Hola! I hope your week was as good as ours at the Union Township Branch!

This week we continued our series on ‘Concepts’, talking about Counting. There isn’t much that kids enjoy more than shouting out the numbers once they learn them and we had an extra rowdy story time because of it. We also talked about our Ready to Read literacy skill, Phonological Awareness, a little more in depth than usual, so you get to learn a little more than usual about it too.

Basically speaking, Phonological Awareness is the ability to hear and distinguish the smaller sounds in words. Being able to hear the beginning and ending sounds that make up words will help children sound out words when they begin to read. Once a child has this ‘phonemic awareness’, they become aware that sounds are like building blocks that can be used to build all the different words and most children have any easier time learning to read.

One of the best way so to help you child grown their Phonological Awareness is to read stories with lots of rhyming words. And lucky for us, it seems that most counting books feature lots of great rhymes that are easy for kids to spot (when they already know how their numbers sound, it’s easier to pick out words that sound the same). This week we read:

• 1, 2, 3, to the Zoo by Eric Carle
• Fish, Swish! Splash, Dash! Counting Round and Round by Suse McDonald
• Five Little Duck illustrated by Ivan Bates
• Hippos go Berserk by Sandra Boynton
• Let’s Count Goats by Mem Fox
• One Pup’s Up by Marsha Wilson Chall

I also pulled some harder number books for our older kids (since it was Spring Break in some of our schools we had some siblings visiting StoryTime). Two of my favorites that are sadly too long/hard for regular StoryTime are The Rabbit Problem by Emily Gravett and 365 Penguins by Jean-Luc Fromental.

Ms. Garria made this week’s flannel board to go with the song Pretty Ladybug. Poor Ladybug starts out with no spots and no numbers, and the kids help us add her spots in one by one, and add the numbers as they go:

For our craft this week we practiced our painting skills, with a little twist! We used masking tape to block of parts of our paper, painted with our water colors and then removed the paint and counted how many white lines we ended up with!

We hope we see you next week at StoryTime!

Don’t tell anyone, but I’ve fallen very behind in sharing what’s happening at StoryTime with you! This post is about a session we had way back in February; it was the first of our session on ‘Concepts‘ and we talked about Colors. I had a really hard time picking just a few books to read, we have so many amazing titles that feature colors. These are some of the titles we actually read:

• Blue Chameleon by Emily Gravett
• Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? by Bill Martin, Jr
• Lemons are Not Red by LauraVaccaro Seeger
• Little Blue and Little Yellow by Leo Lionni
• Color Farm by Lois Ehlert
• My Many Colored Days by Dr. Seuss

We also talked about Print Motivation, one of the easiest of the six Ready to Read Early Literacy Skills. It might have a complicated sounding name, but print motivation is simple. Our website describes it like this:

Sounds a lot like what we do at story time, doesn’t it. Our goal is to help you show your kids that reading is awesome!

We started our time together with a fun flannel board game. The kids had to help find Mr. Mouse so he could listen to the stories too. We searched through his ‘neighborhood’ to figure out which house he was in before we settled down to listen. After we read our stories and had our Silly Dance Contest we had craft time. Our color crafts were both recycling projects we made out of old paint chips. We made two different versions of a color matching game. For the younger kids we pre-assembled some color flip books that we took around the branch on a color scavenger hunt, trying to match the the colors on book covers to the color cards we had. The older kids built their own color match wheel, using paint chips to make the color pegs and wheel.

As always, we had tons of fun at Story Time, so we hope you can join us next time!

This week at the Union Township StoryTime we talked about one of the very best concepts- Shapes! Seeing and recognizing the shapes that make up everything around us is not only an amusing game you can play with your kids, it’s also huge step on the road to Early Literacy. One of the six skills that can help you children learn to read is Letter Recognition, and a big part of spotting the differences in various letters is being able to see the shapes that they are made of. Knowing that an A is a triangle and an O is a circle is a big deal, trust me!

All of our books we read this week dealt with our various shapes, including some of my favorites; hearts, circles and squares. We read:

• Shape by Shape by Suse MacDonald
• I Spy Shapes in Art by Lucy Micklethwait
• Lots of Dots by Craig Frazier
• Not a Box by Antoinette Portis
• Perfect Square by Michael Hall
• My Heart is like a Zoo by Michael Hall

For our craft we made collages and pictures out of circles, and as always we had a few coloring sheets that we made up. We also had some great flannel boards; our Preschool Time had a visit from the Shape Monster, who promptly ate all the shapes we had brought out to show the kids and at Toddler Time we played a game with our felt shapes, first spotting the shapes on the board and then later shapes we found around the room. The game has a song that goes like this:

I Can See Shapes
Tune: London Bridge
I can see a circle shape,
circle shape, circle shape.
I can see a circle shape.
How about you?

I can see a triangle,
a triangle, a triangle.
I can see a triangle.
How about you?

I can see a little square,
little square, little square.
I can see a little square.
How about you?

I can see a rectangle,
rectangle, rectangle.
I can see a rectangle.
How about you?

As always we had a great time this week at the Union Township Branch StoryTimes, I hope you can join us next week!