Toddler Time - Green

Today was the fourth week of my color series, so our color was green. I had a parent tell me that I do a wonderful job and how much her toddler loves coming, so I think that's some good feeback. :) It's always super nice to hear that I'm doing something good.

Stories We Shared:

Today we read two stories about green. The first was Green by Laura Vaccaro Seeger (super fitting). This is perfect for Toddler Time. PERFECT. Each page has a color of green and a matching illustration. We didn't read every page, but the pages we did read fascinated the toddlers. Our second book was a big book version of Jump Frog Jump by Robert Kalan. This is another classic, and the big book format was awesome.

Flannels We Shared:
Since today was green I had to sing Five Green and Speckled Frogs. I just had to. And Five Green and Speckled Frogs is fantastic for flannels, so I made five flannel frogs to go along. (my photo is a little blurry, it doesn't do my frogs justice.)

Rhymes We Shared:
It's the middle of my color series, so we repeated the same rhymes from before. We shook our shakers to Shake Your Shaker from Jbrary, waved our scarves to De Colores by Raffi, and twinkled our scarves, fingers, and shakers to Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star.

Early Literacy Tips We Shared:

• Parents, you may have noticed that we're repeating a lot recently. This is because research shows that repetition helps young children form and maintain connections in their brain and nervous systems. 
• Color and shape are among the first concepts babies learn. Babies can begin to associate words with objects and people as early as 6 months. Parents who identify the color of objects and frequently repeat this concept will find that their toddlers will start to recognize color names quickly. (I try have my tips memorized, but for some reason even though I've been using these tips for a couple of weeks I lost this one halfway through and had to dig out my notes. It was pretty funny. I just wish my parents had been able to complete my tip for me, that would have been awesome!)

Toddler Time - Yellow

Today was week 3 in my color series! Today we focused on the color yellow. :) Appropriate since this has been a dreary rainy vacation week, and I needed a little yellow to brighten things up.

Stories We Shared:

Since today was all about yellow we read books about ducks and construction! Our first book was Job Site by Nathan Clement. Perfect for short attention spans, but with a good vocabulary. Next up was a book that we didn't exactly read, but went with our felt song- Five Little Ducks by Ivan Bates. And we wrapped everything up with Who Made This Cake? by Chihiro Nakagawa, which I really like, but I think went way over the heads of my toddlers. :)

Flannels We Shared:
Just like the previous two weeks we did our Little Bird flannel game. Color matching is a big hit with the kids in my group, so this is a fun game for them all. (Click the link above to check out the felt board.)
Then we sang Five Little Ducks, looked at the pictures in the book above, and used my simple felt board to count down as we sang. Five Little Ducks isn't my favorite song, but it's a classic.

Rhymes We Shared:
It's the middle of my color series, so we repeated the same rhymes from before. We shook our shakers to Shake Your Shaker from Jbrary, waved our scarves to De Colores by Raffi, and twinkled our scarves, fingers, and shakers to Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star.

Early Literacy Tips We Shared:

• Research shows that repetition helps young children form and maintain connections in their brain and nervous systems. 
• Color and shape are among the first concepts babies learn. Babies can begin to associate words with objects and people as early as 6 months. Parents who identify the color of objects and frequently repeat this concept will find that their toddlers will start to recognize color names quickly. 

Toddler Time - Orange!

This was week two of my color series! Last week we read about the color red, this week we're doing orange! Last week was the first of this color series. Hopefully it works well.

Stories We Shared:
Due to a couple of factors we only read one story today. Everyone had so much energy that I focused on more movement, and I had no one to cover the Children's Desk so I had to cut Toddler Time short today.
We read Orange, Pear, Apple, Bear by Emily Gravett today. It's a nice short book with fun illustrations. It worked perfectly for my distracted group today.

Flannels We Shared:
Again this week we did the Little Bird flannel from last week. We'll be repeating this one for the next few weeks. (To see my flannel for this one check out the link above.) Little Bird is a great color learning rhyme.
     Little Bird
     Little Bird you've flown so far,
     And now it's time to rest.
     Fly back and sleep in your
        RED nest!
     Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Purple

I also wanted a flannel STORY this week. I went looking for either a good flannel story of The Carrot Seed (not my favorite because the book is teeny) or a version of The Turnip. I ended up finding an awesome version from an old Flannel Friday post by Miss Mary Liberry talking about the story The Great Big Turnip from The Bilingual Book of Rhymes, Songs, Stories, and Fingerplays. It's  a shorter story with only 4 animals, so kept the attention of my toddlers. Little Bear discovers something orange (in the original purple) in the ground and wants to take it to Momma Bear. She gets help from Squirrel, Skunk, and Mouse and they bring it to Momma Bear who identifies the veggie and makes soup!

I'd like to send a HUGE shout out to the wonderful librarians at the Scarborough Public Library for scanning the story and emailing it to me the day before my program! They totally made my day.

Rhymes We Shared:
Since I'm focusing on a lot of repetition for this color series we again sung Shake Your Shaker by Jbrary. It's fun, it's easy to sing, and it's shakers! Win all around.
Shake Your Shaker
     Tune: London Bridge
     Shake your shaker in the air
     Shake it here, shake it there
     Shake your shaker in the air
     Shake your shaker

     Shake it up and shake it down
     Shake your shaker on the ground
     Shake it up and shake it down
     Shake your shaker

We also sung Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star and danced with our scarves to De Colores by Raffi again today. Both are always a hit.

Early Literacy Tips We Shared:
Again, since I'm doing repetition for this series my tips were repeated from last week.

• Research shows that repetition helps young children form and maintain connections in their brain and nervous systems. 
• Color and shape are among the first concepts babies learn. Babies can begin to associate words with objects and people as early as 6 months. Parents who identify the color of objects and frequently repeat this concept will find that their toddlers will start to recognize color names quickly. 

Toddler Time - Red

Today's Toddler Time kicks off something new I'm trying. I'm starting small "units" or as I'm calling them to the parents "series." Each series is going to tie together several weeks of programming. I'm starting with a Colors Series. For 6 weeks we'll focus on a specific color and then on the 7th week we'll do a rainbow Toddler Time tying all the previous weeks together. Other series ideas I have planned for the future are "Things That Go," "Animals," and possibly "Shapes." It's just something to keep me motivated and investigating new opportunities for Toddler Time.

Books We Shared:

Our first book is a very sweet and simple story. Red Sled by Patricia Thomas is a rhyming story about a young boy and his dad who take a
late night sled ride. This is perfect for short attention spans since each page has no more than 4 rhyming words on it.

Our second story is one of my absolute favorites. So much that I have the book memorized, lol. It isn't a new story by any means, but to me it's a classic story time book. The Little Mouse, The Red Ripe Strawberry, And the Big Hungry Bear by Audrey and Don Wood is adorable and has wonderful illustrations.

Flannels We Shared:
For the Colors Series we'll be repeating the same flannel every week. I want the kids to recognize the game/flannel and play with me every week. I'll probably add other flannels, but I want to have some aspects that are the same for all 7 weeks of the series. I found this flannel game over on Hushlander's blog. Little Bird is a relatively easy game for kids and the rhyme is an easy one to remember.

     Little Bird
     Little Bird you've flown so far,
     And now it's time to rest.
     Fly back and sleep in your
        RED nest!
     Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue,
     Purple

Action Rhymes We Shared:
We did three action activities today! Our first was a fun shaker song from Jbrary. We only sang the first two stanzas of the song since we have a young group that loses focus with long songs, but the two were plenty for us. They loved the song. And it's an easy one that I can remember! :)

    

 Shake Your Shaker

     Tune: London Bridge

     Shake your shaker in the air

     Shake it here, shake it there

     Shake your shaker in the air

     Shake your shaker

     Shake it up and shake it down

     Shake your shaker on the ground

     Shake it up and shake it down

     Shake your shaker

Our second movement activity was to dance with scarves to Raffi's De Coloroes. While the music played and the kids danced and I asked them to do specific actions with their scarves. We waved them up & down, side to side, high & low, over our heads & toes, in circles, behind us, and anything we could think of. They always love this type of activity so it was a big hit.
Finally we finished up with a rousing rendition of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star with our shakers, scarves, and twinkled with our hands.

Early Literacy Tips We Shared:

• Color and shape are among the first concepts babies learn. Babies can begin to associate words with objects and people as early as 6 months. Parents who identify the color of objects and frequently repeat this concept will find that their toddlers will start to recognize color names quickly. 
• Rhyming breaks down words into easy to understand syllables.
• We had some newcomers to Toddler Time today as well, so before we began we had a discussion of how children may not participate at first, but they will learn from their grownup and from watching their grownup participate. This is something I say at the beginning of every Toddler Time, but this dad was new so we had a nice dialog going. 

Toddler Time - Bunnies!

Wow! Two weeks in a row without having to cancel! I'm on a roll. I had a good sized crowd today, with lots of new faces, so the word about Toddler Time is spreading. Which is totally awesome. The program is still pretty much organized chaos, since Toddlers. But they have fun, the parents have fun, and I enjoy it, so that's all that matters.
This story time was all about Bunnies because it's spring. And I like bunnies. (Also I was told to do an Easter story time, but I don't think it really has a place in Story Time since it's a religious holiday. Bunnies was my compromise.) This was also slightly shorter as a story time since I'm still coughing and under the weather.
Onto the books!

Books We Shared:

The first book we shared was What Does Bunny See by Linda Sue
Park. While it isn't my favorite I do love the illustrations in this one. They're bright, colorful, and full of things too look at. The kids who knew their colors liked saying what colors Bunny saw too.

Our second book is an old favorite of mine. We read Little White Rabbit by Kevin Henkes. Kevin Henkes is a favorite of mine. His stories are so readable- even the longer ones like Wemberly Worried (though I have a soft spot for Wemberly Worried since my cat Winston is a Wemberly). In this one I just love the way Kevin Henkes draws. His rabbit is just so darn cute. And the giant two-page illustration spread of what Rabbit daydreams really got the attention of my kids today.

Flannels We Shared:
This wasn't strictly a flannel, since I just used paper images cut out with a magnet on them. Since I've been sick I've been slacking off on the actual flannels. I will turn it into a real flannel at some point though. This "flannel" is one I created myself based on a rhyme by Jean Warren. I added a few stanzas to her rhyme and made the bunnies a little silly.

     Four Little Bunnies

     By Jean Warren
     Four little bunnies went out to lunch.
     They found some carrots and took a bunch.
     They ate the carrots with a crunch, crunch, crunch!
   
     Four little bunnies went out to lunch.
     They found some lettuce and took a bunch.
     They ate the lettuce with a munch, munch, munch!
          Broccoli, apple, oranges, spaghetti, cookies

This rhyme was a hit. If nothing else than for the big pictures of food. Even the littlest ones got excited when they saw pictures of food they recognized.

Action Rhymes We Shared:

I found this rhyme on Verona Story Time, a storytime blog by the Verona Public Library. This was a HUGE hit and we ended up singing it four or five times. Which is a lot when it's repeated three times.

     Hop, Hop, Hop Along

     Hop, hop, hop along

     Or bounce on someone’s knee

     Higher and higher and higher and higher

     Bunny-hop with me!

          [Repeat 3 times]

This also makes a great lapsit song with parents holding their baby on their laps. Since I have toddlers we bounced. A lot.

For a second activity I handed out egg shakers and we danced to Raffi's Shake My Sillies Out. I also sang, which surprised some of the parents. :) What can I say? I love Raffi.

Early Literacy Tips We Shared:

This week I tried something different. I reused most of the same tips from last week. I wanted to see if any of the parents rememberd them. I didn't get any comments, but I did get more nods. I might try doing some more repetition. 

• Learning different animal names will help a child to build their vocabulary. The larger a child’s vocabulary the more words he will be able to recognize and understand in print and in speech.
• Activities like hopping in place will help your child build coordination and the large muscle groups in his or her legs.