Foolish Frog with Puppets

Story:  "The Foolish Frog" by Pete Seeger
Puppets:  Frog, Man, Woman, Child, Cow, Chicken (can cut one or two)
Props:   Grass, Water Bottle, Barn (optional)
Presenters:    One
Audience:   Family Storytime, also good for K-2

When I started as a children's librarian a few decades ago the world of storytelling seemed totally new to me.  Later I realized it wasn't, because I grew up listening to Pete Seeger records, and although I liked his songs, it was the stories that really captured me:  "Abiyoyo"..."Sam the Whaler"...and this one, "The Foolish Frog."  It's kind of daunting to tell a story that you grew up with, especially when it's told by such a great teller (who also has a banjo).  But fortunately the best stories work with all levels of tellers.  And although I have no banjo, and don't sing well, I do have some puppets, and that's the way I first started telling this story in storytime.

It starts with a farmer watching a Bullfrog jumping across a creek.  I narrate and act as the farmer, with the Bullfrog puppet on my hand.  The Farmer makes up a song about it:   "Way down south in the Yankety-Yank / A bullfrog jumped from bank to bank / Just because he'd nothin' better 'fore to do..."  You can get the tune from Pete Seeger's version.  I'm no singer, but this is simple, silly, and has a strong rhythm, so anyone can sing it just fine.

The Farmer sings it to the folks at the corner store, and that starts the pattern.  When I sing the song the second time, I usually ask the audience to join in, which sets up the silly sing-alongs that come later.  Since all the men are at the store singing (and drinking Coca Cola (I think the book switched it to "strawberry pop") and eating soda crackers), the wives come to look for them (gender stereotyping I know, but it works fine in this story).  That's when I get the Woman puppet.  She sings the same song.  Then it's the kids who come down to the store (and I use one Child puppet).  It's fine to skip Woman or Child to save time, which I typically do because it can be a longish story...but if I do have the time I use them all.

Next it's the Cows.  Like Mr. Seeger does in his telling, it's fun to have each newcomer wonder aloud to the audience where everyone is, to give each a bit of personality and silliness, and also build the anticipation.  When the Cows sing along, though, they say "Moo-moo, moo-moo, moo-moo-moo..." to the same tune.   This is a fun moment, when the audience realizes this is a much-silllier-than-usuial participation story.

Next come Chickens, though I sometimes also skip them to shorten the tale.  Then there's another clever shift, from the mild silliness of animals singing, to the really crazy silliness of other stuff, like the Grass wondering where everyone went and swishing its way down to the corner store too. For Grass, I don't use a puppet, just hold up a handful of Easter grass and move it around like a puppet.  The song there is "Swish-swish, swish-swish, swish-swish-swish...."  Barn is pretty fun too:  I sometimes skip it, but when I've had a toy barn of about the right size, I pull that out and we all "squeak" the song like a barn door.  For the River, I use a half-full water bottle and shake it around while everyone sings in bubbly voices.

The final twist brings us back to the Bullfrog, who wonders where the creek he was jumping across went.  He hears everyone singing about him, "puffs himself up with pride," and puffs himself so big that he explodes.  I've thought about trying to actually make the Frog bigger as he puffs himself, but I think of this as really more of storyteller's version than a puppeteer's, so don't feel the need to visually represent everything.  When he explodes, I grab as many of the puppets and props as I can and toss them up in the air.  And Pete Seeger has a great ending for the tale:  Nobody can find the Frog, so "all that's left of the Frog is the song...and we might as well sing 'er one more time."  Which gives the audience one last go-round, this time with the words restored.

We've also done this at my library as a two-person puppet show, with one person playing guitar, singing, and telling, and the other person behind the puppet stage managing puppets and props.  It's excellent, and even includes an inflating balloon for the "puffing up" at the end!  But I haven't been a part of that version yet, so will wait to write more about it in a future post, because I definitely want to try that way.  But the one-person with a few puppets version is also quite fun and works great too (as long as you avoid comparing your version to Pete Seeger's)

The book version of The Foolish Frog is long out-of-print (and runs for $100+ if you've got a new copy), but I always think of it as a record rather than a book.  The version I grew up with was this one from Children's Concert at Town Hall.  What a great album!  It also included "Abiyoyo," "Here's to Cheshire, Here's to Cheese" (a version of "Froggy Went a Courtin'), "Henry My Son" (aka "Mother Be Quick, I'm Gonna Be Sick, and Lay Me Down to Die" (Henry ate some green and yeller eels that turned out to be snakes), and a bunch of other great ones....

Fox's Sack with Puppets

Book:  What's in Fox's Sack?  by Paul Galdone
Puppets:  Fox, Bee, Rooster, Pig, Child, Dog; 4 people optional
Props:  Sack (pillow slip works fine)
Presenters:  One
Audience:  Family Storytime (older too)
Video:  How to Tell What's in Fox's Sack? with Puppets

Here's one of the first stories I ever told with puppets.   It has a repetitive pattern that's easy to learn (and for the audience to follow), and that pattern builds and twists a bit at the end to make a very satisfying story.  When I tell it with puppets I like to it as narrator, as well as doing the puppet characters.  So I'll describe Fox catching a bee, then show him doing that.  I tell how he "walked and walked and came to a house...."  And later it's  "off he went, trot, trot, trot, to Squintum's house."  I think it's because I first presented as a book and an oral tale, and I just really like Galdone's language.

Fox proceeds to meet four different ladies, and asks each one not to look in his sack while he goes to visit his friend Squintum.  I usually don't use puppets at all for the ladies, I just kind of play them myself, interacting with Fox in character, promising not to look, then opening the sack after all.  I've done it with four people puppets (I don't have four ladies, so two ladies, two men), but I don't feel it adds that much, and any time I can simplify the prop and puppet handling I usually do.

The strong pattern of the story invites some good interaction with the audience.  They'll often join in when Fox says "Don't look in my sack!"  And you can play up their involvement as the Lady by asking them:  "....should I look in his sack?"  (response is typically split evenly between "yes" and "no.").

The heart of the story is the narrative and dialogue, rather than action, but there are moments where puppet movement can really help:    When each Lady pulls the animal out of the sack  when Fox returns and kind of gets in the Lady's face when he says "Oh ho!  So you did look in my sack!;"  And short simple chases when one animal chases the previous one away.

It's always fun to watch the audience's reactions shift towards the end.  They've kind of settled into the easy pattern of Fox getting a new animal in his sack each time, but when they realize it's a Child who will be in there, they're not quite so relaxed.  And that brief bit of tension drops once they realize that the last Lady is putting her Dog into the sack to fool Fox.

You can see a video sample of this story on my Youtube Storytelling with Puppets page.  It's a tale that also works great with a puppet stage.  When I do it that way, I drop the narration part, so Fox and the Ladies describe what they're doing as the story proceeds.  With a stage, you can have some fun with the interactions between the animals, extending the chase scenes, having Rooster hide from Pig a few times, for example.

The excellent Paul Galdone version of this tale is out of print and goes for $140+ new on amazon, but Houghton Mifflin Harcourt has brought several of P. G.'s folktales back into print in the past few years and I keep hoping they'll add this one.  And The Monkey and the Crocodile....and The Magic Porridge Pot....okay, let's just say:  all Paul Galdone folktales should be back in print...in hardcover.

The Lion and the Mouse with surf music, Bach, and the Brothers Johnson

Book:  The Lion and the Mouse  by Jerry Pinkney 

Puppets:  none

Props:  none

Technology:  Projector with scanned illustrations + music clips

Audience:  Family Storytime (mostly age 3-7)

Presenters:  one

Jerry Pinkney's version of The Lion and the Mouse has so much potential in storytime settings and we've used it with several variations.  We scan the images to project so they can be seen in our large storytimes.  We've done it with barebones narration and simple perscussion to give it rhythm.  Another time we had a local string quartet provide live musical accompaniment.  For our most recent version I went back to one of my favorites standbys:  pop music of the 50s, 60s and 70s.  I picked six intrumentals from that time period, and put short clips of each to capture, as well as I could, the mood of the story.

For the first part, where day is breaking and we see the lons on the savanah and the mouse waking up, I used 1976's Tomorrow" by the Brothers Johnson (they're best known for "Strawberry Letter #23," "I'll Be Good to You," and "Get the Funk Out Ma Face," but their album cuts were nice too).  I skipped the intro bit (0:00 - 0:22) and went to about 1:11.  It ends on the page where Mouse first hears the Owl. 

Then Mouse gets chased by the owl, so you need something a little faster.  The first 46 seconds of 1963's "Pipeline" by the Chantays fit nicely, even though a mouse running on a savanah is about as far as surfers as you can get.  The clip has a nice little mini-fade that we timed to match when Mouse is on Lion's mane, but doesn't realize it.

To catch the big moment when Lion rises up and grabs Mouse, we went with "Out of Limits" by the Marketts, from 1963.  It starts with a cool "Twilight Zone"-ish piece that's seems just right.  (A little too just-right for Rod Serling, creator of "The Twillight Zone," who sued the Marketts for copying it).  We had this one fade out at about the 0:55 mark.  In the book, that's where Mouse has been released and Lion strides off triumphantly.

When the illustrations shift to the Hunters, we went with "Peter Gunn" by Duane Eddy from 1959.  It was the theme from a detective show that ran from 1958-1961...the music on the show was done by Henry Mancini, but we went with Duane Eddy instead.  It has a great guitar opening to announce the Hunters, then a saxophone that's just right for bad guys.  The first 0:55 worked about right, starting with the Hunters' jeep and ending with Lion suspended in the net.

For the rescue, we played "Walk Don't Run" by the Ventures from 1960, (often considered the first major hit in the surf music genre).  A nice drum opening transitions to the mouse neatly, then the guitar part runs through Mouse's chewing of the ropes, and has a nice break at 1:05 to match the final thread.   

When Lion is finally free, we jump forward to 1972 for "Joy" by Apollo 100 (or you could say we're going back to the 1700's, since this was inspired by a piece by Johann Sebastian Bach).  We skipped the first 0:24 and faded out at about the 1:09 point.  This has a different sound than the early 60s stuff in the middle, but it seems appropriately triumphant, and it fades as the two families walk off across the endpages.  

With a music/scan version like this, it can take some time to get it all together.  Messing around with songs, downloading them into your PowerPoint file, and getting the timings and the fading to work pretty well takes some time.  But after you get it right (or as close to right as I ever strive for), the actual presentation is just introducing the book and clicking on "run slide show."  When we played it in Storytime, the music really did help pace the story, but it didn't interfere so much that the kids weren't following the visuals.  So the book was still the main focus...but if a few families leave storytime with a bit of the Ventures or Bach rattling around in their head, I'm okay with that.  

The Hat with Clothesline

Book:  The Hat  by Jan Brett
 Puppets:   None
Props:   Character Signs, Various Articles of Clothing, Clothesline
Presenters:  2, plus child volunteers (could be 1 plus kids)
Audience:   Family Storytime (mostly 3-7)

Brad and I chose to use Jan Brett's The Hat for a "clothing" themed Family Storytime.  Jan Brett's website has a bunch of great resources for teachers and storytellers, including neat and simple printouts for the animals from The Hat.  They're designed for reader's theater, but we used them in a slightly different way.  We printed out one of each, laminated, and strung some yarn through for the kids to wear.   Then we strung a clothesline across the stage.  We just tied string to two our our backdrops, but I'm sure there are other ways to work that out.

The story is pretty simple, and we simplified it a bit more to make it work with child volunteers.  Each of the kids got an animal sign and stood beneath the empty clotheline.  Brad narrated while I managed kids and clothes.  One by one, I pull each piece of clothing out of a basket and hang one above each animal.  Then Brad describes how the sock blew off an fell on Hedgehog.  And I unclip the sock and place it on Hedgehog/Child's head.

Then it moves to the other animals seeing Hedgehog's cool "hat," and wanting one for themselves.  And one by one, the animals spot the clothes above them and I put each one on their head.  We considered not revealing the clothes until it was time for each child to "wear" it....keeping the shirt in the basket, for example, until it was that animal's turn for a hat.  It actually was much more fun to have all of the clothes in sight from the start, though.  You could watch it all dawn on the audience in different stages, as they anticipated that each child would soon have a silly hat.  The child volunteers went through the same process, as they put the pieces together and realized what they were each about to wear.  Of course, leaving the underwear for last build up the suspense even more.  I really wish we'd taken a photo of the kids, before the "hats" and after, but I think you can imagine it.

The story ends with me coming to take down the clothes, spotting the silly looking animals, and collecting the pieces one by one.  This is one of those stories where the props and the kids really make it work.  Though Brad and I split up the narration and child/prop management, those could easily be done by one person.  So all you really need is a clothesline, a color printer, and some cute kids.  

The Chocolate Chip Ghost (and other colors)

Story:  The Chocolate Chip Ghost  by Meighan Piefer & Phyllis French

Props:   Felt Ghosts + Felt Board; colored food props or pictures (optional)

Presenters:   one

Audience:   Toddler, Preschool

I keep trying to get back to this blog, and my motivation this time is to get in a good Halloween story before the holiday happens.  This a favorite among pre-school teachers and librarians, but not everyone knows it.  I've pretty sure that I've  never actually seen the book:  I learned it as a felt board story from someone years ago.  I don't do many stories with felt, mostly because I'm so completely unskilled at scissors, patterns, and just general crafty creativity.  But these shapes are even simple enough for me.  You just cut out five small ghosts and one big one.  I made the big one into a simple flat puppet, but it works fine as just a felt shape.


 Then you tell the story, which is basically this:

Mother Ghost goes to the store to get some food.  She tells her five little ghosts not to have anything but milk when she's gone.  One by one, each ghost goes to the fridge and gets something that's not milk, but something with a distinct color.  Ghost one gets a tomato.  [pick her up and bring her behind the felt board; show the tomato].  And when she came back, she was......red!  [switch white ghost for red ghost and put that one back on the board].

Then then next three ghosts do the same thing, with different colors and different fruits or vegetables.  Play food or real food both work fine.

That simple anticipation and guessing game, where the kids guess what the ghost will eat and what color she'll turn to, along with the satisfying visual image of that brightly colored ghost, works just great.  Similar in effect to doing Pete the Cat: I Love My Red Shoes with colored shoes.  

Then there's a neat twist at the end, when the last little ghost finds the refrigerator empty, so she looks in the freezer.  I usually let the kids know that she found some ice cream, ask them to guess what flavor, then show the decorated ghost and they all get that it was chocolate chip ice cream. 

For the food props, you can use real food, toy food, or if you don't have either, just print out a picture. Actually pictures might work even better because you can stick them to the board, though I've never tried it that way.

The humor and surprises in this story are right on target for two and three year olds, but it's also engaging enough for ones and surprisingly fascinating to four and five year olds as well.  And for toddlers it's has just the right level of Halloweenishness, with the least scary ghosts ever.   

From Head to Toe with Puppets, Spanish, and Participation

Book:  From Head to Toe  by Eric Carle

Puppets:  Giraffe, Gorilla, Monkey, Horse, Crocodile, and/or a few others

Props:   Animal Signs in Spanish (optional)

Presenters:   Two  (though it works fine with one)

Audience:  Family Storytime (mostly 3-6 year olds)

We try to slip in bilingual stories from time to time during our Family Storytime, and Eric Carle books seem to work especially well for this.  From Head to Toe is an especially fun one because it also gets the kids up and doing stuff.

For our two-person version, Sheila led the kids in trying to do the stuff that the animals do, while I provided the animal examples with puppets from behind a backdrop.

First the animal appears above the backdrop, and names itself:   "I am a Crocodile."  Then I hold up a sign with the word in Spanish, while Sheila says the word in Spanish and prompts them to repeat it.

Then I say what I can do:   "And I can wriggle my hips."   And the puppet wriggles as well as a puppet can, which isn't that well, but good enough.  Meanwhile, Sheila demonstrates that for the audience, prompting them to do the same.  And that's the pattern we follow for all of the animals.  I played around a bit with the puppets, having them peek out from different spots before they're entrance, but tried not to overdo that because it can get too distracting.  

And that's really all there is to it.  Once you've got the signs made, the puppets in order, and an audience, you're all set.  We did make a few adjustments to the animals in the book.  We skipped Buffalo and Camel, partly because we just needed to shorten the whole thing, but also:  we don't have those puppets.  We don't have a Donkey either, but liked that movement (kids put hands on the floor and kick feet out....yes, kind of wild, and we had to give the "don't kick your neighbor" warning, but it was fun), so we substituted a Horse.          

There are many variations to this approach.  You can do it just this way, without the Spanish words, and it works fine.  And if you're puppets don't exactly match the animals in the book, you can substitute freely, as we did, and still be true to the story.  You can also do it as a one-person story, which I've done many times in solo storytimes.  With that approach, I have to rely on the puppets and the words to show the kids what their actions should be, which goes okay, but it's even better when you have that second person to demonstrate the human way to move like those animals.  Oh, and I have to make sure I don't forget:   You can read the book, show the pictures, have the kids do the moves, and it's also excellent.

Monkey with a Pen

Book:  Monkey Face  by Frank Asch  (aka Bread and Honey)
Puppets:  Monkey (with pen-holding ability) Owl, Alligator, Rabbit, Elephant, Lion, Giraffe, Another Bear (optional)

Props:   Whiteboard and pen  (or clipboard, paper, and pen)
Presenters:  One
Audience:  Family Storytime  (mostly 3-7)

I've fallen way behind on posts here.  One reason is that I'm doing fewer new stories lately.  It's great to create new stuff, but so much more efficient to retell things and just tweak a little bit, and the job requires extra efficiency lately.   I've also been busy preparing and teaching an online course on Storytelling with Puppets (Winter session starts January 5th; details are here).  So my new goal is a post every two weeks...

I've never really gotten into Draw and Tell stories, partly because the stories that go with them usually aren't very interesting to me.  And also because I don't draw very well.  But Frank Asch's Monkey Face is perfect, because the story is great and you're not supposed to draw well.

In the book, Monkey draws a simple picture of his mother.  As he walks home he meets different animals one after another.  Each animal gives him a suggestion to improve it, so Monkey takes out his pen and adds a bit.  That part about "he meets different animals one after another" almost always means:  Puppets!   The "taking out his pen" part is a bit harder, but my Monkey puppet has very workable hands, and after all, the pictures don't have to be that good.

I use a standing white board that I can get behind to do the drawings.  Sometimes I have an easel, other times (like in the photos below) I just hold it on my lap and lean it against me while I retrieve puppets.   I have Monkey draw the first picture with his pen, then stand back and look at it.

 
I don't want to move the drawing surface, so the "walking home" part happens from narration:  "Monkey walked home with his picture, and on the way he met......Owl!"  At this point I reach behind the whiteboard with my left hand and Owl pops out above the board.  Owl likes the picture, but makes a suggestion:  "You made the eyes too small."

So monkey gets his pen and enlarges the eyes.  Before he starts to draw, I make sure to have examine Owl's eyes for a moment, to clue the kids in on why he's going to draw these eyes so big:

Once he's done, Owl praises the new version ("Fine work!") and Monkey goes on.  With each new animal he meets, he "improves" the drawing, with the adjustment always matching a prominent feature of the animal:   Alligator = big sharp teeth; Rabbit = long ears;  Elephant = long nose;  Lion = mane;  Giraffe = long neck.  So the drawing gets sillier and sillier.  You could substitute puppets if needed, as long as the sub has a notable feature that can easily be added on to the drawing.  By the time he meets Giraffe, it looks pretty crazy.

Asch always has a nice way with language.  In this book each animal always thinks the picture is great ("I love it!").   And after Monkey shows them the new version they add more praise:  "Unforgettable!" "Much better!" and the like.  I don't always match the book exactly but do try to use interesting vocabulary for each animal.

When Monkey finally gets home he shows it to his Mother.  You could use another Monkey puppet for Mother, but I usually skip that and just speak as Mother.  When Monkey asks:  "Do you like it?"  Mother steps back, looks at it, and thinks for a minute.  I believe the kids are always thinking that she's going to say something disparaging or at least act surprised, but instead it's the perfect parent answer:   "I love it!"  "Just the way it is?" says Monkey.  "Just the way it is."  And she hangs it on the refrigerator.  (Which I can't do because the drawing is on a board, but everyone gets the idea).

There are many different ways to tell this one.  It works great without puppets, just using a pen and paper.  That's where I first learned it, from Bonnie Janssen of Alameda County Library.  I've also told it using the Monkey puppet, but with paper on a clipboard instead of a whiteboard.  This is kind of fun because you can draw without the kids seeing, then reveal the drawing all at once.  But also it's one more thing to handle.  Or, you can do it with the Monkey puppets, but without all of the other puppets.  The fun there is that kids sort of ponder along with you as they imaging that Owl or Elephant and anticipate what the picture will look like.

Monkey Face is an old (1977) out-of-print book; Asch actually retold it as Bread and Honey in 1981 and it looks that version is being reissued in March 2015!  B and H changes the monkey to a bear (I think it's the bear from Happy Birthday Moon) and adds a little more back-story to the beginning and end.  The original also uses more interesting vocabulary.  When Giraffe sees the now long-necked picture she says "Perfect" in B & H; in Monkey Face her line is:  "How elevating!"  (Which I enjoy, though the kids probably don't get).  So I still think the original is stronger for storytelling.  Plus none of my puppet Bears can hold a pen as well as my Monkey.

Funny Food + Scott Joplin

Book:  Food Play  by Saxton Freymann and Joost Elffers
Puppets:  none
Props:   Selected images from the books, scanned, printed, and laminated
Presenters:   one
Audience:   Toddler Time  (1's and 2's)

Saxton Freymann & Joost Elfers have done a bunch of books with photographs of fruits and vegetables put together to look like people, animals, and other stuff.  They're really amazingly creative and kids love to look at them.  We've used them more than once for our "Food in Fact and Fiction" K-2 Book Adventures program, putting scanned photos into a slide show that we ran with musical accompaniment.

Later, we used an adapted version of that in Family Storytime.  I decided to give it a try in Toddler Time, but there's just one thing:  we never, ever do anything in Toddler Time that puts the pages of a book on the screen.  Although I've really enjoyed our creative uses of the screen with stories for older kids, we're not going there with 1's and 2's.  Also, our Toddler Time crowd is small enough (20-25 kids, but they're little) to see pictures pretty well.

So my first thought was to play the music and use the book, just doing page turns.  That didn't work too well, though, because most of the pages have at least two separate images.  Which is great for a book, but in a group presentation you want to be able to focus on one photo at a time.  So I decided to enlarge and print out individual pictures, cropping where needed, and show one piece of funny food at a time.  For our earlier presentation, we selected images from a variety of books, but this time I stuck to just one book, Food Play, which actually consists of pictures from several of the other titles, kind of like a "Greatest Hits" collection.

In our slide show, we utilized three pieces of music, but for Toddlers I stuck with one:  Marvin Hamlisch's recording of Scott Joplin's "The Entertainer" (aka the Theme from The Sting).  It's an instrumental that has just the right bit of playfulness.  It also has a strong pattern, so you get very strong end-of-line cues on where to do your page turns.  Or in this case, page switches.  The music adds a lot to the experience, and I'm sure there are other tunes that would also work.   I actually did go to the trouble of "transcribing" the music, so I could organize the images neatly.  I don't know anything about music, so my transcription was just a line by line list of sounds, using a "d" for some reason:
    d d d D d D d D  /   d d D d d D d d D
It made sense to me anyway, and did help my planning some, so if anyone wants to try the story and would like the line by line, let me know and I can send it.  I'd also be glad to list the photos I used, but it's also fun to just pick out your favorites.

The song divides neatly into 6 sections, and I picked 4 illustrations for each section, grouping them into similar themes for each section:   Faces, Animals, People, Vehicles, More Animals, and Faces again to end.  With the slide show, we used more illustrations, switching them faster, because clicking for a new slide is seamless.  Also, the toddlers really need more time to absorb what they're seeing.  So doing 4 per section means that I held each one up for about 4 or 5 seconds.

I thought about putting the images on sticks to make them easier to handle, but just using two hands worked fine.  And even though "holding up a picture" sounds simple, Terri pointed out that there should be rhythm and sameness to the appearance of each picture.  So I picked up the picture from the stool on my right, slowly panned it from left to right, then slowly went back right to left, and picked up the next one.  That regularity meant the kids could focus on the images without having to work to track where the picture will be.

This is one where all the work is in the prep.  Choosing the illustrations, scanning, printing, and laminating, and practicing to the music.  You really want the transitions from one picture to the next to match the rhythm of the music....it could work without that, but it's better with.  And then once it's time to tell it, you just put on the music and flip from one picture to the next.

The toddlers really enjoyed it, but I'm sure it was on a different level than the preschool or K-2 groups did.  The older kids see bananas that look like giraffes and are amazed at the cleverness;  toddlers just see giraffes that look kind of silly...and that's okay.  Identifying the fruits is more of a lap activity, and since so many of the Freymann/Jelffers books I had available checked out, I'm sure some of that happens later at home.

A couple weeks later I did this same version for a Family Storytime at the Hillsboro Library, where I'm a sub and do a Sunday Storytime a couple times per month.  We don't have the screen and projector set-up there, so using the pictures and my ipod worked just fine.  The things I was sure to do for Toddlers (fewer pictures, move them slowly and regularly) were equally useful for a mostly 4 and up group, so I really didn't need to change a thing for the older crowd.

Tap the Magic Tree on the Screen

Book:  Tap the Magic Tree  by Christie Matheson
Puppets:   None
Props:   None
Technology:  Scanned Images and Projector
Presenters:   One or two
Audience:  Family Storytime  (mostly 3-7 year olds)

Making books interactive by directly involving readers in the action can be pretty cool:  There Are Cats in This Book and Press Here are two of the best examples from recent years.  Tap the Magic Tree takes that interactivity used so effectively in Press Here and fits it into a pleasing book about a year in the life of a tree.  For Family Storytime, we scanned the images, adjusted the placement of the words a bit, and used the PowerPoint click to work as a "page turn."

 The book opens with a bare-limbed tree.

 Readers are told to do different things (like "tap it once"), and when the page turns, we see the effect.  Since we don't want 80 kids rushing up and touching the projection screen, we ask them to tap in the air.  When they do, we click on the PowerPoint remote to bring up the next image, which shows that a green leaf has been added:

In putting the PowerPoint together, we scanned the images and lined them up so that the tree was placed in the same spot for each image.  That way, it would look like the same tree, just with the added item (like the leaf above).  For the first scan (above), we covered up the text.  Then another click makes the text appear:

In the book, the words are sometimes on a facing blank page, so we re-typed all of the words to make them appear alongside the image of the tree.  By doing the text as a second step, instead of simultaneous to the illustration, we could guide the audience's attention properly.  First they see the visual change on the screen.  Then the text appears with the instructions that will lead to the next change.

As the year progresses, the tree changes, and so do the things we ask the kids to do to make it change:

When the tree is full of autumn leaves (above), we all "blow!" and the leaves fall off as we click:

Then we get the whole audience clapping to bring....:

The only other adjustment we made from the book was to put a colored frame around each image.  Borderless works just fine in the book, but we needed frames to make the pictures distinct against our big white screen.  I thought it would be cool to match the color of the frames to a dominant color from the illustration on that page, but I think next time we'll use just one color for the frame so that the change in the illustrations is the only change the audience sees.

It's a nice simple book to scan and tell, but with a very effective impact.  Our scanned PowerPoint presentation is really not different at all from the way we would read it to a smaller group.  I used the book version with my Toddler Time group and it was equally effective, but the scanning allows us to share it with much larger groups.