Spring Preschool Storytime

Spring starts on Sunday!  Huzzah!  I don't tend to be a person who does a lot of seasonally appropriate storytimes (I guess I'm just not inspired by them, which is honestly one of the biggest reason I do themes in the first place -- I don't think they are necessary, they just help ME organize my thoughts).  But for some reason I was feeling the coming rain and green and flowers, and spring it was!

Opening Song: Open Them Shut Them (click on the link for a video of how I do it).  I swiped an extra verse from Jbrary's Extra Verse video (see below)

Opening Activity: Before we started reading books, I pull out felt letters (spelling SPRING, today) out of my magical Dr. Seuss pencil box.  We also learned the ASL for "spring", which was actually tricky for the preschoolers!  It requires some hand-eye coordination, which is great!

Opening Song: Today we went back to ye olde standby, and sang These Are My Glasses before we read the first book.

Book One: Huck Runs Amuck by Sean Taylor, illustrated by Peter Reynolds

I was actually a little nervous about doing this book for preschoolers 'cause it's kinda like, but they were totally engaged the entire time!  I had them read the phrase "OH, NO!" with me whenever it appeared, and there are a lot opportunities for story prediction. 

Flannel Board/Song: The Green Grass Grows All Around

I have a cute flannel board set for this song (one of the few that I actually made -- you may not have noticed, but I am SO not a flannel board person.  It requires an amount of artistic skill that I don't really possess, so I tend to go the "printing things out and laminating and glueing felt on the back" route.  But this one I could handle :)  We did a shorter version of this version song, with the movements!  We didn't do it QUITE as fast!  This is a great song for building short-term memory skills.

Book Two: And Then It's Spring by Julie Fogliano, illustrated by Erin E. Stead


I LOVE this book, but I was again not quite sure how it'd go over in storytime.  My storytime book style is definitely a little sillier and less gentle than this book is, but it's so beautiful I wanted to try it.  We had a little bit of a conversation before it started about what colors you see when it's spring, and we spent the book trying to decide if it was spring yet by looking at the colors.  Again, it worked surprisingly well!  





Action Rhyme: I'm Going on a Picnic

Got this cute rhyme from KCLS and updated it a little!  We did it a bunch of times with different categories of food, for example:

We're going on a picnic,
We gotta pack a lunch!
What SANDWICH should we bring to MUNCH MUNCH MUNCH?

And then we took some time talking about our favorite sandwiches.  We did the same thing with fruit, vegetables, and dessert.

Action Rhyme: Aaand after this, we had to do Bananas Unite , because we totally packed bananas in our lunch.  We ended after this because our first book was so long that three seemed excessive!

Closing Rhyme: Tickle the Clouds

Tickle the clouds

Tickle your toes

Turn around

Tickle your nose!

Reach for the ground

Reach up high!

Story time is over,

Wave goodbye!

I got this rhyme from this awesome Jbrary video: Jbrary Goodbye Songs

--Sara