Seals on the Bus, Baby Driving

Book:  The Seals on the Bus  by Lenny Hort.  Illustrated by C. Brian Karas
Puppets:  Seal, Baby, plus a handful of Other Animals
Props:  None
Presenters:  One
Audience:  Toddler Time (1 and 2 year olds)

I always do one puppet story in my Toddler Time sessions and sometimes I have a tendency to try to squeeze a 2-3 year old story into this session for 1 and 2 year olds.  Partly because there aren't enough really great 1-2 year old books that adapt for puppets, but also because I just like a little bit more of a story.  Something like Squeak-A-Lot or What Will Fat Cat Sit On is just a little more fun to tell than Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?.  And really, those slightly more involved stories end up working well, but I have to admit, the simple stuff is really reliable for this age group.

Seals on the Bus fits that category.  I usually tell it just after singing (or having Raffi sing) The Wheels on the Bus.  Then I introduce the book:  "There's a song about wheels on the bus; what if there were seals on a bus?  So they get the idea that it's a take-off.  (I mean, Weird Al is always funnier when you know the song he's parodying).  The picture book is very clever, with Brian Karas' illustrations adding a kind of storyline to the progression of animal sounds....but for puppets, I stick to the progression of animal sounds.  Which makes it a simple series of Pop-Outs.  First it's Seal, then really any animals you want to bring out....I don't stick to what's in the book. 

After we've all sung:  "the seals on the bus go Arf Arf Arf," I kind of stop to build up to the next animal, and provide a clue or two:   "Now we know there are seals on the bus.  I wonder what other animals are on the bus?  [peek in the puppet bag].  Oh!  This next animal has a long tail...and eats bananas.  [pop out Monkey and all sing]: The monkeys on the bus go eee!  eee!  eee!  (or whatever your preferred monkey sound is).   So this sets up a nice pattern with some guessing, some vocabulary, and lots of participation.  The puppetry is easy to manage, since puppets don't even interact with each other.  Just pop out, make the sound, and back in the bag.

I always like to include a Giraffe for change of pace:  "the Giraffe on the bus goes..."[finger to lips and say nothing].  And I end it with the Driver on the Bus:   "Now it's time for the driver.  Who do you think the driver will be?...[anticipation builds....peek in the puppet bag].  Oh!  This is not the driver I expected!"  [anticipation builds even more....and out pops:  a Baby!]   I don't know why, but the idea of a baby driving a bus (and saying "Waa, waa, waa"] is just really funny.  And a good way to end it.

My one regret with this story is that I don't have a Pigeon puppet.  But it's probably just as well, because then I wouldn't be able to resist making it:  "The pigeon on the bus says:   'Please let me drive the bus!  I'll be your best friend!  I'll give you five bucks! I have feelings too!...'"  and on and on.  Which would amuse me quite a bit and maybe a parent or two, but those toddlers just wouldn't get it. 

"Storytelling with Puppets" videos on Youtube

Here's something new (for me at least) on this blog:  Video instruction/demonstration of some of the stories I like to do.  I can't manage to put our public, multi-person storytimes and programs on video yet, so I decided to focus on one of my favorite ways to tell stories without the book:  Storytelling with puppets (but without a stage). 

So I've started up a Youtube channel where I'll add videos, probably one
 per week.  The videos show the story being told, along with some tips and suggestions mixed in.  There are a few up there now, at http://www.youtube.com/user/stories13579.  Here's one sample (I know, I don't look very happy on this thumbnail, but the other choices were even worse...):

 

 

 

 

If these videos seem useful to folks, I'll continue adding them, probably once a week or so, and mention them on this blog when I add new ones.  I'll also add links to previous posts on this blog if there's now a video to match.

I'd be interested to hear if these are useful, and also any suggestions to make them better (as long as the suggestions don't require fancy equipment, any level of video expertise, or more than just a little bit of effort...).    And I'll keep posting on this blog the usual video-less way, as well...

Frog and Toad and the Story

Story:  "Frog and Toad: the Story"  from the book Frog and Toad are Friends by Arnold Lobel
Puppets:  Frog and Toad (or two frogs will do)
Props:  Squirt Bottle
Presenters:  One (with puppets) or Two (as an Act-Out)
Audience:  Family Storytime
Link to "Storytelling with Puppets" video demo

This may have been the first story I ever told with puppets.  The Friends of the Pleasanton (CA) had just paid for a couple hundred dollars worth of Folkmanis puppets for us, and I had never really done anything with puppets.  We chose wisely, though, and got two Frog puppets (in those days there was only one Folkmanis frog option) thinking Frog and Toad might be a possibility.  I was still too unconfident to try them until I heard Mr. Lobel reading his own stories on tape (books on tape:  that was kind of a new thing back then in the late 80's).  He brought them to life so perfectly, I decided I should try.

"The Story" seemed like the simplest to tell.  Frog doesn't feel well, so Toad tries to think of a story to tell him, and tries some silly stuff to generate an idea:   He walks back and forth:  very easy to do with a puppet.  He stands on his head:  pretty easy too.  He dumps water on his head:  okay, this one was a little harder.  It's kind of awkward to make a hand puppet look as if he's pour water on his own head....they don't have the reach.  So, remembering the advice of Beckie Brazell, an experienced teller and puppeteer, that "if you ever have the opportunity, squirt the audience with water," I had Toad get a squirt bottle and squirt himself...but mostly he misses himself and gets the kids.  Finally Toad bangs his head against the wall, which is pretty easy:  I just use my knee or the chair or whatever as the wall. 

Each time Toad does his thing, Frog jumps up from bed to stop him.  So there's some nice pacing there, as Toad gets progressively more manic while Frog gets more concerned.  Which leads to the neat ending twist, where Toad feels poorly so Frog, feeling better, tells him a story.  And tells the story of a Toad who does crazy things to help him think of a story.  This gives the puppeteer a chance to run through each of the silly antics again, with Frog this time. 

The puppetry is fairly straightforward, with a few touches to make it all work well.  Toad should hesitate a bit before each new action, giving the kids some time to anticipate.  For the water squirting bit, I slip one hand out of Frog to work the squirter, while the other hand still has Toad, but that's simple since Frog is just resting.  Other than that, it mostly comes to life through the words, the plot, and the voices...the voices don't have to be wildly unique, just enough to suggest a bit of silliness in Toad and a more sensible, regular voice for Frog.

This is also a great story for a two-person act out.  Brad and I did it a while ago in Family
Storytime, and the physical humor with puppets is enlarged with real people.  Crashing into the wall is especially fun.  I used to be able to stand on my head and used this story as one opportunity to show off that talent in the role of Toad, but I don't do that anymore....we changed it to "holding head upside down," which even I can manage and is still pretty funny.

Creepy Cardboard Carrots

Book:  Creepy Carrots  by Aaron Reynolds, Illustrated by Peter Brown
Props:  Big Cutout Carrots, Mirror, Bunny Ears, Bedtime stuff
Puppets:  None
Presenters:  2 or 3, plus 2 child volunteers
Technology:  Scans from book projected
Audience:  K-2

When I was halfway through my first reading of Creepy Carrots I was sure it could be a fun puppet show:  Stick puppet carrots sneaking up behind rabbit...it would be great!  But when Roscoe Rabbit builds a giant fence at the end I couldn't really figure out how to make it work, so I gave up the idea.  A month or two later Sheila thought it would be just right for our summer Preschool Stories & Science program, with the "Dig Into Reading" theme and all.  She figured it out:  we could to act it out, add some volunteers from the audience, and fill in selected scenes with some scanned illustrations from the book.  We decided to try it for our K-2 Book Adventure Summer Reading preview, which also used "Dig Into Reading."

We used three staff, with me narrating, Sheila as Roscoe, and Terri as Creepy Carrot #1.  Creepy Carrots #2 and #3 were child volunteers.  Our volunteer Ruth made some great cutout carrots and the three just held them in front of them as they creeped around:

For Roscoe's carrot field, we projected the illustration from the book on the screen, then had a table covered with brown butcher paper at the bottom of the screen, sort of extending it into 3-d.  And we sprinkled a bunch of real carrots in there, so Sheila could hop past, stop, and take a bunch. 


When it came time for the Creepy Carrots to appear, Terri led the kids in the refrain "tunktunktunk" and they just followed her, appearing from behind our backdrop, then ducking back just before Sheila turned around to see them.  The kids rarely stayed all the way hidden, but that was fine.

When Sheila returned to the field to see if the Creepy Carrots were real, we showed the regular carrot scene again, but when she turned her back on it, we clicked for the carrots to appear:

Then as she decides with relief that "creepy carrots aren't real," we did a "grow" animation click so they got even bigger. 

We combined the animation and "live" carrots for the other scenes where Roscoe sees the carrots.  When he looks at the window, for example, we showed the illustration, while the three live rabbits  were showing themselves at the side of the screen:

We put the next window scene, which is on the opposite page of the book, "underneath" the first illustration, then had one "fade out" while the other "faded in," using PowerPoint animation effects again.  And as the non-carrot window appeared, the live carrots snuck back behind the backdrop.

In the end Roscoe builds a fortress around the carrot field so they can't get out.  And it's exactly what the Creepy Carrots were hoping for, since now he can't get in to pick them.  For this, we showed the scan of Roscoe's fortress, then the scene of the celebrating carrots, and had our three live carrots come out and celebrate too.  Much better than whatever I might have come up with for a puppet show.

Overall, the combination of screen and act out worked well.  While the scans on the screen let us share the excellent illustrations, it was the three cardboard carrots interacting with Roscoe that really made it come alive for the audience.  The one disappointing piece was the lighting.  The orange coloring on the book and on the computer screen has a great glowi-ness to it, but that only shows up on screen when it's dark in the room...and we needed enough light to see the acting out guys.  We found a middle ground that worked well enough, though. 

 

And the cut-out carrots were great.  When Terri and I visited some kindergarten classes to promote the event we brought the carrots along, even though we performed a different story for them.  I think just showing them the carrots and showing the book cover might have been all we needed to do....     

K-2 Book Adventure Program Summary - "Dig Into Reading"

We just finished our last "K-2 Book Adventure" of the school year and I realize I haven't posted any program summaries...maybe I'll catch up soon.  For May we made it kind of a sneak preview of our Summer Reading Program, so we used the "Dig Into Reading" theme.  Not the easiest topic for this program, but I think we made it work, picking five books that each have something to do with guys who dig.

 

We started with "Digging Dogs," and acted out a scene from one of my favorite early chapter book series:  "Down Girl and Sit" by Lucy Nolan.  Those books just crack me up; they're perfect for people who like dogs and who have a 2nd grade sense of humor, so no wonder.  Though Down Girl and Sit do some digging in their books, we chose two funnier scenes to act out, both from Bad to the Bone.  As "Ruff" (Down Girl's owner) I tell how Down Girl and Sit got their names, while Terri and Sheila (as DG and S) demonstrate by jumping up and down and not sitting.  Then we did a scene where Down Girl drags her newly cleaned rug through the mud, so it will smell right again.  Some good chasing there as the neighbor cat, Here Kitty Kitty, clings to the rug while Terri/Down Girl runs into the audience with the puppet cat trailing.  We finished with the scene where the dogs grab Ruff's paint brush and get paint all over him ("now he will match the color of the house!") and eat Ruff's pizza.  The scene has a nice conclusion where Ruff decides Down Girl needs to go to dog training classes, and DG thinks it's a good idea because "Ruff has a lot to learn."

 

Then we shifted to "Digging for Dinosaurs," featuring Prehistoric Actual Size by Steve Jenkins.  For whole animal and projected them large on the screen, with a note on how close these are to actual size. 

 

this we just showed a few of the very cool life-sized illustrations, including some fold-outs.  The teeth of Giganatasaurus are especially nice.  To supplement it, we scanned the thumbnails from the back of the book that show the

 

Next up was "Digging Worms," and we took the easy way out for this one.  I just love the "Diary" books by Doreen Cronin and Harry Bliss, but could not think of anything we could do with Diary of a Worm that would be as good as the excellent Weston Woods film.  So we showed that on the screen.

 

One of our goals for this program is to check out multiple copies of the books we feature, so we only choose stuff that's pretty widely available in our county.  For "Digging Snakes," though, I went back to an old favorite:  "The Snake," which is a story in Gwot: Horribly Funny Hairticklers by

George Mendoza.  The book is long out of print (published in 1967, now $70+ on amazon), but I haven't had the chance to tell that story in a long time and decided I'd just take the opportunity.  Basically a farmer slices a snake in two and it comes back the next day twice as big and that keeps happening...I know, sounds kind of weird, but it really is a great oral tale, just funny enough and just gross enough.  Plus it works as a "stretch" if you have the kids stand up and "Thwack!" the snake each time. 

 

We were planning on finishing with "Digging Rabbits" and using Tops and Bottoms by Janet Stevens.  But a week or so before the event Sheila decided we just had to find a way to do Creepy Carrots, a recent Caldecott Honor book by Peter Brown.  We've been really busy and Tops and Bottoms was going to be easy since we had done it before, but sometimes the lure of a cool new book is just too hard to resist....so this became our "Digging Rabbits" book instead.  Details are in this separate post. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Painting a Blue Horse with PowerPoint

Book:  The Artist Who Painted a Blue Horse / El Artista Que Pintó un Caballo Azul by Eric Carle
Puppets:  None
Props:  Paint Brush (or broom)
Technology:  Projected Scans on Screen
Presenters:  Two (could be done with one)
Audience:  Family Storytime

We did an "Eric Carle" themed storytime recently.  Sheila's been taking Spanish classes and this seemed like a good story to do in both languages.  And since Carle's illustrations are so excellent and our crowds are too big to use the book, we did the scan and project thing, using some simple PowerPoint animation to add a bit of visual surprise.

We traced each animal on white paper and scanned that picture.  (We didn't scan the little window in the middle of the horse...that's me messing up on my copying and pasting).

Then we scanned the illustration from the book and line that up exactly even with the outline.  Then you do Animation / Appear / Fly In for the colored illustration.  If it "flies in" from right to left, and you set the time for a good 6 seconds, it looks like the outline is getting slowly filled by the colors.

So to tell the story, we'd show the outline, then I'd say "I wonder what color the artist is going to paint this animal?"  Sheila steps up with her artist clothes and a broom (to act as a giant paintbrush) and strokes along the screen as the color fills the animal.  So it kind of looks like she's painting it.

When the animal is filled in, I say the English words ("Blue Horse") and Sheila says the Spanish ones ("Caballo Azul") as the written words for both appear above the animals.

Simple to tell, and lots of fun.  I acted surprised the first few times the Artist painted an animal an unusual color, but then added comments like "I've never seen an orange lion before...but I love it!"  We do enough stories where getting something wrong is a joke, and we wanted to be sure the kids got the point that the colors the Artist chose were imaginative and creative, not "wrong" at all. 

For the last animal Sheila poked her broom/brush instead of stroking to convey the dot making for the polka dotted donkey.  A very nice touch by Carle to give us a bit of a surprise at the end....

Ninja Pigs and Perfect "Pork Chops"

Book:  The Three Ninja Pigs  by Corey Rosen Schwartz, Illustrated by Dan Santat
Props:  Wolf Hat (or similar), Pig Ears (or something like that), Fake Bricks, Pre-cut Stick, Martial Arts Clothes (or even a plain bathrobe would be funny)
Presenters:   Three
Audience:  K-2 (also works for Preschool, just not quite as well)

Even before I saw the book, I knew just from the title that there would have to be something fun we could do with The Three Ninja Pigs.  We decided to try it for our K-2 Book Adventures "Heroes and Villains" program.  It's a clever re-telling of "The Three Pigs," where each pig learns a martial art, but the first two don't stick with their training.  The third one's a girl and a good student, and she saves the day. 

For our three-person telling we decided to go with one person (Teri) as all three pigs.  Sheila was the Wolf and since the text rhymes and we wanted to get that just right, I was narrator.  We usually don't mind half-memorizing and acting out with a script, but Terri couldn't do that this time:  she had to have her hands free for Ninja moves.  The illustrations are also excellent, and give the kids a more tangible sense of what the book is all about, so we selected some of those and projected them as the story progressed.  We also threw in a bit of the martial arts terminlogy as visuals, and added word balloons for most of the dialogue.  For the script we trimmed a stanza or two just to fit our time slot.

With that in place, the story plays out pretty smoothly.  Terri borrowed an authentic Taekwondo Ki to wear from a co-worker.  She even learned an authentic move or two, but in the end she went for comical effect, and it was definitely funny.  I'm pretty sure "the cartwheel, the crescent, the crane" don't go quite the way she did them.

Pigs one and two battled Wolf briefly.  We projected a scan from the book, then clicked to add word balloons for their lines.  Then Pig Three demonstrated her skills.  Terri broke a stick (pre-broken ) and shattering bricks (cardboard ones, but still visually impressive).  This scares Wolf and he leaves without even coming to blows ("I love to eat ham / But I think I should scram / before she makes mincemeat of me").

We'll probably use this for Family Storytime as well, but K-2 is really the perfect audience, since they get most of the jokes, like when Pig Three performs a "perfect Pork Chop."  Younger kids will still get the heart of the story, though, and will love the silly action.