Wild West Storytime

Inspired by the book Fandango Stew by David Davis, I decided to do a Wild West themed storytime.

Story: Fandango Stew by David Davis. A cute Western themed version of Stone Soup. Slim and his grandson Luis ride into the town of Skinflint, where the sheriff tries to get rid of them. Slim offers to make a fandango stew, using one single fandango bean, but suggests that other towns' fandango stews were better because they had salt and pepper, onions, potatoes, etc... Slowly, the stew takes shape, the whole town has a party, and everyone is sad when Slim and Luis have to leave town the next day. If, like me, you have trouble figuring out how to sing the lines that Slim and Luis sing: "Chili's fine and so is barbecue, but nothing's finer than fandango stew," it fits nicely with "She'll be coming round the mountain."

Game: The Sheriff Says. Just a game of Simon Says with a couple of Western phrases thrown in. "The sheriff says reach for the sky!"

Story: Ten Gallon Bart by Susan Stevens Crummel. Bart, the dog sheriff, is ready to retire. He wants to howl at the moon, sleep until noon, and go fishing whenever he wants. Unfortunately, Billy the Kid chooses his last day on the job to come to town. All the townsfolk promise to back up old Bart, but when that mean goat gets to town, everyone disappears. At least until Bart needs them the most. I particularly had fun playing Billy the Kid when he says "I'm BAAAAAAD" and "I'm MAAAAAD" cause I do a pretty great sheep impression.

Game: Hot Potato. I took a pair of pantyhose and cut off a length, tied an egg-shaker into the toe and filled it with scarves. Told all the kids it was my fake rattlesnake and shook the egg shaker to show them. Then we played music by Buck Howdy and played Hot Potato with the rattler.

Craft: I explained a little bit about the history of branding cattle and asked the kids to design their own brands, using either their initial or some of the common brand symbols. Then I had them draw their brands on little circle stickers and go searching for cattle to rustle. I had cut out about 100 cows for two separate storytimes, and I hid them around the meeting room. I have a really cool worksheet for the brand design with examples and other fun stuff, but I can't think of a way to attach it. I suppose if anyone is interested, just leave a comment with your email addy and I will send it to you.

Beautiful Brazil (Actually more of a general South American storytime)

The summer reading theme for CSLP libraries this year is One World, Many Stories, which is a graciously broad topic and easy to find themes for. I was really excited to plan a storytime featuring Brazil, partly because I love Nancy Van Laan's story So Say the Little Monkeys and partly because I just wanted to hang up beautiful pictures of Iguazzu Falls all over the meeting room.

Turns out I had a little trouble with Brazil. First, I decided that So Say the Little Monkeys was a little too young for my summertime target demographic, K-3rd grade. It worked well with pre-schoolers, but it felt like it would only work with older kids if I turned it into an action rhyme or something. So off I went to find other picture books about Brazil. I work for a suburban county library system with a pretty forceful weeding policy on aged and damaged books, and the branch that I work in is particularly draconian. Now fortunately our collections management people have kept us pretty well-stocked, but older books can sometimes be difficult to find. I managed to get the single copy of James the Vine Puller by Martha Bennett Stiles that our library has left. I looked at several non-fiction titles, which were far too long for read-alouds, and probably not very interesting besides. Eventually, I settled on Love and Roast Chicken by Barbara Knutson, which is actually set in the Andes, but I figured I had a little leeway.

So here is what I ended up with.

Story: James the Vine Puller, in which a clever turtle gets bullied by an elephant and whale, and then tricks them into playing tug-of-war with each other, both thinking they are battling against the little turtle. A nice trickster tale, although the action surrounding the old switcheroo might move a little too fast for the 5-6 year olds. It helped to use predictive reading and ask the kids what they thought James was going to do with the rope once he tied it to the elephant and the whale.

Song: O sapo não lava o pé

Words here. Video here.

An adorable song in Portuguese about a frog with dirty feet. One minor word of warning about this--Most of my kids wanted to sing this in English as well, and there is just not a translation that works with the melody.

Story: Love and Roast Chicken. Cuy the guinea pig is just trying to have a nice vegetarian snack when Tio Antonio the fox spies him and decides to make a meal out of Cuy. Then the quick-thinking guinea pig has to come up with numerous ways to escape the fox. But when the farmer catches Cuy eating his alfalfa, Cuy has to be more clever than ever to escape both the farmer and the fox.

Craft: Although we are seriously outside of the season for Carnival, I knew the kids would have fun making masks, so I used some of these templates from Activity Village. We had feathers and markers and sequins, and a great big mess!

Filler activity: How the Brazilian Beetles Got Their Beautiful Coats, a storytelling with stick puppets. I had planned for this to be an actual story for storytime, but there wasn't enough time for it. I used it for a group of day campers who had to wait for transportation at the library, and they seemed to enjoy it.

There are some wonderful photos on flickr with Creative Commons licenses of Brazilian wildlife. Try looking up jaguarundis, tamanduas, macaws, margays, sloths, coatis, caimans. For flora, look up pau brasil, ipe amarelo and pampas grass.