Cupcakes Galore

Hello crafty friends! I hope you all are having a great week. :) My storytimes have been going really well lately. There have only been a few kids at each session (our evening storytimes unfortunately are nowhere near as popular as are morning storytimes) it's been the perfect amount for a beginning storytime coordinator. :) I'm going to share with you the past two weeks of storytime crafts that the kids and I have done. 


The first craft I'm going to share with you is based on the story Little Mouse and the Big Cupcake. This story is so adorable, you should definitely read it if you have the chance! :) 

For the craft we each made our own cupcakes and decorated them by first coloring them with crayons and then using a glue stick to apply glitter for the sprinkles. This was the first time using glitter for many of the kids, so they had a lot of fun with this. Unfortunately I don't have pictures of their creations to share with you, but I do have a picture of the sample cupcake I made:

For a transition activity between the story and the craft, I created a matching game for the kids to play using the felt board. I made mini versions of the cupcakes they decorated and created them so that they can be matched in three different ways: by the bottom paper color, the frosting color and the sprinkles. It was too hard to tell the differences between the sprinkle colors in the pictures, so I'm just going to show you the other ways they can be matched.

In this picture all of the cupcakes are matched by the bottom paper color. The sprinkles don't look very fun in this picture, but I promise they are when you see them in person! :)

In this picture the cupcakes are matched by the color of their frosting. The kids had so much fun moving the cupcakes around so that they matched! 

Thanks so much for reading! Do any of you have fun storytime crafts you've made in the past? I'd love to hear your ideas!

Ashley

Successful First Storytime!

Hi everyone! Today I thought I'd share with you something different from what I usually post. Part of my job as an employee in the children's department of a library now entails doing a weekly storytime for 3-6 year olds. This was something completely new to me, so I was definitely nervous! It ended up going really well, I read the book The Parrot Tico Tango (see the picture below). I'm trying to stick with a "food" theme for each week, and this week was fruit.

This is the front cover of the book (which I took from Amazon.com) the story is about a parrot, Tico Tango, who goes around and takes a different piece of fruit from each of his friends in his rainforest. At the end, he can't carry it all and he drops it, and his friends turn it into a fruit salad. The story is so cute and is so vivid and bright!

Each of my storytimes will include a craft (my favorite part!), so I figured the perfect craft would be for each of the kids to make their own fruit salad. I printed each of the fruits used in the story onto colored cardstock and cut them out. They looked like this:

Lemon, cherry, date, papaya, grapes, fig and mango

Each of the kids had fun choosing which fruits they wanted to add to their fruit salad, which they made by using a glue stick to apply the fruit to a paper plate. I also used a flannel board to help tell the story, so I made a felt parrot and felt fruit so that the kids could better understand the story.

This is the front side of all the pieces. I attached cardstock paper to the front with a hot glue gun so that the parrot and the fruit looked more realistic, and not just like felt. I found a parrot coloring page online and printed it, and then colored it using markers so that it matched the parrot in the story.

This is the back side of the parrot and the pieces of fruit, which is what they would have looked like if I didn't include the cardstock paper.

Is this something you guys would like to see more of? I always like to change things up a bit. It's a 6 week storytime session so I would have plenty more to share. I could also try and include pictures of the kids crafts and also of the storytime itself. Let me know what you think! :)

Ashley