Playtime!

This year's themes for the summer were On Your Mark, Get Set, Read! or Exercise Your Mind. Normally, we do six weeks of heavy programming during the summer (followed by about a month of lighter no-planning programming). So to cover the different areas of being keeping your body healthy and fit, our themes for story time were Bath Time, Healthy Eating, Bed Time, Brain Power, Playtime, and Sports! We already do themes around bath time, bed time, and food, so we really only had to come up with things for the others.

Playtime actually came up as a theme by accident. We may have done a keyword search of "play" and enough books came up between that and sports that I felt we could easily do both weeks. And we did!

 

Let's Do Nothing! by Tony Fucile. Two kids who are convinced they've done EVERYTHING already set out to do nothing. One of them, Frankie, has quite the imagination and has a really hard time just doing nothing.

 

 

Mustache Baby Meets His Match by Bridget Heos. In this sequel to Mustache Baby, he meets Javier, a neighbor baby who has a beard. MB tries to show up Javier, but gets bested in a lot of ways. Soon this brings out the worst in both babies and it's a wrestling match for the ages. It's quickly broken up and they learn which is the best competition to win. I think this book goes over the heads of our younger children, but elementary age kids really enjoy it.

 

 

 

 

Watch Me Throw the Ball! by Mo Willems.

Elephant & Piggie is a series of books that is PERFECT for beginning readers. They're also really fun to read aloud in story time. In this book Piggie brings over a ball she found that Elephant threw. She wants to join in, but Elephant is very serious about how to do it. She gets to throw (does terribly) but is still celebrating over it because she had fun (and Elephant learns to have fun with it too).

So in all honesty, I started this blog post a year ago. I don't have as much time during the school year to blog, and now I don't remember what we did for this program. As far as songs and fingerplays go, you could really do anything. Since the theme is play, really anything will work.