hokey pokey, the song that breaks phones

I'm happy to say that both storytimes were a success this week! 

We sang our hello song and then tried a new ABC song, which begins with Baa Baa Black Sheep and ends with the ABCs.  It wasn't a hit, but it didn't stuptefy the toddlers like the 80s ABC song did.

It's sung by Karen Banks-Lubicz.



We did our quieting down fingerplay and read the first book, We Love Dinosaurs by Lucy Volpin. This was the favorite at last fall's dinosaur storytime and the first storytime's favorite last week.

After the first book, we read another book in the second storytime. They were such good listeners! The second book, Dinosaur Roar, was a favorite book last spring during a storytime about opposites. During last week's storytime, a girl shouted out the colors of each dinosaur, which was adorable.



I brought out the shaker eggs and we did our shaker egg warm-up activity followed by Roly Poly and "Everyone Can Shake Shake Shake."



In the first storytime all the toddlers ran around the room shaking the crap out of their shaker eggs while the adults tried to engage them in the activities.  The second storytime was a completely different story.  They loved both shaker egg activities. I would say participation was at 90%. It was super cool.

After we put the shaker eggs away and did the enormously popular fiddle fiddle meditation we've been doing the past couple weeks, we read Crunch The Shy Dinosaur.  This was the second storytime's favorite book.  It's an interactive book that really focuses on audio levels.  For example, everyone says hello to Crunch in a soft voice and a medium voice, each with entirely different and pretty funny results.  In another part of the story everyone sings happy birthday to Crunch, and in the second storytime we sang so loud I thought I saw the window drapes move a little.



Sadly, the first storytime was just too wound up to enjoy this book. I ended up skipping pages and when I closed the book, I immediately played a song without telling them what I was doing.  This was surprisingly effective. Everyone stopped, looked around, and then got jiggy with it.

I couldn't find the song on youtube, which is by by Carol Hammett and Elaine Bueffel, but here is the general idea.



We finished with the hokey pokey, which has now advanced to curse word status for me.  I usually remember to take my phone of my pocket for storytimes because of all the dancing.  This time I didn't. As we were doing the hokey pokey in the second storytime, my phone flew out of my pocket and the screen shattered into a hundred pieces.  No one was injured, unless you count the phone, which died a terrible death. The last words it ever heard were, "you put your bellybutton in..." sung shrilly by a flock of gleeful toddlers, all completely unaware of its demise.