Wednesday, September 14, 2016

Meow! A Kitty-Cat Storytime

I love cats (don't most of us?) and every time I plan this theme it gives me great pleasure selecting titles. Except that there are so many good titles it is difficult to select the best of the best.

Planning this storytime also required a little bit of forethought : being the first storytime in the school year I had to remind myself to "dumb down" storytime, something we often need to do when summer ends and all our 5-year-olds go off to kindergarten and our 4-year-olds go off to preschool. Instant toddler storytime!

I love to introduce the kids to my cats, mostly because they have a great backstory. My first cat was found in a box in the road as a 3-week-old kitten. We took him in but he was such a ferociously playful guy that we needed to get him a playmate - hence, our acquiring our second cat.

Just because, here they are ...
Aren't they beautiful? Of course I'm biased ...

Anyway, these are the books that we read today. I did include one long-ish book simply because I could not resist the title where a black cat and a white cat make orange kittens.

I made a flannel of a draw-and-tell story a few years ago titled "Poppa Pugleasee" ... not sure if I prefer this as a flannel or draw-and-tell, but here is the flannel version :

Poppa Pugleasee is round and fat
With two pointy ears and little black hat
He has circles for eyes and a triangle nose
and very sharp claws at the end of his toes
His little pink tongue is kind of funny
And he eats too much by the look of his tummy
He wags his tail when I give him a pat
I love Poppa Pugleasee because he’s my….CAT!


I guess this flannel kitty-cat is cute ...


My library still carries the old book props in our shared storytime collection. The one for Pat Thomson's "Drat That Fat Cat!" is pretty good ... as you tell the story, each animal gets swallowed by the fat cat ... but in a transparent body so kids can see what's going on inside.




Our early literacy tip for the day was to read together -- to that end, I created this take-home activity sheet for kids to do at home reinforcing this skill.
for at-home use only



1 comment:

  1. Hail to the cat lover! Hail to the cat storytime! I have one of those big orange kitties, and his parents were black and white. It happens

    ReplyDelete