One of my libraries has a great rug for kids. In the middle of the rug is our solar system. It's labeled properly and everything! The rug is situated directly in front of the reference desk, so we get to watch little people, all day long, playing on the planets. It's amazing to me how little they are, and they know the names of the planets already. Same for the letters of the alphabet that go all the way around the border of the rug. I swear I've seen kids who can't be quite 2 jumping on all the letters and correctly identifying them. I never get tired of watching it.
Anyway, one of the felt board ideas I had was to do something like Which Bug is in the Rug. I got this idea from here. I made my bugs much simpler, since my primary audience is two. I just printed up some cute bug outlines and colored them in with red, blue, yellow, orange, purple and green colored pencils. Then I found clip art of a rug that looks much like the one in our library, thinking the kids might get a kick out of this. Well, maybe another audience, but for this storytime, I got a bigger kick out of the matching rug than any of the littles did! But they did have fun guessing which bug was hiding under the rug. They were pretty good at it! Oh, to have a memory like theirs again!
So I figure I hit upon several important early literacy concepts, disguised cleverly as just plain fun. Colors is an important one. We used shaky eggs and followed the directions to the I Know a Chicken song again. Yes, I love that one. I also used some science concepts, including using the shaky eggs to dance to another Laurie Berkner great, Bumblebee. We also count to three in this one, but we learn that bumblebee's go "buzz"! And, we looked at and named the planets on our rug.
My garden storytime at the other library was a hit too. I have a big group there, about 30 kids, and I wanted to let them put stuff on my felt board. I know they've wanted to all year, but it took me a long time to find an activity with enough pieces. I found this activity where I could read the book Counting in the Garden, and use this pdf to create 4 sets of ten felt pieces of different bugs and animals. I passed them out, explained the concept, started reading . . . and was immediately rushed by 30 small people at once! They listened though (most of them) and toddled back to mom or dad and waited til I said their number. I had three little boys who just couldn't bring themselves to sit down. They stood right in front of the felt board, but they didn't try to touch it, and weren't hurting anyone or disrupting the story flow, so I let them stay. The kids get so excited, and so proud, to put their felt pieces on the board. It was a completely rewarding experience for them and for me, and I plan to use it again someday! And, counting and science concepts covered, right?
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