Happy 4th Anniversary to Flannel Friday! To celebrate,
we're having a Guest Post Palooza and I have the honor of hosting Grace Smart
and her very first Flannel Friday post. Without further ado, here's Grace.
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Flannel Board Table
I have been doing Story Time for 2 years as an assistant
to the Youth Services Librarian, and have created dozens of flannel boards
during that time to use in StoryTime. I have read on other blogs that some
librarians allow their young patrons to get up and interact with their flannel
boards DURING STORYTIME. This seems like a great way to engage the kids, but
unfortunately we have too many children attending for this to be practical.
Nonetheless, I think flannel boards are a great early literacy tool and I
wanted to find a way to get our flannels into the hands of our young patrons.
I pondered this idea for a good while, until one day my
coworker came across this
post by Lisa M. Shaia on Thrive After Three.
I immediately knew that this was something I wanted to
do, so I started brainstorming with my coworkers! We were able to find a
flannel table cover for about $10. It’s a green table cover for card games with
elastic around the edges, and it was a perfect fit for the small round tables
already in our children’s area. We ordered two so that we could switch them out
and clean them when necessary. (Hopefully they will hold up in a washing
machine.) Once we had the flannel cover, I started working on the first flannel
board table for our children’s area. I created the cars and trucks by tracing
the outlines of clipart. The roads are simply rectangles of different lengths
and sizes (with painted stripes down the middle). I made the road pieces
all different sizes with corners and straight pieces so the kids can rearrange
and interact with them. I used fabric paint for all of the details on all
the pieces from tires to road signs and more.
Since this activity seemed like the perfect opportunity
to reinforce the early literacy concepts that we promote during each and every
StoryTime, I created information cards with talking points for the parents.
These I laminated so they would last as long as possible.
Here is my first Flannel Board Table, “Driving Around
Town”.
This has been out in the children’s area for over a
month. We have found this to be very successful. All the pieces have been
rearranged at the end of each day! And we have had many compliments from
parents about this activity. All of the pieces have held up well at this
point even though the roads are starting to be a little wrinkled. I am working
on a few new sets of flannels so that I can swap these out in the future to
keep things interesting. Overall, “Driving Around Town” has been a really
successful interactive flannel experience for our library.
Thank you, Bridget, for hosting!
Grace Smart
Denton Public Library
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Thank you, Grace, for sharing this great idea with us!
Mollie
is hosting the roundup this week.
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Our March/April Flannel Friday Fairy Godmother is Mollie.