A Christmas Story Hour

I hosted story hour at our local coffee shop today.  We had a great crowd this month.  Our theme was Christmas trees, and we shared three books:

The Biggest Christmas Tree Ever by Steven Kroll is about two mice, each on his own search for the perfect Christmas tree.  When they both find the same tree, they decide to work together to create the biggest and most beautiful Christmas tree ever. 

If You Take a Mouse to the Movies by Laura Numeroff is a fun book to read this time of year because Mouse does so many of the things kids love to do at Christmas time.  He makes ornaments, builds a snowman, decorates a Christmas tree, and more.

Merry Christmas Mouse by Laura Numeroff features many of the illustrations from If You Take a Mouse to the Movies.  The text is simple and it  is a cute counting book for young preschool aged children.  This was a good third book for our story hour because from experience I have found that the kids need more than two books, but not quite three books!  This book is very short and the kids like to count the ornaments on each page.  Of course, this means they climbed all over me to see each page close up, but that was fine!  I felt loved!

After reading together, the children made their own Christmas trees.  My original plan was to give each child glitter paint and corks so they could stamp ornaments on their trees, but we had a large crowd so I opted for a mess free version from Frugal Family Fun.  I gave each child two identical tree shapes that I had cut out of green card stock and some mini color coding labels. 

They decorated both sides of each tree with the labels.  Next, I cut one of their trees from the bottom up to the middle and the other one from the top down to the middle and fit both trees together.  I should mention that I quickly learned  (after the first child) that I had to tell each child ahead of time that I would be cutting his or her trees to fit them together to make one beautiful Christmas tree.  There were no tears or anything, but the first child was very concerned about me cutting his trees!  Two Post-it star shapes finished each of the Christmas trees.

Thank you to Cuppers Cafe for providing free hot chocolate for all of the story hour guests and for providing a wonderful place for us to gather, read, and create together! 

Thank you to my friend Robin for helping me every month; if you click on her name, you can check out her blog where she posts pictures of the amazing cakes that she makes! 

Last, but not least, thank you to all of the moms who attended story hour and allowed me to take pictures of their children and share them here (I didn't get pictures of all of the kids this month; it was a bit hectic)!