"Five Little Snowmen" Booklet

Have you heard this song?

Five little snowmen fat,
Each with a funny hat.
Out came the sun
And melted one.
Oh, what a sight was that.

Four little snowmen fat...

I taught that to my kids today and they had fun pretending to melt like snowmen. We made a little booklet for it. I cut a piece of light blue paper into six equal parts. We used finger prints to make the snowmen. I started with the end of the song (one snowman) first and painted the children's pinkies with white paint. Then I painted two fingers, then three, and so forth. When they were dry, I stapled the pages together with a blank page on top. I had printed out the song and cut up each verse. The kids glued the verses to the correct page, on the opposite side.

Then they decorated their snowmen with silly hats!

Some of them got really creative!

Here's what I would change about this if I did it again. I'd use a darker paper so the hand prints showed up better, although not so dark that the kids couldn't decorate it with markers or crayons. I also would like to make each page bigger, but I was really trying to just use one piece of paper per child. But the kids enjoyed making them (and reading them to each other!) so that's all that matters, right?

Our Little Books

Today we talked about librarians and then we made our own books! We discussed how books have characters and usually some sort of problem that needs to be solved. Some kids followed this "rule" and others did not. But no matter how they did it, the stories were great! And for some reason, we had a lot of stories about princesses dying or being eaten. Hmmm.... Anyway, this is how we made our books. I just put together four small pieces of paper (about 1/4 the size of a normal piece of printing paper) and stapled them along the left side. I wrote "By ________" at the bottom of the front page. I let the kids draw some pictures as I went around the room asking them what was happening in their stories. I wrote the title for them and then a sentence or two on each page. On the last page I had written "The End" in dotted lines so they could trace it. Here's one of their stories:

Hot Air Balloon   By Morgan

 The hot air balloon crashed!

Then the airplane came and took the balloon to the hospital.

The hot air balloon got better and blew away.  The End

See? Short and sweet. I don't think my age-group could have handled a longer book, so I think four pages was perfect. Maybe if I could sit down with them one-on-one then a longer book would work. But in my experience, big groups mean shorter attention spans!