ExploraStory

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Today was a good day for imagining eating, maybe not so good if you were really hungry though.  It was all about big food!  The biggest turnip you ever saw, so big it took a man, his wife, their daughter, the dog, the cat to get it to budge, and that wasn’t even getting it out of the ground!  We also read about (I think a new favorite) The Giant Jam Sandwich.  One day, 4 million wasps converge on the town of Itching Down.  What are the residents to do?

We also read Sheep in a Jeep by Nancy Shaw and Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs by Judi Barrett.  Lots of fun stories today!  But the result was, we weren’t sure what to do with big food like that.  How could you make a huge slice of bread, or what if there was a meatball the size of a bush?  There were a lot of pancakes in the last story, and it ended up that there were a lot of pancakes in the art work too.  Everyone seemed to take to the play doh today, which is an excellent base for pancakes.
A pancake here:

A pancake there:

Pancakes everywhere!
     

I, Elizabeth, filled in for Henry this week. Henry was off puppeteering. We investigated big and little and the relativity of it all. We read some great stories. The first was Charlie the Chicken by Nick Denchfield. Charlie has many large body parts that pop right out. But if you think Charlie is big, you should see his mother!

Then we got big and little ourselves with “My Ups and Downs” on Jim Gill Sings Do Re Mi. We also took turns looking into both ends of a pair of binoculars. Next was I’m the Biggest Thing in the Ocean by Kevin Sherry, a boisterous, buoyant tale about a giant squid who is convinced that he is the absolute biggest.

We rounded things out with Eric Carle’s Papa, Please Get the Moon for Me, in honor of  tonight’s full moon. This is a story that not only serves as a wonderful introduction to the lunar cycle, but is also a stunning example of picture book art. Monica wants her father to bring her the moon. Alas, it’s too big, so they wait until it is small enough for him to carry it to her down the longest ladder ever seen.

When we started to explore the world of big and small through art, Meadow, Daniel and Olivia created underwater scenes with creatures of various sizes and shapes. Jacob focused on crabs and the color red. Unfortunately, neither Henry’s nor my camera batteries was charged, so only two pictures lived to tell the tale. Below is Jacob’s red crab panorama.

I needed the quick fix of reading a really fun, new book to start off explorastory this week.  Not an uncommon thing, and it wasn’t too off topic either since we really didn’t establish one after last week’s open ended exploration.  Anyway, we started with Ghosts in the House! by Kazuno Kohara which I absolutely didn’t want to wait until next halloween to read.  What do you do when you discover you live in a haunted house?  Maybe it’s not so bad if you know how to catch ghosts, as the little girl does.

Then getting down to the idea of the hour was Which Would You Rather Be? by William “can do no wrong” Steig.  Would you rather be a dog or a cat?  Rain or snow?  Thunder of lightning?  An elbow or a knee?  It’s up to you to decide what you like about what you want to be.  And, as always, we saw some pretty creative ideas. 

What if you were a duck, like Henry is?       Or a cat, Like Lauren?

Or the ocean, like Spencer?

Today was kind of a hodge podge of stuff because I didn’t know who was going to brave the post holiday AM.  It was difficult enough for me, so our small but intrepid group was much appreciated.  And entertaining!  There was a lot of dancing and running around to the tune of Kids Beat Bop by Daddy A Go-Go on their album Eat Every Bean and Pea  On Your Plate.  Around this we read The Puddle by David McPhail, Grumpy Bird by Jeremy Tankard and Bear About Town by Stella Blackstone.

These books generated some pretty disparate thoughts, like how would an ostrich ride a surfboard?  Unfortunately, there wasn’t quite enough time to find out, in today’s storytime at least.

                      +                        =        ?????

Another week exploring stories, exploring them from the inside and making them up as we go along.  After some books and enegizing songs, we read Move! by Steve Jenkins & Robin Page.  Their books focus on nature and animals illustrated using a ripped paper collage technique.  Move! talks and illustrates the motion of animals, which shows that sometimes very different animals can move in very similar ways.  Whales and polar bears both dive, cheetahs and road runners both run.  We did too!  It was a great story to act out because it was part animal learning, part trivia, and part precursor to many entertaining evenings playing charades.

 We made up some more stories too.  There were princesses, mermaids, more animals and monsters.  This is a good place to mention that one of the underlying concepts to literacy is the ability to understand narration, and that stories have a beginning, a middle and an end.  What we did today in Explorastory isn’t really anything different than what children do so much of all the time: imagining.  The framework that we put the storytelling in gave some structure that strengthens the ability to understand narration.  The stories were told in a group setting, out loud, and had to answere questions like “what happened next?” and “what about the other character, what happened to her?”  In this sense, even though we didn’t ‘make’ anything, we were getting a lot of practice with abilities that get us ready to read, but in a very expressive, kid-centric and reggio mode.

WOW!  What a cool week!  This was the first week that we explored stories and were creating something without using the materials!  We used ourselves instead!  Here’s how it happened:  We were reading Hondo & Fabian by Peter McCarty and Maddie suggested that we act out the story.  So some people were Hondo the Dog and some were Fabian the Cat, one was Fred (Hondo’s friend) and the rest of us were the audience.  It was fun to read this story and act out things like jumping in waves and eating turkey sandwiches.  It was so fun that we kept going after the story was over and made up our own stories!

We broke up into groups that didn’t really stay so seperate which was totally fine, and worked up a story in our imagination.  Then we took turns telling out loud and acting out the story we made up!  Maddie and Lauren told the story of Peter Rabbit and Flopsy, Daniel told Star Wars: The Clone Wars, Alex told the story of Jumping Jacks.  Never heard it before?  Jumping Jacks was doing a lot of jumping jacks all over the place.  Then some monsters started attacking her, so she killed them.  She did more jumping jacks, but it just wasn’t the same.  She made the monsters come back to life.  But they bothered her too much so she killed them again.  This time, Jumping Jacks jumped for joy.

We heard the story of Franklin the Turtle, whose mother told him it was okay to go outside but don’t go in the forest!  Sure enough he did anyway, got lost and hid in his shell.  He’d probably still be there if it wasn’t for his friends who came and rescued him.  Lastly, Yang told the tale Skeleton.  We turned the lights off and watched as the Skeleton captured a bat and brought it home to feed the ghosts in his castle.  When he got home, there was a witch there.  They had to do battle, and Skeleton won.  The whole thing was very scary.  I hope we continue this next week, and I will try to be prepared to capture some of these images!

Sometimes I like to bring books to explorastory that have really fun artwork in them, and sometimes I like the books that have will get everyone really excited about reading.  A book that does both came to us recently, and it’s called Scoot! by Cynthia Falwell.  There’s lots of activity by the sunny pond, but for the most part, the six silent turtles sit still as stones. 

Then we read What Do You See When You Shut Your Eyes?  There were lots more rhymes and sounds repeated, and it was really fun to try each exercise.  What do you see when you look really close?  We used magnifying glasses for that.  What do you yell when you yell really loud?  What do you see when you go to bed? 

We made some different things.  A few people just wanted to experiment with the magnifying glasses and some other stuff from the science bucket, like the marbles and lightbulbs.  Most people made what they could see when their eyes were closed.  Take a look at the green girl with white hair and an angel in the clouds.

Halloween!  What a fun time!  It was such a nice day, too.  Did you enjoy dressing up?  I did!  I was a penguin, although it was a strange looking kind of penguin.  A lot of people thought I was a raven, so maybe people want to be scared….so scary stories it is!  We told the story of Big John (who you don’t want to be there for when he gets here!) and the Teeny Tiny Woman.  We read one story that I really like, but it is kind of wierd.  It’s called I’m the Best Artist in the Ocean! It’s about a giant squid who claims to be the best artist underwater.  He does brag about it a little bit, but he’s mostly silly. 

Anyway, the Teeny Tiny woman was a very scary story.  The Teeny Tiny woman needs food for her Teeny Tiny dinner, so she takes a Teeny Tiny walk and finds a Teeny Tiny bone.  But when she takes the Teeny Tiny bone back to her Teeny Tiny house, she hears a Teeny Tiny voice say “…giiive meeee baaack myyy boooone!”  It’s very scary.  And who was it that wanted their bone back?  Could it be a rabbit?

Or a mean, hungry dog?

Or even one of us!

Today was a great storytime, and I can tell it was because I didn’t read everything that I brought.  It’s more fun when kids decide what to do.  We did read two fun books, a new one called Hello! Is This Grandma? by Ian Whybrow and Can You Guess? by Margaret Miller.

Can You Guess? is really fun because it asks a simple question like what do you put in a mailbox and seriously looks at, through photography, various silly answers like an elephant or a watermelon.�
We were going to read another book, but conversation turned to halloween costumes and Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz, and all about sparkly red shoes.  Well it turns out that three whole people were wearing shoes that lit up and sparklead!  I took a movie of the shoes in their sparkly jazziness but I wasn’t able to get it right off the camera, so stay tuned for it.  For now here’s just a picture.  And before all this came up, Laura had shown us a collection of gems she found, and some of those were sparkly too!

What we did do was to imagine things that don’t normally sparkle, like shoes, and make them sparkle.  Here’s just a few:
            Shoes                                   A dog

There was a fractured fairy tale party at Lee road earlier this week, which got me thinking a lot about storytelling and how stories go.  Fractured fairy tales are stories that are told with familiar characters or plots from fairy tales, but they have a new ending, characters, setting, or sometimes a whole different story.  In Explorastory, we read Jim Aylesworth’s wonderfully illustrated (by Barbara McClintock) version of The Gingerbread Man.  The cover doesn’t really give you a good sense of what the black-and-white cow looks like wearing a dress. Check it out, it’s wierdly minotaur-ish.

The book Can’t Catch Me  is another story involving big dreams, lots of running, trickiness and gulping at the end.  I like what the ice cube taunts:

“Can’t catch me!  I’m off to the sea, where I will grow as BIG as an iceberg and bump boats when they aren’t lookin’!” 

So the question was: “What would you chase all over the place?”  Jordan would chase a cup of milk, Caroline would chase popsicles, and Jacob would chase a duck.  Jacob also said he’d chase the sun, and in order to chase he would build a plane to get him up to it.  But then what, Jacob?

 
Maddy made up a big story about what she’d chase and wrote it on the back of the illustration.  See, Maddy, the cow and dad are chasing the ice cube down to the ocean.  At the same time, mom has been grabbed by the octopus!  But don’t worry, all the fish are saving her…whew!