Flannel Friday: Hi, Pizza Man!

The main reason I wanted to begin blogging again? Flannel Friday, of course!  Thanks to Mel and the Flannel Friday crew, I have gotten excited about storytelling again.  I have in storage several envelopes full of my version of flannel board stories–I can’t cut felt very well, so I use paper pictures with felt or velcro backing.  The pieces are mostly very informal (meaning basic at best), but they work.  For my first flannel Friday, I’m doing an extention activity for the book Hi, Pizza Man! by Virginia Walter.

In this book, a little girl imagines what it would like to have various animals deliver her family’s pizza.  When an animal is at the door, the reader makes the correct animal noise.  So, for the cat: Meow, meow, pizza cat.  And Ssssssssss, pizza snake.  You get the idea.

First, find some flannel animal pieces.  Here are some of mine–just an assortment of hand colored and clip art animal shapes cut out of paper.  

Here’s the door that I use, but there could be any number of ways to make this work.

Then open the door:

Tweet, tweet, pizza bird!

Continue with as many animals as you like.  (This is how I made the animals stick behind the door: the magic of velcro.  Stick a piece of velcro behind the door, and the matching piece on the back of the animals.)

While out shopping a while back, I found this wonderful picture frame and immediately thought of this story.  It’s wooden, bright red, and about 9 inches tall.

Inside is a picture wallet, so in each slot I put an animal.  Knock on the door, open it and voila, animals bringing pizza!

I just open to the next page to see each animal.  It does take some finessing, but it’s worth it because the red door is so cool.

That’s it!  My first flannel Friday!  Be sure to check out Mel’s blog for a wrap up on all the wonderful flannel friday blog entries out there this week.