This Week at Family Fun-Take Me Out to the Ballgame

Can you only appreciate these if you are from Wisconsin? If you've had a brush with the Milwaukee Brewers, you may have seen the Klement's Racing Sausages. We celebrated fun ballpark food this week, and I have never had so much fun with a craft! 

Eloise at the Ball Game by Lisa McClatchy is the perfect introduction to ballpark fun, and The Pigeon is a hit at any storytime. We had crazy fun poppin popcorn (crumpled paper) in our parachute to the Barenaked Ladies' Popcorn from Snacktime.

Another great choice for baseball storytime--Bill Thomson's illustrations
in Baseball Hour are spectacular.

This Week at Family Fun: Wild and Woolly Wisconsin

We have a beautiful museum in town that prominently features mammoth remains that were found locally along with a mammoth replica. I wasn't too surprised that Pinterest was not flooded with woolly mammoth crafts, but we had fun creating this one. We started out with a mammoth coloring page copied onto brown construction paper. To make the tusks, bend a white pipe cleaner and lace it through a hole at the base of the trunk.

Our local yarn shop gave us some wool from a farm in the area. The kids had so much fun with the wool, and it totally makes the project. (If you don't have access to sheep, you can purchase wool roving at craft stores in the yarn section.) 

My genius coworker added the "glacier" which allows Woolly to stand up and shows the connection with the ice age.

I was so happy to finally be able to share Mammoths on the Move by Lisa Wheeler--an awesome non-fiction picture book with rhyming text. And who doesn't love caveman talk? We had tons of fun with Me Want Pet! by Tammi Sauer.

This Week at Mommy and Me: Cookie Monster

At circle time, I showed the connection between the flannel board, the book, the craft, and my shirt--all Cookie Monster. I knew most of them wouldn't know Cookie yet, but they loved him by the end of class. I only read part of the book to introduce some concepts. Everyone got one "cookie" to feed the monster. After each child placed their cookie on the flannel board, we all said, "Yummy, yummy in my tummy! "

Everyone painted a paper plate for our hungry Cookie Monster craft. They put brown dots ( and other assorted marks) on beige circles. These will be the cookies they feed their monsters after everything is assembled. I cut a semicircle mouth in the painted plate, and another half plate gets attached to the back to catch the cookies.

We threw cookie bean bags at the bean bag board and in buckets. We made play dough cookies and sorted cookie shapes. One little girl had egg shakers in her hand from the time she walked in the door, so we wrapped things up with a shaker mix :

Shake! by We Kids Rock

Shakeable You by Imagination Movers

I Know a Chicken by Laurie Berkner

Five Brave Firefighters

I can't wait to do this with the kids. This is based on the rhyme widely available on the web. I shortened it (a) to turn it into a counting rhyme (who wants to ring a bell once?) (b) I do toddler storytime and shorter is always better and (c) shorter and repetitive means I can memorize it easily.

This was so easy to make. Cut slits in top and bottom. Slide one end of pipe cleaner into top slit. Slide on bell and five red beads. Ring the bell and slide one bead down each time you repeat the verse.

When I do this in storytime, we have some larger foam firefighters we slide down the long pole that pulls down our screen. I got the bead idea from a homemade abacus I saw.

Five brave firefighters 
Sleeping in a row
Ring goes the bell
And down one goes....