Preschool Storytime: Thanksgiving

This week's storytime post comes as both a sharing to fellow librarians and an instructional tutorial to families. Never have I sent a craft home as an extension activity, but this week the craft was too cute and the amount of time was too short.

This morning a parent came in to look for a particular non-fiction book and left saying, "I'm just so impressed. It's a relatively small library and I'm leaving with three books on this very particular topic." It was a proud librarian moment. The pride then continued when I went to look through the Thanksgiving bin and found more fun titles than I expected. I did pick up a few new(er) titles and ended up with the following for storytime:

I Know an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Pie by Alison Jackson and Judy Schachner

10 Fat Turkeys by Tony Johnston and Rich Deas

Bear Says Thanks by Karma Wilson and Jane Chapman

The Amazing Turkey Rescue by Steve Metzger and Jim Paillot

The Almost Unschooling Mom posted a fun brown paper bag puppet to accompany I Know an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Pie and I was hooked. Like the Almost Unschooling Mom, I used Marcia's Lesson Links for the body, Utah Education Network's Old Lady Puppet for the head (I like that the mouth is bigger and the kiddos can fit the cards in easily), and Make Learning Fun for the pieces of food.

We finished our storytime with I Know an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Pie and as I was reading, the kiddos brought up the different pieces of food and dropped them in the old lady's mouth. Too much fun. They loved being part of the story.

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To make your own Old Lady puppet at home, follow these steps:

Step One: Color the Old Lady and the pieces of food.

Step Two: Cut the Old Lady (including inside her mouth, big people help will be required here) and the pieces of food. I cut the rectangle outline of the food so they were all the same size and shape.

Step Three: Lay the paper bag on the table with the seam of the bottom of the bag, face up. Glue the Old Lady's face to the bottom of the bag. I suggest using a glue stick for this part, anything else will soften your brown paper bag.

Step Four: Glue the Old Lady's body to the bag, make sure your hand can still fit inside the bag and the seams all move.

Step Five: Here comes the tricky part... Use a scissors to cut out the mouth of the Old Lady, I used tape to reinforce her mouth to the bag.

Step Six: This step is option, you can tape the plastic sandwich bag inside of the brown paper bag to catch the pieces of food.

Step Seven: Retell the story and enjoy!