Program Summary: Silly Stories

K-2 Book Adventure Program Summary: Silly Stories

Our March “K-2 Book Adventures” theme was “Silly Stories,” which we built around four stories and three books of riddles. Terri, Sheila, and I presented and we had about 80-90 kids this time, which is proving to be about our average.

We opened with Lazy Jack, electing to start with a surefire story that also introduced the idea of “Noodlehead” tales. Details are posted here.

Then we used PowerPoint slides to feature my favorite kids’ riddle book ever,the What Do You Hear When Cows Sing? (Answer: “Moo-sic”). Scanning the questions, the pictures, and the answers worked really well to capture the kids’ attention between stories.

One of my all-time favorite books is Remy Charlip’s Fortunately. We decided to just tell it without pictures, props, or scans, trading off lines between the three of us. That worked neatly because that meant we would each alternate between “fortunately” and “unfortunately” lines. We followed it up with a group version where we made up our own “fortunately” story. I’ve done this with other groups and sometimes it works pretty well. I usually have us supply the “fortunately” piece: “Fortunately, I went to the zoo yesterday.” Then ask for ideas for something “unfortunate” that can happen. Which is generally the funnest part. But also if we control the “fortunately,” we can kind of keep the story from falling into a rut. (“Unfortunately a lion escaped…Fortunately the zookeeper caught it…Unfortunately a tiger escaped….”). In this case, with so many kids, we didn’t take the story too far, but it was still worth it, I think.

Joke book interlude: We did a few riddles from Simms Taback’s Great Big Book of Spacey, Snakey, Buggy Riddles by Katy Hall and Lisa Eisenberg. The riddles here aren’t quite as perfect as Cows Sing, but Taback’s illustrations are especially appealing scanned on the big screen.

All of Our Noses are Here was our next story, with details here.

Our last joke book was Knock, Knock!, the collection of knock-knocks with illustrations by 14 excellent (and funny) artists. A very cool book, though not all of the efforts work in this setting...we were looking for quick laughs that they’d get right off. Like for instance, Saxton Freymann’s: “Knock Knock / Who’s There? / Lettuce / Lettuce Who? / Let us in!” I know, but when you add his photos of lettuce heads that look human, it’s perfect.

We closed with Click Clack Moo:  details are in a separate post.

We promoted this one with school visits, using Lazy Jack as the hook. We just told the first few segments, right up to the point where Jack gets paid with a cat. It seemed like enough of the story to engage them, but still didn’t give it all away.