Storytimes from the Liberry: Mad About Hats (Toddlers)

Social Media, blogs and Pinterest have helped me so many times as a librarian, I couldn’t count. 

So in an effort to share and share alike, I’ll start posting my own ideas for storytimes here on my blog. Please feel free to share, use and adapt for your storytimes at your library, childcare or home. Library books are free and sharing the love of reading should be free too.

For reference, I run the toddler storytime at my library and my age group is 2-3 year olds ( everyone seems to have a different classification for toddlers) So the idea posted here are geared towards that age group and are often packed into a fast pace 20-25 minute session

Mad About Hats

Inspiration: Being a child of the 80’s-90’s I was addicted to Care Bears and one of my favorite silly songs was from “Care Bears Adventure in Wonderland” sung by the Mad Hatter himself “Mad about Hats”

To this day it is an inside joke in my family. If you ask “Do you like hats?” or mention hats in a conversation , my mother and/or myself will reply “I’m Mad about hats!” (that’s the insanity talking)

Hats was a theme I knew I wanted to tackle and it was one of the first story times I created. I repeated it in January after two years and some sprucing up.

BOOKS:

Do You Have a Hat? By Eileen Spinelli
A longer book to start out, you can skip a few pages to shorten it. I've read this one before but I switched it out for this next one

Under my Hood I Have a Hat by Karla Kuskin

Okay, so the hat is a small part of this story, but it is an adorable book to read for winter.  Kids can really relate to the clothes and the simple text. It's fairly simple to ask kids at this age if they wore a coat, hat, mittens today and what color they are.

Twelve Hats for Lena: A Book of Months by Karen Katz
A book of months and hats. It's got a big lift the flap at the end of the story which seems to wow them at the end.

Which Hat Is That?: A Flip-the-Flap Book by Anna Grossnickle Hines, LeUyen Pham (Illustrator)
 

 Lift the flaps. Kids love them. This book is full of them.

Aunt Lucy Went to Buy a Hat by Alice Low
This book has a great rhythm, and the chance to switch voice from narrator to the voice of Aunt Lucy. 

 SONGS:


A cowboy wears a cowboy hat (Hands encircle head)
As he gallops on his horse (Galloping motion)
A firefighter’s hat keeps her safe (Hands encircle head)

As fires run their course (Spraying motion)

A clown wears a pointy hat (Hands form a point on head)

And a smile upon his face (big smiles)
And astronauts wear helmets (encircle face with hands)
When blasting into space (Palms together shoot hands up to sky)

 

Grandma’s Glasses

Here are Grandma’s glasses
And here is Grandma’s hat

And this is the way she folds her hands
And puts them in her lap

Here are Grandpa’s Glasses
And her is Grandpa’s Hat
And this is the way he fold his hands
And puts them in his lap

My version has Grandma with very tiny glasses (Small circles around the eyes) and folds her hands very gently. On the other hand, Grandpa has very big glasses and more or less slaps his hands in his lap.

Hat Thief

The Wind took my hat- oh dear, oh my!
The wind took my hat up into the sky
I need my hat the baker said

I need my hat to cover my head

I tried this using actually hats at the end. I asked the children to hold their hands up and pretend to reach and catch the hat. Some did it and even mimicked the song, but most of them just wanted to wear the hats. I had a power struggle as I kept them out of arms reach until we were finished with the rhyme. My evening group did pretty well and even tried saying the rhyme or chanting "my hat". I was adorable and we had playtime with the hats afterwards.