Farm Storytime!

I had a daycare class of three-year-olds and four-year-olds request a special storytime all about the farm. Their daycare is taking them on a field trip to a farm next week and the kids were PUMPED to hear farm stories today!

(I was also pumped because I think farm storytimes are my favorite storytimes. Also, because I was reading four brand-new-to-me books that I ordered from different libraries in our library system. And I definitely have some new favorites to be purchased for our storytime collection.)

(And! I really made a conscientious effort today to work on transitions between books and to really introduce each title by pointing to the words.)

I started off with “Cock-a-Doodle Quack! Quack!” by Ivor Baddiel & Sophie Jubb.

This was a case where I really feel like I found an absolute perfect book for me to read. While the text is naturally funny (the story is about a baby rooster trying to figure out what to say to wake the other animals up in the morning), I also found myself raising my eyebrows and shrugging — and the kids fell into giggles after every page. But not the kind of off-topic giggles that can occur; actual responding to the story giggles!

Then I asked the group about their favorite farm animals which led into “Well, Miss Katie’s favorite farm animal is a pig…and look, she’s got a story about piggies RIGHT HERE.”

I read “Piggies in the Pumpkin Patch” by Mary Peterson & Jennifer Rofe.

Short and sweet, this book went by quick! The kids loved it though and asked for the book to be read again. As much as I wanted to oblige, their teacher stepped in for me and told the kids that they could read it at school again. So, then I asked the kids if they wanted to grow some pumpkins and they jumped up to do our action rhyme:

“Pumpkin, Pumpkin”
Pumpkin, pumpkin on the ground, (touch the ground)
How’d you get so big and round? (make a big circle)
Once you were a seed so small, (pinch fingers together)
Now you are a great big ball! (make a big circle)
Pumpkin, pumpkin on the ground, (touch the ground)
How’d you get so big and round? (make a big circle)

Next up, I dropped the ball a little on my transition, but we did our “Old MacDonald” flannelboard. I asked the kids about the different animals in the song and said that we should be on the lookout for them in our next book (leaving the animals up on the board). And then, we read “Hurry Hurry” by Eve Bunting.

As we went through the story (each page only has four words on it at the most), we matched up animals on the flannelboard and in the story, putting the animals away as we went. I think the kids really enjoyed this interactivity, and the story in “Hurry Hurry” is simple enough that the kids could follow it even as we broke away from the book to work with the felt animals. The end of “Hurry Hurry” involves the arrival of a new chick at the farm which was a natural segue to sing “Over in the Barnyard” with finger puppets. We started with the yellow chickies.

“Over in the Barnyard”
Over in the barnyard
Early in the morning
See the yellow chickies
Standing in a row
See the busy farmer
Giving them their breakfast
Cheep, cheep, cheep, cheep
Off they go (remove finger puppet)
[Also, pink piggies and spotted cows]
Credit: Teach-nology Farm Songs

Our next book was “How Kind” by Mary Murphy.

I made sure to define “kind” for the kids in my introduction of this book to make sure that they all understood what was going on. I also told them that this book would be a lot like another one we had read earlier — it was their job to help me figure out which one it was like. In “How Kind,” animals on the farm do favors for one another resulting in another baby chick hatching. At the end of the story, the kids were able to point to “Hurry Hurry” as the book that this one was similar to. One enthusiastic boy shouted, “Because they both have baby chicks!”

Next I asked the kids what else happens on a farm besides animals. No one was able to get the word “crops” out, but we did get a lot of food called out. So, I told the kids we were going to grow some food ourselves next in our action rhyme:

“Farm Chores”
This is the way we plant our seeds, plant our seeds, plant our seeds
This is the way we plant our seeds so early in the morning
[Water our seeds, weed our seeds, our seeds grow up, pick our plants, eat our plants]

Then, I told the kids that my favorite thing grown on farms was apples! And that led us to our fingerplay: “Way Up High in the Apple Tree.” I was so excited that the kids knew this one from school, so they all did the rhyme along with me.

And with that, we had arrived at our last story of the day, “Clip-Clop” by Nicola Smee.

I love this book — it’s a great storytime book, with a fabulous rhythm to it. I always speed up my reading as Mr. Horse speeds up his ride, so that when the other animals go flying the kids are laughing and gasping. And my favorite part of reading it to a group is the one child who is very concerned that someone got hurt, and is very relieved once we discover the animals want to fall off again.

A super simple craft today — a paper pig mask that my teen volunteers had attached to popsicle sticks.

I found our pig mask template here at Animal Jr.