Story Time: Letter D

So once my coworker did a Letter C story time with a Cookie Monster craft I did a Letter D story time the following week with a D is for Dinosaur craft I saw on Story Time Katie's blog.  Story Time Katie is another one of my go to blogs for story time book suggestions and the occasional story time craft idea, particularly once I saw she had also done a series of alphabet crafts.

So I cut the letter D and 1 large rectangle, 4 small rectangles, an oval and 5 triangles out of construction paper and handed them out to the kids with crayons to draw dinosaur faces and personalize their dinosaurs if they wanted to.

There are so many great dinosaur books that I thought for sure I would have an easy time picking/getting books.  This ended up being both true and not true.  There are a lot of great dinosaur books; they are however, very popular and all checked out.  I had wanted one alphabet dinosaur book, one shape dinosaur book and two dinosaur stories.  Unfortunately I wasn't able to get the dinosaur shape book I wanted and my second choice was missing.  On the other hand I spent a lot of time on my dinosaur alphabet book identifying other items that also began with that pages letter, so three books was okay.  Next time I will request my books earlier though.

ABC T-Rex by Bernard Most

Dinosaur vs The Library by Bob Shea

How Do Dinosaurs Say I Love You? by Jane Yolen

Had I been able to find it I also would have done Shape by Shape by Suse MacDonald.  

As I mentioned earlier for each page of ABC T-Rex we tried to identify additional items on the page that began with that letter of the alphabet.  For Dinosaur vs The Library I had the kids roar with me and help me figure out all the other animal sounds.  How Do Dinosaurs Say I Love You? was a quieter book and at least one of the kids turned around after it was over to tell their Mama that they loved her which was beyond adorable.  For songs I changed If You're Happy and You Know It to If You're A Dinosaur and You Know It; we clapped our hands, swished our tails and roared.  

I wanted to end on the Hokey Pokey but one of my regulars adamantly refused.  One minute we were happy and we knew it and suddenly we were nearing meltdown territory.  I always feel this is dangerous when I have less than 6 children as it seems to spread quickly.  This has become even more worrisome now that I've noticed one of my other regulars will repeat the feelings and actions of the other kids.  If one of the kids says they had a good weekend, then she had a good weekend.  If a second kid says they had a bad weekend, then she says she had a bad weekend. It always makes me giggle a little bit since even when she repeats something negative she still seems fairly happy about it; I still feel like the tables could easily turn so I ditched the hokey pokey.  Instead we did the Skinamarinky Dinky Dink song.