Mel's Desk

Welcome to Flannel Friday! This week’s round up will be is over at Sharon’s blog Rain Makes Applesauce!

I made a set of summer clothes for summer storytimes.

You can play a guessing game with pieces like this (“I’m going to the pool and need to put on something that I can wear in the water. What is it?”) or sing “If You’re Going to the Pool,” to the tune of “If You’re Happy and You Know It.”

If you’re going to the pool, wear your suit,
If you’re going to the pool, wear your suit,
If you’re going to the pool, then a suit will keep you cool,
If you’re going to the pool, wear your suit.

…then a hat will keep you cool
…then flip flops will keep you cool
…then some shades will keep you cool

I also made Summer and Winter labels! You can make a Winter Clothes set, and hand out all the summer pieces and the winter pieces to the kids. Put the Summer and Winter labels on either side of your flannelboard. Tell the kids to look at their pictures and decide if they are summer clothes or winter clothes, then they can come up and put their piece under the correct label.

If you’ve spent any time here at Mel’s Desk, you know I usually use clip art for my storytime flannels. Last week, though, I made a set of felt strawberries for Flannel Friday, and I had a lot of fun getting out the felt again! Making the strawberries and seeing everyone’s amazing ideas from last week’s Round Up made me want to make more felt flannelboards. But it also reminded me of why I like clip art so much, so I thought I’d share those reasons with you.

Durability

We have time for free play after our storytimes, and I love letting the kids play with the flannelboard pieces we used in storytime. It’s a great opportunity for them to revisit what we did in storytime, tell their own stories, and talk with their grownups. Not all kids have a flannelboard at home* so they are often fascinated by the ones at the library. When I have laminated clip art pieces for them to play with, I don’t have to worry as much if the kids are being gentle with the pieces or are they keeping them out of their mouths. My clip art pieces are made with color printed images with a 110lb cardstock backing sandwiched between 3mil hot laminating sheets. They are really stiff and fairly thick, which makes them easy for little hands to pick up, and if they go in someone’s mouth, they don’t dissolve instantly. For older groups, I like being able to hand out pieces to all the kids that they can bring up and put up on the board, and the durability of the clip art pieces is nice for this purpose as well.

Duplication

When a piece does go missing or a set does get worn out, I like clip art because it is so easy to make another set. I just print another file to the color printer, and laminate them again. I don’t have to start from scratch. If a child does inadvertantly damage a piece, I can truthfully reassure the parents that it’s no trouble for me to make another one. Also, my library has about 60 “resource packs” for storytime, boxes full of puppets, books, flannelboard sets, rhyme and activity ideas, and so forth. Staff can request these themed kits and get a jump start on their storytime planning for the week. I’m one of the staff who get to develop and maintain these kits, and clip art sets make it easy for me to put the same set in with different themes, ultimately offering more choices for staff in each kit.

Size

When I found out that the developmental milestone for 20/20 vision isn’t until 36 months, I immediately began replacing all my fist-sized flannelboard pieces with larger ones, to help out those still-developing toddler eyes. Well, the bigger a felt piece gets, the floppier it gets, and the harder it is to maneuver on and off the flannelboard. But the stiff laminated pieces are still easy to move around, no matter how big I make them.

Visual Interest

Our kids are pretty visually sophisticated these days. They grow up surrounded by images that have been carefully crafted and designed. By using clip art, I can use photographs and different styles of cartoon images in addition to my felt pieces. I think this adds variety and helps keep the visual interest of the storytime high.

Ease

Another reason I like clip art flannelboard pieces so much is that it’s very easy for me to make them. At my library, I have access to a color printer, a color copier, a hot laminator, a cold laminator, and a budget which allows me to purchase the laminating sheets, the thick cardstock, and the Velcro sticky dots for the backs. The hot laminator is actually pretty key. I’ve found that it’s much harder to glue felt or make Velcro dots stick to the back of our cold laminated items (one of our staff came up with the idea to sand the laminate first to help felt adhere), but everything sticks like a charm to the hot laminated ones. Plus we have volunteers who are able to help with the cutting and laminating. If I didn’t have all of these resources at work, trust me, I would be making different decisions about my flannelboard production!

Felt Sets

Please note: I do still like felt sets! I do still use felt sets! And thanks to all the ideas on Flannel Fridays I have a feeling I am going to be making more… So come back next week; I’m planning a post about why I like felt for flannelboards! Why do YOU like what you use?

*Homemade FlannelBoards

I often remind my grownups how easy it is to make their own flannelboards: Buy an inexpensive cookie baking sheet at the dollar store or the grocery store, and purchase a sheet of adhesive-backed felt at a craft store. Then just stick the felt onto the cookie sheet! For a couple of dollars, you can buy your own sheets of felt and cut simple circles and squares and triangles and your kids can go to town. Plus, then you can flip over the sheet and use magnets on the other side!

Flannel Friday is being hosted at Katie’s place this week! Check out her blog Storytime Katie for the Round Up!

This idea grew from Abby’s Apple Tree flannelboard. I wanted to make something to go with The Little Mouse, the Red Ripe Strawberry, and the Big Hungry Bear for our bookmobile librarian, but he doesn’t have a huge flannelboard and I didn’t want to give him a tree to grapple with.

So I decided to go with strawberries, just like the book.

You know me, I started with clip art! I found a really beautiful photograph of a strawberry, but I couldn’t find more than one image that would work. More and more, I am trying to build flannel sets that support conversation and discussion. I wanted to be able to talk with the kids about which strawberry was bigger, which was rounder, that sort of thing. Since I didn’t want to have five exactly identical strawberries in my set, I let that beautiful strawberry go and looked at cartoon clip art instead.

I tried to squish and stretch a nice cartoon strawberry into different shapes and sizes with the Edit Picture tools, but they were looking pretty lame, and finally, I said, “Hello? Mel? You could do this quicker with felt.”

Here’s a photo:

The seeds are stitched on using cross-stitch floss, but only because it was easier for me to use what was in the house than to go out and get puff paint or something. Don’t feel obligated to do the same!

Here’s a scan of all the leaves and strawberries in separate pieces, that you can print and use as a pattern if you’d like.

What can you do with these strawberries? You can use Abby’s rhyme, adapted for strawberries instead of apples:

Five red strawberries, sweet to the core.
Bear came and ate one and then there were four.

Four red strawberries, growing near a tree.
Bear came and ate one and then there were three.

Three red strawberries, for you and you and you.
Bear came and ate one and then there were two.

Two red strawberries, sitting in the sun.
Bear came and ate one and then there was one.

One red strawberry, left all alone.
Bear came and ate it and then there were none.

Or you could use a mouse puppet, and say, “Mouse is going to hide all these lovely strawberries from the big hungry bear! Which one should he hide first? How about the skinniest strawberry? Which one is skinny and thin?” Go through all the berries, using as many good describing words as you can. I made the littlest one green on purpose so we could talk about ripe and unripe!

Or you could sing Down Around the Corner! “Down around the corner at the grocery store / Were five strawberries and not one more.”

Have fun! I think they look very pretty and they are making me hungry for summer!

I got a request this week for the file for my Spacesuit flannelboard!

I mentioned this set in another post, but never shared my file for it. Largely because it doesn’t exist!

I use cartoon and photo clip art often for my flannelboards, and I’ve gotten pretty good at editing the clip art: taking out parts I don’t want, changing the colors, altering the dimensions. But this astronaut just didn’t cooperate. I couldn’t separate the boots and gloves from the rest of the image, and I couldn’t erase the astronaut’s face from inside the helmet. And I wanted them all separate so I could talk about the different parts of the space suit one by one.

What I wound up doing was printing out the astronaut as large as I could, then enlarging him even further on the photocopier. Then I went old school with the scissors and just cut out the parts that I wanted from the rest of the image. For the gloves, I thought his right hand had better detail than his left, so I reversed the astronaut image and enlarged it both ways, so one would be right handed and one would be left handed. [Yes, this whole process was a little OCD.] Once I had all the pieces I wanted, I lay them out on cardstock and laminated them, then cut them out and put a Velcro sticky dot on the back.

So: no pretty color file. But I did make a scan of my pieces, and I also have a file of the original astronaut clip art. So you can at least have a grainy B&W image of the boots, gloves, and helmet to use as a pattern, or the clip art to print in color and enlarge on your own copiers and cut and trim yourself.

(Ed. 11/11: I am no longer sharing my clip art files due to copyright concerns, so I’ve taken down the link to the scans. However, if you search in Microsoft Word clip art you may find the original file I started with.)

My favorite thing to do with this set is to sing “If You’re Going to the Moon, Wear Your Boots” to the tune of “If You’re Happy and You Know It.”

If you’re going to the moon, wear your boots
If you’re going to the moon, wear your boots
If you’re going to the moon, this is what you have to do,
If you’re going to the moon, wear your boots.

…wear your gloves
…wear your helmet

No pictures today because the week went by too darn fast! I’ll add them when I can.

Today I have a new set of clip art for you: Bugs! There’s a green inchworm and a yellow bee and a blue butterfly, a brown worm, an orange lightning bug, a purple dragonfly, and a red ladybug. Oh, and a black ant. They’re pretty cute. Check out the Color and Counting Sets post for a few ideas of what to do with them.

PLUS! Two more ideas:

Categories

I’m also including a couple of labels: One says “Crawls” and one says “Flies.” You can put the labels up on either side of your flannelboard, and hand out all the bugs to the children. Ask them to think about their insect and decide if it is a flying bug or a crawling bug. Encourage them to talk it over with their grown-ups! Conversation is so amazing for building language skills!

Remember some of them will be tricky: The ladybug flies AND crawls, and you can’t see its wings. Does the worm crawl, even though it doesn’t have legs? So you can take the ladybug and the worm out of the mix for toddlers, if you’d like. When the kids have decided which category their bug belongs to, you can call them up and have them put their pieces under the right label. You can count which category has more insects in it. Are you noticing this sorting, comparing, and counting is early math? How cool!

Bug in the Rug

I was looking at old storytime idea books in our professional collection today, and found this idea in “Felt Board Fingerplays” (by Liz and Dick Wilmes, 1997), so I quick made a rug to add to this post!

Put one of each kind of insect on the flannelboard, and put the rug at the top. Have the children look at and name all the bugs, then tell them to close their eyes. (Miss Mary Liberry made up a perfect, simple keep-your-eyes-closed song you can sing during activities like this.) While they are not peeking, slip one of the bugs under the rug. Tell the children to open their eyes, and have them try to figure out which bug is missing. You could say a quick chant like, “Under the rug, under the rug, which little bug is under the rug?” Repeat this a few times with different bugs. Try sneaking two bugs under the rug!

(Ed. 11/11: I am no longer sharing my clip art files due to copyright concerns, so I’ve taken down the link to the files. However, if you search in Microsoft Word clip art you may find the original files I started with.)

Anne at So Tomorrow is hosting Flannel Friday this week, so keep an eye out over there for the Round Up! Thanks Anne!

It’s the fifth Flannel Friday already! It is so fun to have new folks participate from week to week. Welcome aboard! Past Round Ups are here.

Hello to these ladies, new to Flannel Friday this week!

15 Animals
from Abby at Abby (the) Librarian
follow her on Twitter @abbylibrarian

Five Astronauts Went Up In Space
from Katie at Story Time Secrets
Follow her on Twitter @sharingsoda

Where Has My Little Dog Gone
From Sarah at Read Rabbit Read
[she’s not on Twitter…yet!]

Hi, Pizza Man!
from Tracey at 1234 More Storytimes
follow her on Twitter at @tcy28

And welcome back to everyone else!

A Blanket for the Princess (Royal Wedding alert!)
from Anne at So Tomorrow
Follow her on Twitter @sotomorrow

Michaels (flannel sets and puppets on sale now)
from Katie at Storytime Katie
Follow her on Twitter @katietweetsya

Shapes Rhyme with Finger Puppets!
from Mary at Miss Mary Liberry
Follow her on Twitter @daisycakes

Tired Bunnies (for a Mother Storytime theme)
from Mollie at Miss Mollie’s Storytime Fun
Follow her on Twitter @molliekay

Dear Zoo
from Nicole at Narrating Tales of Preschool Storytime
Follow her on Twitter @Nikarella

Five Green and Speckled Frogs (song prop)
from me here at Mel’s Desk
I’m on Twitter @MelissaZD

BONUS! If you are a newbie to making flannelboards you MUST check out Storytime Katie’s walk-through of her process. It is very detailed and has tons of pictures and lots of tips!

Thanks all! Are your storytime files getting thicker? Mine are!