In this sweet story of friendship and loyalty, Penguin and Pinecone become the best of friends.  While reading the book aloud, I emphasized the ‘p’ sound at the beginning of both words, and wondered if one reason Penguin and Pinecone became friends was that their names started with the same sound. After we read the story, I got out some of my animals (someday, Flannel Friday, I will make myself some new animals, I swear) and identified them, emphasizing the first letter of their names. Then we found each animal a new friend, matching up the animals with an object that started with the same sound. Some of the kids didn’t really get it (I do an all ages drop-in storytime), but many of them were able to successfully complete the matches.

Animals and objects are laminated paper with magnets on the back. The objects are clip art (mostly from Open Clip Art Library, so they are free and in the public domain), and the animals are OLD and mostly from Liz and Dick Wilmes flannel board books.

Match!

Friends!

And now:  (clears throat)

Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you, happy birthday dear Flannel Friday, happy birthday to you!  May you have many more happy birthdays!

fun, free, fabulous, friendly, functional, fantastic, flannel-y, fly, fascinating, funky, famous, facebook-y, festive, fancy, fierce, and fantabulous!  Thank you to all who participate in Flannel Friday. You help make my job more of the good f-words, too.

Oh, and for this introverted storytimer Flannel Friday is one big non-f word, too: community. I have virtually (and Mel IRL, hi Mel!) met so many fabulous people through Flannel Friday. Right now I must admit I’m mostly a lurker. I’m like that kid in storytime who doesn’t say much at the library, but then goes home and sings the words to every storytime song.  As a part-timer (with two other non-library jobs) who spends almost all my work time doing storytimes and programs, I have very little time to actually spend preparing them. The Flannel Friday pinterest account is an inspirational time-saving  journey and a creative jumpstarter for this storytimer who almost never even uses felt, and the Flannel Friday Facebook page is an amazing resource on just about every aspect of programming. I have a someday goal to do more Flannel Friday posts and give back what I can to the community that helps me so much. In the meantime, thank you, Flannel Friday community for your ideas and friendship, and thank you to those who keep this fabulous flannel kingdom running efficiently.

And of course, thank you Mel, for dreaming up this fun, free, fabulous, friendly, functional, fantastic, flannel-y, fly, fascinating, funky, famous, facebook-y, festive, fancy, fierce, and fantabulous group.

Just for fun, I’ll tell you a story about this one. I often use this kind of activity in storytime (animals on the flannel board presented in a game format), from Little Mouse Little Mouse Are You in the Red House to Button Button Who’s Got the Button to an underpants matching game and MANY more. When I explained in storytime how to play the Yes and No game and got out the animals, a parent actually LAUGHED. I like to think she was laughing with me and not at me.

Here are today’s fabulous Flannel Friday ideas:

Anne at So Tomorrow is thinking ahead to summer with the worm song Nobody Likes Me, complete with patterns, that will be a great fit with the upcoming Dig Into Reading summer reading program theme.

If you need more ideas for your Thanksgiving storytime (and who doesn’t?), Tara at Storytime with Miss Tara and Friends has several suggestions for you, including flannels, songs and books.

Sandra of Storytime Sparks shares a fun way to use colorful boxes (I LOVE boxes!)

Need cake? You will after you visit Miss Courtney Meets Bobo and see her tasty flannel for What a Cake!

Monica at Ram Sam Storytime combines Pete the Cat and puffy paint as part of her amazing Shoe Bop storytime.

Jane at Piper Loves Storytime shares one of Piper’s favorite songs, Autumn Leaves are Falling Down, along with a great way to use foam and felt leaves with this song. And one more thing you need to see–Jane shares a photo of her flannelized neck brace! Flannel Friday hopes you feel better soon, Jane!

Linda at Notes From a Storyroom has inspired me to do a “folktails” storytime by sharing her adaptation of the Ojibwa story Boastful Beaver and His Beautiful Tail.

More Thanksgiving! Be sure to check out the irresistible puppet/flannel combo that Sarah at Read, Sarah, Read created for I Know an Old Lady Who Swallowed A Pie.

Balloons, bells and hand pumps? Must be another fabulous craft from The Voices Inside My Headphones. Really, this would be a super fun idea for the holidays.

Dorothy at The Wielded Pen shares her lovely butterfly song Butterfly, Butterfly Passing Me By, as well as a great idea for making accompanying butterfly finger puppets.

Be sure to visit storytime katie to see her adaptation of Fall Is Not Easy. The hamburger leaves are fabulous!

Visit the Flannel Friday Pinterest page for more great ideas, and see the Flannel Friday blog if you need information on future hosts, themes, and ways to get involved with Flannel Friday.

And get your flannel ideas ready for next week when Flannel Friday will be hosted by Library Quine at Loons and Quines, who has this programming note: I’m hosting Flannel Friday next week for Friday, November 23. As you’ll no doubt all be celebrating Thanksgiving over there in the USA I intend to put the placeholder up on Monday 19th Nov so that you’ll have more time to get you submissions in before “Black Friday”. The placeholder will be at http://loonsandquines.blogspot.com

Please leave a link to your Flannel Friday entry in the comment section below.  Thank you and have a great day!

I am so sorry. I promise I will send you what you asked for, and as soon as I can.  I am sloooooowwwwww.

–Tracey

I’m not sure that Button, Button would work with my storytime crowd, so I combined it with a game they do love to play, Little Mouse, Little Mouse, Are You in the (color) House.

After Pete loses his buttons, where do they go?  Who knows, but I bet his friends help him look for them. Here are Pete’s friends–

And they have some of Pete’s buttons.

Buttons close up–

I ask the kids which color button they want to look for, and we ask “Green button, green button, who has the green button?”  Then we guess which animal might have the green button, looking underneath each animal that the kids name.

Cow has the green button!

Once we find a button, I leave the animal off the board. This helps us (ok, ME!)  remember which color buttons we’ve already found as we continue to play.

A few of the animals don’t have a button. This lets us reinforce the concept of zero, one of the numbers discussed in the book. Raccoon doesn’t have a button.

Keep looking until you find all the buttons! We look for red, green, blue and yellow buttons. I know that Pete doesn’t have a yellow button in the book, but I bet he has lost a groovy yellow button at some point.

I have two buttons for each color. This allows for more animals in the game, and also introduces another element to the game–memory. If we are looking for the green button and we find the red one instead, sometimes the kids remember where the red one is when are looking for it later. And if they don’t remember, that’s fine, too.

The animals are part of my ragtag bunch of colored and laminated paper animals that I keep handy, just for games like this. The buttons are office supply stickers with button holes colored on them with a Sharpie.  Someday I will use slightly larger stickers, but these work fine. The board is sturdy posterboard coated in spray glue–the animals stick to the glue, making it possible to stick the button stickers right to the board under the animals.  All of this could be done much prettier in flannel too, of course.

Lisa of Libraryland is hosting this week’s Flannel Friday.  Find out more about Flannel Friday at the Flannel Friday website.

On a sunny day in the jungle, Chameleon is tired of blending in with the scenery.

When Hippo almost steps on Chameleon, the reluctant color changer says he is sick of always being ignored because no one can see him. But Hippo says he would like to be able to change his color like Chameleon does.

And so begins the jungle version of What Not To Wear as Chameleon gets an idea. He spends the night smooshing flowers to make paint colors.

The next day he calls the animals together

and they all get fancy, with Chameleon painting them in stripes and flowers and bright colors galore.

At first the animals love their new colors, but soon decide that they have been bamboozled  by Chameleon (Lion can’t figure out who to eat, and Snake can’t hide in the grass any longer).  Chameleon has no idea what to do to help the animals un-fancify, but luckily Mother Nature helps him out and things go back to normal in the jungle.

The animals are coloring pages, colored with markers and laminated. They are normal animal colors on one side, and fancy colors on the other side. I just flipped them over when it was time for their makeovers. Oh, and the word chameleon? Sounds much cooler the way I say it in my head.

Library Quine is hosting this week’s Flannel Friday; be sure to visit her fabulous blog.  And don’t forget to visit the Flannel Friday website!

Front and rear views of the children’s service desk

The children’s program room where we held signups and handed out prizes for the first several weeks. Teen volunteers usually manned the tables.

Information about the kids photo exhibit, my idea which unfortunately has not really taken off, and the Midnight Snack game, which the kids love. Each week, a new clue is hidden in the children’s department (pictures of various kinds of food) and once a child finds all the clues, they can figure out a special message and enter a prize drawing.

We use the area right outside the children’s department to place signs that advertise upcoming programs.

The teen summer reading program registration table, also in the programming room.

Our first two prize winners in the preschool program! They came in on day two of summer reading to collect their first prizes.

During the school year, we have 15 or more storytimes a week at our branch.  In the summer, those programs are condensed down to 2 storytimes a week,  which are open to all ages.  Attendance at summer storytimes this year has ranged from 113 to over 200 (that’s per program, so double that for the week). We do count anyone who comes into the room, so this number includes all attendees, regardless of age.

There are four of us who are doing the storytimes this year, and we work in teams of two, splitting up the on-stage duties. When I say on stage, I mean it–we stand up on the stage of our community meeting room, and use microphones to read and sing. This is my American Idol moment!  Storytimes last for 30 minutes, and are followed by a simple craft.

There are 8 weeks of storytimes this summer, so the 4 storytime staff members were each charged with creating 2 programs, which included developing the storytime (we are using the Dream Big–Read theme), creating the powerpoint, and preparing a craft. Then each person was scheduled for a specific week and made sure that their program was ready to go on the chosen day. Teams could then do whatever they wanted with the program, as long as the basic structure stayed the same. Books and songs could be moved around within the storytime, songs (even whole books) could be dropped, props could be added, etc.

The change in routine that summer storytime provides has been refreshing. Working so closely with my talented fellow staff members has been a wonderful experience–I have gotten so many great ideas from them this summer. Working as a team is fun, too, and really challenged me to look at storytimes differently, which is a good thing.  Other challenges–we can’t use flannel stories or small-scale songs or fingerplays, as they don’t really work in a large room filled with many people, and one of my coworkers does not like to sing but prefers to use recorded music. I had to really rethink my standard storytime processes, and again, that is a good thing.  Of course, doing a wild hokey pokey up on stage with over 100 people watching sounds like a story better suited for the after hours crowd (karaoke at the bar, anyone?), but really, who doesn’t want to do the hokey pokey in front of a huge crowd?  And with all the kids and adults swarming the craft tables at once following the storytime, craft time becomes like managing a flash mob, an exercise in barely controlled chaos, but since we don’t get to do crafts during the school year storytimes, it’s a treat to have them at all.

And yet despite the fun of summer, I do look forward to the return of regular storytimes. That return will happen soon, now that summer is more than half way over (2 more weeks of library summer to go).  I miss the intimacy of my much smaller school-year storytime groups, the emphasis on early literacy that I can include in the smaller storytimes, and seeing the reaction of kids-to-book up close rather than from a distance or not at all. I am NOT, however, ready for summer to end. Ah, the great summer reading paradox strikes again.