Drive in Storytime

I've seen a few "drive in" ideas floating around on Pinterest using cardboard boxes. We having been getting quite the stack of boxes in our community room, and with Earth Day on Monday I thought it would be fun to do a drive in storytime with the toddlers. It went pretty well (most box stories are short), so I thought since it the toddlers seemed to have fun in the boxes (most toddlers sitting at storytime ever!), I would do a drive-in box storytime with the preschoolers as well. 

When the kids walked into storytime, alot of them were confused by the boxes I had set out all over the floor. "Hop in!" was all I had to say and the boxes started filling up. The question of the day today was, "Have you ever made something with a box?" I started with the easy reader "What Is That", Said the Cat by Grace Maccarone. It is very rhymey (yeah, probably not a word). I allowed for a pause in the middle of the phrases to see if the kids would come up with the rhyming animals "I will try, said the . . . fly!". The book ends with "later alligator" so I used the Five Little Monkeys Teasing Mr. Alligator flannel and song. Some knew it, some didn't.

Then I read a rare two books in a row! Sitting In My Box by Dee Lillegard which is a little bit like Brett's The Mitten. There was opportunity for the kids to knock on their boxes as each animal approaches then asks to get into the box. Then I read Not a Box by Antoinette Portis. The rabbit gets a little frustrated that I, the reader, kept talking about his box when it clearly was not a box. Kids were giggling. The book ends with the rabbit shooting off into space with his rockeship, so we danced to Rocketship Run by the Laurie Berkner Band. The countdown and blast off were easy for the kids to catch on to, then we just used our arms to fly around during the "boring" parts of the song. I finished up with The Birthday Box by Leslie Patricelli.

Our craft used a recycled cereal box chopped up to look like a little cardboard box and the kids got to make their box into something using markers. This was not one of their favorite art projects, there was no messy glue, paint or glitter, just some boring old markers. I made sure to walk around and ask everyone what they had made their boxes into and wrote it on their sheets... words have meaning!!

Sadly, no one asked to take their boxes home- I would have let them!