: Alphabet Soup- GROW

Finger Play: 10 Little Fingers

Book: Growing Vegetable Soup by Lois Elhert

Flannel: The Pizza Sally Made (Changed to The Pizza We Made at Story Time)

Song: Shake My Sillies Out

Song: I'm a Little Teapot

Song: Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes

Book: Pumpkin Pumpkin by Jeanne Titherington

Song: Itsy Bitsy Spider

Song: Turn Around

Make and Take Craft: Painting with Vegetables.

We touched on this idea briefly back when we made apple prints, but today there was a whole host of vegetables for us to make art with.

Supplies:

-vegetables, various, washed and cut

(I used okra, broccoli, apple, onion, celery, and bell pepper)

-paint

-paper

Process: Before story time, I rinsed and cut my vegetables and laid them out on the craft table with paint. After story time we handed out pieces of paper and went crazy with the different types of prints you can get from different vegetables. Okra makes stars, broccoli looks like fireworks and the leafy tops of celery kind of work like a regular paint brush)

 

Time: Prep took 20 minutes and the craft took 30-40. A lot of the kids abandoned the vegetable after a while and went straight to finger painting, while the caregivers and I filled sheets with awesome vegetable paintings.

Halloween Party

We had our Halloween party early this year. My big idea was to host a costume swap, which we'll touch on in a separate post, and I wanted the party to coincide with the start of that. Also, I wanted it early enough that I could justifiably not give out copious amounts of candy.

We had four activity stations at the party. They were all pretty much self-run, or easily run by the parents who came with their kids.

The exception to that was the face painting station. I painted faces for 3 hours straight and only quit when everyone and their mother had a colorful design on their cheeks. I brought out every face painting book we had and let the kids look through them or took requests- turns out I can draw a pretty good Angry Bird. Who knew? 

For face paint I followed a DIY recipe- basically corn starch, food coloring, face cream and water. It worked well enough for the simple designs but I had trouble doing the intricate ones that most kids wanted. I think the next thing I ask our Friends group for will be a nice set of face paints. It was certainly a popular enough station to warrant doing it more.

We were supposed to have a Bean Bag Toss. I made a Jack-O-Lantern, taped it to the side of our big box from the castle building day with the appropriate cut-outs and then realized I didn't have ANYTHING I could use as bean bags. But never fear, we had legos!

This game proved particularly popular with the toddlers who would just run up to the mouth and shove a lego in, giggling madly the entire time.

Using a bunch of the smaller boxes left over from our castle building days, we set up a painting station. The IDEA was to paint the faces of haunted house creatures and then we'd stack them together into the basic shape of a house and decorate the top of a book shelf with it. In actuality, I accidentally left the paint bottles on the table after measuring out nice little bits, and it turned into a who can get the most paint on a box competition. I love messy, process oriented art and so do the kids.

And finally we had a Pin the Face on the Jack-O-Lantern.

I honestly expected the party to be me and a few of the after school crowd that I could tempt away from the computers. But, hoo boy, did people turn out for this one. We had over 40 kids, plus their parents, cycling through the stations. We ended the night with an over-sized and slightly scary pajama story time.

 

 The aftermath.