Amy usually leads the storytimes on Wednesday mornings.  I was the sub today.

I had the color green on my mind this morning as I was preparing for my storytime next Monday, since  St. Patrick’s Day is next week.  When I had the opportunity to lead this morning’s storytime, I used two of the books I will be reading next week.

Little Green Peas is by Keith Baker, who brought us the fabulous LMNO Peas.  That original picture book teaches the alphabet with a large capital letter taking up most of the page and little green peas doing lots of things that begin with that letter, so you learn the upper case and lower case.

I have to admit that I enjoy Little Green Peas even more.  This time the peas are teaching us colors. One page will have a color word in capital letters, with each letter in various shades of that color.  The story starts with BLUE.  You do not need to read that large word to enjoy this book.  The story stands on its own.  One spread is saturated with a certain color, except for a few green peas.  Turn the page and lots more peas appear.  The children this morning were great at guessing the big word on each page by using the color as the hint.  Close reading between one adult and child allows you to notice all the fun things the peas are doing.

This book was my St. Patrick’s Day choice.  It is a fairly simple story about a family of leprechauns.
Most of the shamrocks on the front of the book have 3 leaves.  It’s unfortunate that a four-leaf clover is featured prominently.  That is certainly lucky on all other days, but we want to see shamrocks on March 17th.

If you read this blog with any regularity, you know how much I love this book.  When the group is small enough, children are very excited to interact with this magic book.  The children today were mesmerized, and I had exactly the right number of volunteers.

And yuck! is probably my favorite picture book for storytimes, so if I am the substitute at a storytime, I want to read this.

This Saturday is the second Saturday of the month, which means it is time for Dads and Donuts.  This book is the perfect way to remind people about that storytime.  It’s also a good way to end any storytime.

~Maureen