Big and Little

I am fortunate to have been invited to participate in a grant called Ready to Learn with Iowa Public Television, and one of their new programs currently in development is a fun, engaging cartoon called Peg + Cat, which includes match concepts for preschoolers.  This inspired the toddler storytime I'm finally posting today, which highlights the concepts of relative size and spatial capacity. 

The books we read were:

Tiny Little Fly by Michael Rosen


Big Little by Leslie Patricelli

And as a flannel story, A House for Birdie by Stuart J. Murphy. The idea for making this particular story into a flannel story came from Miss Mary Liberry at Flannel Friday.

I realized too late that I had made the smallest round bird gold, so I had to change the names of a couple of the birds to match the story.

We also did some action rhymes, but I can't post them because I didn't put into my plan where I found them.

As a craft, parents and children traced their hands onto green construction paper--the parent's hand is big and the child's hand is little.  Then the parent cut them out and the child taped them to our windows, where we had put up a tree that we intended to change through the seasons (buds and flowers in spring, leaves in the summer, colored leaves in the fall, etc.), but it isn't holding up as well as we thought it would, so it may be more temporary than that.  Our unseasonably warm weather this spring has also kicked all of the vegetation into high gear, so it looked more like May here last month than March.  I love that!

Because of the backlight on the windows, you can see only the silhouette of the trees, and to the left of the second tree, there is a tiny pond with a duck swimming there.  The tree was created by one of our interns, and the green hands look very leaflike, I think.

I love to do this kind of craft occasionally that allows children to have their work displayed in the library and that adds warmth and color to the children's department.