I presented a Back to School Themed story time today at Tony Reyes Bilingual Child Care Center. There was one book in particular that both I and the kids REALLY loved!
It was called Butterflies in My Stomach and Other School Hazards. It's a little bit older, but I was drawn to it by the mixed media art on the pages. The whole book chronicles a young boy on his first day of school and his anxiety. The fun came with the literal interpretations of the common idioms ("if we miss the bus, we'll be in a big pickle," the illustration shows a pickle bus.) The kids giggled throughout the tale and enjoyed the silly humor.
I wanted to use an alphabet song in this story time, but since I had a mixed age range, I didn't want to use the traditional one. Older kids would have found that boring! I searched the internet and came across this great version on You Tube by a group called Have Fun Teaching. Is had a funky beat that the kids loved dancing to. The visual showed the letters in both capital and lower case form, then went through the letter sounds as well. I just used my cell phone to play the video while we all sang along and danced to the funky beat.
Here is the funky fresh alphabet/phonics song link if you want to view it. I thought I could use the iPad to show it at my library story time!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36IBDpTRVNE&feature=youtube_gdata_player