Totally Tots- Spring Time

I was hoping for a little bit of sunshine today for my Spring story time, lucky for us the lack of it didn't stop us from having fun.  Every week I have been reviewing good library behavior and it seems to be working well. The kids are listening better and staying seated for the majority of the stories.  Today's theme revolved around Spring and everything fun you can do when the weather is warmer. We also talked about flowers, planting a garden,  and did some dancing and singing.  We started with our usual opening song "The More We Get Together" and "Let's Start Story Time" . Our first book was


Hurray for Spring by Patricia Hubbell. I love the bright, colorful and full of details illustrations.  The rhyming text creates a whimsical tone which engaged the kids with what was coming next.  We followed with a couple of short finger play/rhymes "April Trickery" and "My Garden" and one round of "Open Shut Them".  My next book was



Up, Down, And Around by Katherine Ayres.  I was lucky to have a big book  with great big illustrations full of funny bugs and silly animals.  The kids loved pointing out the different animals and plants.  We followed with another finger play "Flowers Tall & Small" and a song "Flowers" using felt flowers.  For some reason the tune wasn't working for me but the kids didn't mind and were ready to shout out the next color flower.  Since the kids were getting restless I decided to play "Shake Your Sillies Out" and let them shake around.  For my last book I went with a flannel story of "Planting a Rainbow" by Lois Elehrt.


I knew reading the book was going to be to much for this group but they enjoyed going through the process of getting the soil ready,  planting the bulbs,  pretending to be the sun and the rain, and watching the stems grow and the flowers bloom. Everyone enjoyed the story, except my felt pieces kept falling down. We finished with our usual closing song "We Wave Goodbye Like This".