E is for... EGG and ELEPHANT!

     It’s been another crazy week at Mooresville Public Library.  I love working in a

fast-paced environment because you never know what you are going to walk into on any given day.  This week alone I saw 65 Kindergarteners for a pre-field trip story time, 70 second graders for a library tour, and 80 children between the ages of newborn to six years old for regular weekly Story Time.  And if all that wasn’t enough, I also got to attend a seminar at my library about the new and improved Every Child Ready to Read 2.0!  I am exhausted just thinking about it.  Let’s get going on what we did this week at Story Time, however fair warning, I am also going to talk a bit about ECRR 2.0 at the end because it was so FANTASTIC! 

     As you may have already guessed, the letter this week is Ee.  I happen to really like the letter Ee.  It’s the first initial of my middle name AND my last name AND my sister’s name begins with an Ee.  Ee was a tricky one for me in terms of our flash card this week.  The obvious response would have been to make an elephant with our upper case E, but I wanted to be different.  I decided that Ee was going to be an egg.  Egg?  Now I know what you’re thinking.  How in the world are we going to turn an Ee into an egg?  Simple… you don’t!  Behold the power of a brass fastener.

Materials: Uppercase"E" drawn on an index card, crayons, an egg cut out of colorful printer paper cut in half to make it looked cracked, and a brass fastener.

Back side of card

1) Color the capital E adn decorate the egg.

2) Trace the Ee on the backside of the card.

3) Stick the brass fastener through one portion of the egg.  Now, barely overlapping, push the brass fastener through the second half of the egg.



4) Next push the brass fastener through the index card.  The E should look as if it is inside the egg.  Don't forget to pull apart the prongs on the fastener in order to make it nice and secure.

5) Lastly, add the E to the letters A, B, C, and D.

     As for the second craft for my four to six year olds, I went the safe route, elephants!  Admit it, elephants are funny.  They are HUGE, look funny, and every kid loves them.  I found a really awesome craft here.  Elephants AND a party horn?  Life doesn’t get much better!  Although this craft was a hit, I learned a few things. 

1)     ALWAYS, ALWAYS, ALWAYS have more than enough crafts prepared.  Although it sounds a bit wasteful, having too many ALWAYS beats the alternative.  I got lucky and 2 children had to leave early.  If they hadn’t, I would have been 2 short!  Worst nightmare!

2)     Kids DO NOT CARE if their mouth has been on something.  They will still want to switch you for a different color.

     Books this week were two I had never read before.  For my two and three year olds I chose the book Except If by Jim Averbeck.  This book was a great “thinking” book.  What starts out as a cracked egg quickly becomes a snake, then a lizard, then a dinosaur, and the list goes on.  I am not going to ruin it for you, but I will tell you it’s possible to keep your kids guessing for an extended period of time about what my come next.

     To go along with our elephant craft I chose a not-so-traditional pick, That’s Not Funny! by Adrian Johnson.  Thought not necessarily about an elephant, the elephant quickly becomes the star and main joke-getter in this book.  This book is SO MUCH MORE than a book about a boy and an elephant.  It’s a great book to discuss things such as being nice to everyone, helping someone instead of laughing at them, and could even be used with an older group when discussing bullying. 

     Song choices this week were minimal.  I like to try to combine my songs, books, and crafts into on cohesive theme, but sometimes, it just doesn’t work.  This was one of those times.  I couldn’t really find and egg song or elephant song that I really loved.  I did use a song called, “Dinosaur Egg” by Geof Johnson.  This was great for the parachute because it was fast and really got the kids hyped up (as if they needed it!).

     So that was this week’s story time in a nutshell.  As I previously mentioned, along with my typical programming this week, I also attended a workshop held at my library about Every Child Ready to Read.  This is the second edition of this program and I was really excited to see what new changes they were implementing.  The best part, for me personally, was the change from 6 skills to 5 practices.  What use to be a lot of library jargon, such as phonological awareness and narrative skills, became 5 easy practices that everyone can do- Reading, Writing, Singing, Playing and Talking! YAY!!!  Something we can all understand!

     One of the greatest things that came from this workshop, in my opinion, was the recognition that my library and the weekly programs I do are ahead of the game.  With the implementation of the alphabet flash cards, I have slowly been adding writing into my weekly plans which seemed to be the hardest one for people to wrap their heads around in terms of how we are going to use the 5 practices in Story Time.

     There are so many more things I could say about Every Child Ready to Read 2.0.  I think it is going to be great incorporating the practices into what I already do.  I don’t think it will be difficult, just different.  If you have any questions about my weekly story times or even what I learned during my ECRR 2.0 workshop, please leave a comment!  Next week we tackle the letter Ff.