Today was the first storytime of the fall session, and it was so good to see everyone!  We started by watching the Count, Group, and Compare video and I was so happy to see that even the kids were interested in it!  There were lots of good suggestions in that video, but my favorite was from a mom whose daughter had just turned 3 years old.  They filled a large sheet of paper with different threes: the three parts of an egg, three sides of a triangle, etc.

Anyway, we started with bubbles and our usual hello songs, then moved on to the letter of the day.  Today the house of sounds was replaced by a mailbox!  We opened it, and there was a letter inside.  Since there was a cat on the stamp, we thought that might be a clue about the letter of the day.

We were right!  The letter was from Cleo Catterson.  I pointed to each of the words as I read the letter aloud, then we brainstormed some other words that start with the letter C.

We read Pete the Cat and the Missing Cupcakes and Cleo’s Counting Book.  Cleo’s Counting Book had illustrations that were easy to count, and I liked how big the numerals were so I could point to them while I was reading.  With Pete the Cat, we discussed what the word “missing” means, and talked about who we thought ate the cupcakes based on the clues we read about in the story.

Between the two books we took a break to play “Count to ten like…” where we counted to ten like a monster, a baby, even a fish!

For our activity we played a counting game with M&Ms.  We rolled the dice to see how many “sprinkles” to add to our cupcakes, then counted them out.

Erin Honeycutt (aka Ms. Erin) is the Assistant Director/Youth Services Librarian at the Moultrie-Colquitt County Library System.  To support families of very young children, she leads a popular year-round storytime program at the library called Baby Bees.  She also visits local daycares to provide outreach storytimes during the school year.  For more information about library programs and/or more book recommendations, email ehoneycutt(at)mccls(dot)org.