Butterfly Story Hour

I hosted my last coffee shop story hour today.  I may do it again in the future, but right now our schedule is jam packed with an upcoming trip to Disney, R's preschool graduation, R's dance recital, C's piano lessons, T's busy schedule, and come September, I will have a newborn.  Anyway, enough about me.

Today, the theme of our story hour was butterflies.  I read two books:

The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle is a book that most people are familiar with, but it features a very hungry caterpillar who eats his way through the days of the week until he wraps himself up in his cocoon and emerges as a beautiful butterfly.  We have owned this book since T was a toddler; it's great for counting practice for toddlers, and the story is fun for preschoolers too.

Butterfly Butterfly by Petr Horacek is about a girl named Lucy who chases a butterfly around her garden all day long.  The next day, she looks and looks but can't find the butterfly anywhere.  She finds a lot of other colorful creatures in the garden, and when she finally decides to lay down in the grass, she notices something wonderful in the sky - her butterfly.  The book is full of beautiful colors that are very appealing to young children, but the biggest attraction in this book is the pop up butterfly at the end.

After reading, each of the children made their own butterfly to take home.  They began by coloring coffee filters with washable markers.

When they finished coloring, each child used the spray bottle to spray his or her coffee filter with enough water to just make the filter damp so the colors would spread out over the filter.

We left the coffee filters to dry for a few minutes.  Then, I cut pipe cleaners in half and used one pipe cleaner (some people call them chenille stems) to wrap around the center of a scrunched coffee filter.

I twisted the pipe cleaners so they would stay in place and then turned the edges to look like antennae.

 

Thank you to all of my little friends for joining me for story hour every month.  I will miss all of the hugs!  Thank you to the moms for bringing the little friends, and for helping clean up!  Thank you to Cuppers Cafe for providing a great place for story hour and for providing free hot chocolate and juice for the kiddos.

For more art projects inspired by books, head over to stArt at A Mommy's Adventures.