My coworker lost her voice, so I took on her storytimes for her this week.  Since I didn’t have a lot of time to prep, I thought about what would be a quick storytime I could put together with what I had on hand and came up with this hide & seek theme.  Most of the stories that I used had lift-the-flaps that created that “seeking” element.

MOVEMENT: Welcome Song*

MOVEMENT: “Baby’s Little Self” from Here I Am by Caspar Babypants

BOUNCE: Ride a Little Pony*

BOOK:

Peek-a-Baby by Karen Katz

MOVEMENT: “Clap, Tap and Bend” from It’s Toddler Time by Carol Hammett and Elaine Bueffel

FLANNELBOARD:
Little Mouse, Little Mouse 
 
Pattern & Rhyme from Felt Board Fingerplays by Liz & Dick Wilmes

This is a fun game to play with storytime.  You start off with different colored houses on the board, the say the following rhyme before uncovering who is under the house.

Little mouse, little mouse
Are you in the (insert color here) house?

When I first started doing this rhyme, I only hid the mouse in one of the houses.  Then I realized it would be a whole lot more fun to uncover other animals.  I just take some friends from my other flannelboard stories to add in there.  The ones picture above are from some of my ArtFelt sets.

BOUNCE: “Smooth Road to London Town” from A Smooth Road to London Town: Songs from the Parent-Child Mother Goose Program by Kathy Reid-Naiman

BOOK:

City Animals by Simms Taback

TICKLE: Here are Baby’s Fingers*

NURSERY RHYME:
Little Miss Muffet

Flannelboard from Little Folk Visuals

Little Miss Muffet
Sat on a tuffet,
Eating her curds and whey.
Along came a spider,
Who sat down beside her,
And frightened Miss Muffet away!

MOVEMENT: “Itsy Bitsy Spider” from Children’s Favorite Songs Volume 3 from Walt Disney

MOVEMENT: “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” from Songs for Wiggleworms by the Old Town School of Folk Music

MOVEMENT: Storytime’s Over*

ADDITIONAL MATERIAL IDEAS:

Peek-a-Moo by Marie Torres Cimarusti
Where’s Spot? by Eric Hill

HOW IT WENT:
It was nice to just to one storytime without doing the whole series, because it allowed me to try out a couple of new things and not have to worry about changing the storytime routine if it didn’t work well.  For this storytime, I wanted to see if “Babies Little Self” would work as an activity for the parents to do together with their children.  I think it is such a sweet song, and it did seem to work fairly well.  I don’t know if I would use it every time, but it was a nice change of pace. I also chose to use that since we were doing a lot of “peek-a-boo” during the stories themselves, so I didn’t want that as my intro movement as well.

ATTENDANCE: 40 people

* For these songs, please see my page Storytime Movements & Music