Exploration Station

Books:

Actual Size by Steve Jenkins is my favorite non-fiction book for story time. I don’t really read it so much as talk about the pictures. Each picture is of an animal and is it’s actual size. For example there is a gorilla hand and I have a child volunteer to put their hand in it to show how big it is. There is a picture of the eye of a giant squid and I show the kids how it is bigger than any of our faces. It is always a huge hit.

What will Hatch by Jennifer Ward and Susie Ghahremani is a non-fiction book easy enough for a toddler story time. On each page is a different kind of egg and the book illustrates how so many more animals than just birds lay eggs.

How Many Ways Can you Catch a Fly? by Steve Jenkins and Robin Page is a bit wordy for story time so I skip a lot of pages and paraphrase. It is about what different animals eat and how they eat their prey.

Flannel Game:

We played hide and seek with a flannel snail hidden behind different colored squares.

January Songs:

If You Have Some Rhythm Sticks

If you have some rhythm sticks, rhythm sticks, rhythm sticks

If you have some rhythms sticks you can tap them now.

If you have some rhythm sticks, rhythm sticks, rhythm sticks

If you have some rhythms sticks you can scrape them now.

If you have some rhythm sticks, rhythm sticks, rhythm sticks

If you have some rhythms sticks you can hammer them now.

If you have some rhythm sticks, rhythm sticks, rhythm sticks

If you have some rhythms sticks you can drum them now.

Credit: Jbrary

Bread and Butter, Marmalade and Jam

Bread and butter, marmalade and jam

Let’s tap our sticks as nice as we can.

Bread and butter, marmalade and jam

Let’s tap our sticks as quick as we can.

Bread and butter, marmalade and jam

Let’s tap our sticks as slow as we can.

Bread and butter, marmalade and jam

Let’s tap our sticks as quiet as we can.

Bread and butter, marmalade and jam

Let’s tap our sticks as loud as we can.

Bread and butter, marmalade and jam

Let’s tap our sticks as nice as we can.

Activity:

For our activity I printed out a scavenger hunt and let the kids look through my nature collection and see what they could find. I made sure they knew that I didn’t have everything on the scavenger hunt and that they would have to finish it at home.

This was a huge hit. I have a lot of really cool things in my collection: a very spiny puffer fish specimen, a rattlesnake skin, sand dollars, wasp nests, all kinds of shells and nuts and seed pods, feathers a roe deer skull, and much much more. The kids had a blast looking through it and adding the scavenger hunt made them pay that much more attention.

This was a super fun program.

Books:
 

 
Flannel Board:

Dotty the Dinosaur
Dotty the Dinosaur loved to eat
Things like lettuce and string beans.
That is why her dinosaur skin
Was colored a lovely GREEN.
One day she saw some cherries
And ate them all that day.
Later, Dotty the Dinosaur
Turned bright RED they say.
Dotty just loved colors,
So the next day she ate two
Bushes filled with blueberries
And turned the color BLUE.
The next day she saw some grapes
And ate them on the spot.
Then Dotty turned quite PURPLE
From her bottom to her top.
Next she ate a banana;
It made her feel quite mellow.
And wouldn’t you know it, next thing
Dotty turned bright YELLOW.
Then she ate some juicy orange,
Just a little slice.
And when Dotty turned ORANGE she thought,
“Isn’t this quite nice?”
Credit: Miss Jaime’s Library Journeys
Activities:
How many kids feet does it take to make a T. Rex foot?

For this activity I’ll have the kids trace their feet on construction paper and then we’ll glue them onto the T. Rex footprint that I have prepared.
Activity 2
How long were the dinosaurs?

For this activity we measured a square of toilet paper at 4 inches, thus 3 squares equals a foot.  We found the measurements of several species of dinosaurs and calculated how many squares of toilet paper that would be.  We’ll lay them out so the kids can see a physical example of how long dinosaurs actually were.  We’ll start with the shortest and work our way up to the longest.
Activity 3:
Dinosaur Bingo for Books

For this activity I used cute clip art to make bingo cards and then made a large card of each square to visually call the squares out.  I have a bunch of donated books that we will be able to use as prizes.