
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.