Books for Preschoolers on Monday, November 30

In my previous blog post I confessed that there are certain details about the natural world that I get fixated upon.  Cycles of the moon is one of them.

Image of itemThis new book is a charming educational/fantasy exploration of the moon.

Mae is confused by the fact that the moon looks different each night and one night it seemed to disappear altogether.  She builds a rocket ship to explore the situation up close.

The end pages of this book give illustrations of the phases of the moon and the names for them.

I want children to know that they can see the moon in the daytime as well.  It is only the full moon that is in the night sky the whole time.  The week before the full moon, look for the daytime moon in the afternoon.  The week following the full moon, look for it in the morning.

One of the children in the preschool storytime wanted to know if I was going to read Christmas stories.  I will read some over the next 2 weeks.  Christmas is as big as Halloween for children, and certainly bigger than Thanksgiving.  It’s foolish not to read some books about it.

My choice for today was a llama llama book, because some children are already having “holiday drama” and many more will in the weeks to come.

Image of itemThis was a long story, especially for most of the children who were unfamiliar with little llama llama. (perhaps that is my fault- I must read more of them)  Anyway, it is a hectic story and my storytime children were particularly restless this week.  Lots of craziness happens until llama llama has a melt down.  Then the tone of the story shifts, and I read more slowly.  Mama llama takes him aside and sits him on her lap and focuses on the importance of family and times together.  All ages appreciated that message this week.

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We read There Are Cats in This Book last week, so I thought I would try this book.  Quite frankly, it was not as good and didn’t keep the children’s attention.  It was a bit confusing, because there were cats in the book even though the title was There are no cats in this book.  They were trying to escape the pages.  It was not as interactive as the original book, and therefore not as fun – especially in storytime.

We’ve been having only 20-25 people in the preschool storytime on Mondays.  That is a small enough group that we can have interactive activities and have some dialogue.  Today we had Image of itemmore than 40 people in the room.  They were not used to being together at a storytime, so the children had a harder time focusing.  This next book needed more focus and discussion, and so I wouldn’t recommend it when you can’t speak with the children while reading a story.

~Maureen