Story time Wednesday! Letter J! Jungle sounds, Jeep riding sheep! Jump, Frog, Jump!

 Hello and thanks for stopping by another Story time Wednesday with Mr. Mike. It was a great crowd today on a rainy Wednesday. The perfect weather for a story time experience. I had a lot of fun with this story time. It's become sort of an in-joke with parents and me during our ABC action song that I'll forget letter s. It happens every time and today was no different. You can see it on the video I'll post below. Good stuff. The kids liked the stories, had fun with the magnet board and enjoyed shouting along and guessing different animals. For letter J, I used Jump, Frog, Jump! by Robert Kalan, Guess Who's in the jungle by Naomi Russell, Sheep in a jeep by Nancy Shaw, and I made a magnet board story based on the book Jump In! by Ian Whybrow. Jump, Frog, Jump! is an ideal story for kid participation. Just being able to shout out every other pages really engages preschoolers and helps them feel like an important part of story time...well...because they are THE most important part. Guess Who's in the jungle is a short, Lift the flap story where kids guess what animal is hidden behind the flap on each page. It really reinforces the participation portion of story time and I'll use it again. Jump In! is simply really funny, silly fun where a girl invites all these animals to jump in her car. Then, a tiger sneaks up on them and all the animals willingly jump into his mouth. Then the girl chases the tiger with her car and it hiccups all the animals out. The animals all really liked being in the tiger's belly and they all do the same thing again the next day. Yeah...you just read that. I had one mom laughing out loud at that book because it is just unabashedly absurd.

     We always start our day with the Heidisongs ABC action song and dance to get warmed up. I actually had a fantastic mom take video so you can see it below! Yes, I skip letter S in the video. Yes it is hilarious.

ABC Action!

After the ABC action dance, we greet all the little ones with our greeting song,
We're All Here (Skip To My Lou)
Here, Here, We're all here!
Here, Here, We're all here!
Here, Here, We're all here!
We're here at story time!
Hello, ________! How are you?
Hello, ________! How are you?
Hello, ________! How are you?
I'm glad you're here today!

The first story I shared was Jump, Frog, Jump! It is one of my personal favorite story time books to read and most kids age 4 and under like any opportunity to shout out in a quiet place! This went very well. The book also serves as a good teacher of the prediction skill. Each page gives a hint as to what will happen next. Kids feel so smart when they can predict what is going to happen.

After the story, we stood back up and practiced our letter J song/dance from Heidisongs. This time, instead of posting the lyrics and such, I'll just post a link to the video below. I'm still having trouble figuring out all the ins and outs of blogger so I'm uploading through Youtube instead. Here's the link so you can see how we get down at the ICL.

Letter J song.

To cool down, the magic hat gave us an ipod that had jungle sounds on it so we listened to some jungle sounds and called out what animals we thought we heard. Then I read them the Guess Who's in the Jungle book. The older kids always shout out the answers first. I only had the kids stumped once because I don't think they knew what to call a parrot. Most of them shouted out bird. The rest of them are more obvious.

After our jungle adventure, we used the story Jump In! To have a little bit of magnet board fun. I'm very happy with this one because I made it up myself. I actually don't owe anyone any credit for this one. It's a proud day!

We ended with Sheep in a Jeep by Nancy Shaw. Somehow, the magic hat had a jeep toy from my house inside...hmmm. I found out that I had a few Jeep fans in our audience and they particularly enjoyed this story. The ending especially resonates with Jeep lovers because many of them have had yards strewn with spare Jeep parts for sale. Ahh...you've gotta love your jeep.





Finally, it was time for goodbye, so we sang our song like we always do
We Wave Goodbye like This (The Farmer in the Dell)
We wave goodbye like this!
We wave goodbye like this!
We clap our hands for all our friends.
We wave goodbye like this!
Repeat a few times and add some silly waves!

Craft: Bejeweled J's.

Easiest craft ever. I had drew a letter J in craft foam for a template, then cut them out of construction paper. The kids took them and stuck Oriental Trading jewel stickers all over them. They flipped for this craft. Stickers are hands down the easiest way to engage all kids in a craft. Anyone can do stickers and little ones just go nuts for stickers! I highly recommend them.