Little Red Riding Hood

I displayed twelve picture book versions of Little Red Riding Hood all featuring wonderful illustrators. My favorite is by Trina Schart Hyman. I had the children vote on the book with their favorite illustrations and that was the book that I would read to the group. The book they chose was illustrated by Christopher Bing and it lent itself very well to sharing as the illustrations are large and finely detailed. 

I've been wanting to do a Little Red Riding Hood program for a while. My main obstacle was deciding what kind of craft to do with the school aged group. After many a Google searches I came up with idea of using a  sequencing story board that was already available from DLTK- growing together. Each of the children received a stack of nine images telling the story of Little Red riding Hood, with their craft materials and they put them in story order. 

http://www.dltk-teach.com/rhymes/littlered/1.htm

Below is the example I showed them and their work. I really should have given them a larger piece of poster board to work with. Although, as is always the goal -- creativity played itself out and the other side of the poster board was used. The pre-cut Red and Wolf  were taped to skewers so they could play with them on their pictures and as shadow puppets at home.

I played  the song Little Red Riding Hood by Freakwater several times during our craft time.

The song is available on the album The Bottle let Me Down

go to Amazon for a free listen and purchase. 

http://www.amazon.com/The-Bottle-Let-Me-Down/dp/B000066JE8

For a treat we watched a portion of Shelley Duvalls's Little Red Riding Hood
from her Fairy Tale Theatre Series
and had a yummy snack of children's wine (sparkling juice), potato rolls and cookies.
A red cape, red hat and a wolf puppet joined us as well. 

Jan-u-BEAR-y

We had fun with BEARS!!! In the center is my very own Mr. Bear. He is 54 years old,  and I enjoyed telling the children all about him. I shared stories from my childhood such as the time I pulled his eyes off and got a red marker to replace them and added a belly button, and how I put my dad's shaving cream on his muzzle and shaved him. I showed them the ruddy scars from the shave, and told all about how I felt so bad later that I drew angel wings on Mr. Bear with a red ink pen and bandaged him up.Unfortunately Mr. Bear is really stinky and worn from so many years of love and storage...

Part of the day's theme was BYOB (Bring Your Own Bear). We had eight children and five of them remembered to bring in their bears. It's a shame that I forgot to take photos of them.  My energy level was pretty low that afternoon, but we had quality time talking and working together. It was a peaceful and relaxed program with library regulars who were just happy to be together.

Both of these books are really good. I usually lean towards humor with the children,

 but these are two serious books that they really liked, almost to the verge of tears, though

fortunately no one broke down. The Teddy Bear by David McPhail  has a homeless man as a main character which brought up a questions about homelessness. I was asked "Why is the man sleeping in the dumpster?" My reply was "Because it is warmer than sleeping on the cold ground."

One True Bear by Ted Dewan is about a boy named Damien who destroys teddy bears. A brave bear  volunteers from "teddy bear headquarters' to become Damien's one true bear.  It is a well constructed story about courage and love and having "the right stuffing". 

We made Bear Paw Cookies. The children wrote their names on their square of parchment paper 

and our helper Martha baked them for us. Here is the recipe:

http://www.duncanhines.com/recipes/cookies-bars/dh/bear-paws

For our art project, I laid out strips of felt, bits of felt, pompoms and glue. I also had cloth scissors available, so I had to be sure to watch the younger children.  Everyone was very careful and responsible.

They made scarves and wraps for their bears. I had paper bags for them to take home their creations and allowed them to take home some extra craft materials. 

The Music

Going On A Bear Hunt - Mr. Eric & Mr. Michael- Yummy Yellow From The Learning Groove

The Bear Went Over The Mountain - Six Little Ducks

Bear Went Over The Mountain- The Bounding Bear- Mother Goose Rocks Vol. 5

Freddy Bear The Teddy Bear - Ralph's World - Ralph's World

Teddy Bears' Picnic- Greg & Steve- Shake, Rattle & Rock

Teddy Bear Picnic- Green Eyed Fleas- Mother Goose Rocks Vol. 5

Light the Night

The Books

 I talked to the the group about being happy and loving as shining from the inside. I compared that to being angry or sad and being dark. I gave examples of "dark me and light me". 

They were amused. 

I sang  Raffi's book This Little Light of Mine and they joined in.

I read David Shannon's The Amazing Christmas Extravaganza ,

a somewhat dark and humorous tale of a dad who gets out of control decorating. 

He ignores his family and angers his neighbors: and later, he sees the light and is redeemed. 

The Star Tree by Gisela Colle is Christmas story about an old, lonely man living in a big city and remembering  holidays of long ago. He cuts stars out of gold paper then takes them out to the countryside and hangs them on a tree where they could shine by the light of the moon. A huge wind comes through the city and tears down the power lines. In the dark, the city people see the the moon, the old man, and the paper stars glowing in light and join him. It really is sweet. The illustrations are primitive and have a very European feel. 

The Crafts

The crafts were very simple. They put self-adhesive jewels on glass votive candle.(Note: There was a light (tee hee) waxy residue on the outside of the glass. In order for the jewels to stick, I cleaned them off with rubbing alcohol) They drew stars on the back of  glitter paper and cut them out.  Most of them were independent and  I loved the different personalities the stars had. 

During the craft and snack time I played 

This little Light of Mine performed by different musicians. 

The Snack

They freaked when I told them we were going to eat lit candles

but, they loved the pretzel sticks and light cheese spread!

YOU ARE WHAT YOU EAT!

                               

You are what you eat and other mealtime hazards by Serge Bloch is a cleverly written book that uses figures of speech that are related to food and eating. It was a great opener for our program

 and the children were as pleased as punch.

Heckedy Peg by Audrey and Don Wood is written and illustrated as a classic fairy tale.

The book is about a mother who saves her seven children from Heckedy Peg, 

a witch who has changed them into different kinds of foods.

The craft is based on the art of Arcimboldo

I found and printed fruit and vegetable images from the internet for the program. I drew an outline of a face and copied it on cream colored card stock then, I glued it to cardboard to 

frame sturdy and frame it. Above are my examples. 

The students experimented with different looks before gluing. This could be a fun interactive activity if the pieces were laminated and moved around on the face, so many possibilities  - 

To end our program with a bang I read Frankenstein makes a sandwich by Adam Rex . 

Then I constructed a Frankenstein sandwich from an unsettling combination 

foods both new and used.

It was wild, gross, laughing and yelling fun! 

Out of the Book

An idea for a craft can come from the book itself,
as in the book Cool Cat,Hot Dog by Sandy Turner. 

I was drawn to it by the unique and clever use of collage and the competitive banter
between cat and dog that makes it a perfect picture book for an older audience.

I presented  this program with Darcy, one of my co-workers at the time,
and we held our cat and dog puppet as we read the dialogue.
The children had to vote who was the best. Cat or dog? Dog won.

I photocopied images of cat and dog along with key phrases in the book.

For materials I used different shades of light weight cardboard, brown paper grocery bags,
graph paper,discarded J fiction, tissues, markers, scissors and glue.
 I had several copies of her book on the tables for them to look through.
They enjoyed recreating the style of Turner's collage using recycled materials.

The program's title was It's Raining Cats and Dogs!  We also read and included                     ;   

Woof a Love Story by Debra Weeks is about a dog and cat that fall in love- 

yet there is a big communication problem- very funny and sweet.

Why do I Have to Eat Off the Floor? by Chris Hornsey is about 

a dog that has to come to grips that he isn't a human.

We served Cracklin Oat Bran dry cereal ( it looks like dog food) - 

The whole group was on all fours eatin' like dogs.

We all were crackin up laughing. Good dog!

Enlarging Illustrations

 

The books Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs and Pickles to Pittsburgh by Ron and Judi Barrett were having a revival, and I wanted to do a program celebrating them. 

The complete set of both titles was republished in 2009 and the movie 

Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs was released later that year. 

My kids grew up with these books and we loved them along with 

Animals Should Definitely  Not Wear Clothing. The big problem that I had with 

the books was that the illustrations were too small for a large group. 

To solve issue I used a  real view overhead projector called the Elmo Document Camera.

I  was able to project the book's illustrations while reading it. The kids loved it and I solved the image problem. I have used this for other program and event needs. 

Today, if I had to do it again I would scan the images and put them in a slide show 

and project them from the laptop with an In-Focus projector.

 

The craft was to recreate the city and food of both books. I included stiff cardboard for the children 

to make buildings with windows and doors, signage and helicopters on toothpicks 

for Chewandswallow. There were mashed potatoes, peas, carrots, pickles and, 

of course, meatballs. 

The kids had fun with their creations and enjoyed snacking too.

Snow Wishes

In 2010, we had fun with Snow Wishes (in the south that's about all you can do).

We had our snow stories, and the children cut out their own tortilla snow flakes. I had an assistant who baked them in the oven and sprinkled powdered sugar on them.

In order to identify which snow flake belonged to who, I pre-cut parchment paper squares and they wrote their names on the paper before baking. Here is the recipe:

 http://spoonful.com/recipes/sweet-tortilla-snowflakes

Snowman Pencil Topper

For the other craft the children made snowmen pencils. I had already glued the Styrofoam head so they stuck the beaded eyes and mouth on. The nose is a bit of chenille pipe cleaner so they put it on with the little twigs and wrapped him in in a felt scarf.

 

At the end of the program we watched the DVD,  Ramond Brigg's The Snowman. The music and quality of animated film is fantastic and the kids really liked it.