Bugs!

The Plan

Books

The Ant and the Grasshopper by Ed and Rebecca Emberley
Bugs By the Numbers by Sharon Werner
Butterfly, Butterfly by Petr Horacek
I Love Bugs by Emma Dodd

Extension Activities

Flannelboard: “Five Hungry Ants”
Five hungry ants, marching in a line,
Came upon a picnicwhere they could dine.
They marched into the salad,they marched into the cake,
They marched into the pepper….uh oh, that was a mistake!
AHHHH-CHOOO!
(count down)
Credit: Miss Mary Liberry

Flannelboard: “The Very Hungry Caterpillar”

Action Rhyme w/ Puppet: “Flutter, Flutter Butterfly”
Flutter, flutter butterfly
Floating in the summer sky
Floating by for all to see
Floating by so merrily
Flutter, flutter butterfly
Floating in the summer sky
Credit: Best Kids Book Site

Action Song: “Ants Go Marching”
The ants go marching one by one, hurrah! Hurrah!
The ants go marching one by one, hurrah! Hurrah!
The ants go marching one by one, the little one stops to suck his thumb
And they all go marching down to the ground, to get out of the rain
Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom
(Two/tie shoe; Three/climb a tree)
Credit: Childhood

Craft

For the first summer reading session, I went with a craft where I could easily have extras available in case we got swamped with registrations: scratch art! This is what my demonstration art looked like. I scratched some simple lines for the kids and showed them how you could write as well. I had a lot of preschoolers practicing their letters while my smaller kiddos worked on making the colors come out.

How It Went

Thursday morning

The kids absolutely loved “Five Hungry Ants” on the flannelboard. (Both groups did, but the Thursday morning kids were especially excited by the flannels.) The biggest book success of the day was “Bugs By the Numbers.” The kids loved the big fold-out pages and the different kinds of bugs. I chose to only read the main fact on each page, making it a great storytime read instead of being too long.
Bugs!
Friday morning

This group loved “The Ant and the Grasshopper” and “Butterfly, Butterfly.” But their absolute favorite was “The Ants Go Marching.” They got really into playing around with me and acting out the song. I took it to five ants since they were having such a good time, though I was pretty darn tired by the end of it!