S is for Snake

And it's time for Letter S! There were so many cool things we could do for S that it was not easy to narrow it down. But I did.
Firstly, I pulled out our Folk Manis shark puppet to greet the kids as they arrived.
It was a very small crowd today so we didn't get very loud when we sang, but as always we started with "If You're Happy and You Know It". We moved on to talk about the weather and then sang our alphabet.
Show & Tell was small but we had a seashell and Spiderman make an appearance.

Our first book was "The Little Mouse, The Red Ripe Strawberry and The Big Hungry Bear" by Don and Audrey Wood.
Next came the Shaker Eggs. I recently purchased more shaker eggs for my storytime supply closet so we will be doing more songs like the one we did today-"Shake Your Shaker Eggs" by We Kids Rock.
Our second book today was "Can You Make a Scary Face?" by Jan Thomas- a great interactive picture book.

And then came the shark! I am super excited about my Storytime Shark.

I got this idea from Pinterest of course and Kristina from Toddler Approved. I made my shark from a piece of heavy weight poster board and painted it grey. I cut some fish out with my Cricut and added the letters to one set.

I also made another for shapes and colors and another with numbers. I am hoping my shark will hold up for many storytimes to come!
For today's storytime I passed out all of the letters we have learned so far and as we went through the alphabet whoever had that letter brought it up and fed it to the shark. It was fun!
After that we headed to the tables and our activities.
Our Letter S animal was a snake.

For this one, I gave the kids strips of colored paper along with scissors so we could practice our scissor skills. They made their own triangles to glue onto their snake.
I recently added a set of alphabet stamps to our storytime supplies and got to use them right away for the letter S! There were several great printables out there for this purpose, but in the end I made my own.

I made up 3 different sets of alphabet printables leaving 8 blanks on each one so they could use the stamps I gave them to fill that space. This allowed me to have 3 trays out (actually 6 since I also borrowed a stamp set from a mom). The trays are a new acquisition as well and I am so excited to have them.
Finally we made our rockets or SPACESHIPS since we are now on S, but these were the rockets that went missing when we were on letter "R". This was another Pinterest activity that I am incredibly thankful for the printable. It was shared by Buggy and Buddy.

I cut them all out ahead of time to save time and just had the kids color their rocket and we added the pipette and straw to the back.

These were a hit. And I couldn't be happier.
I sent home some Letter S printables for the kids as well as a Space Stamp. I also sent home this printable from The Kindergarten Connection. This printable will work with a magnetic alphabet but it will also work with our Alphabet Monster caps.
Our kids also took home a free book today- "The First Strawberries" by Bruchac.
That's all for "S". See you in a few weeks for "T"!
~Mrs. Angel