Tag Archives: program

Giraffe’s Gotta Dance

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giraffe's gotta dance

Great gamboling giraffes! With just a few simple supplies – cardboard tubes, drinking straws, foam beads, and string – you’ve got yourself one fantastic dance partner!

We read Giraffes Can’t Dance by Giles Andreae, illustrated by Guy Parker-Rees (Orchard Books, 1999). It’s time for the annual Jungle Dance in Africa, and the all animals are strutting their stuff. Except Gerald the giraffe. His awkward long legs and neck make him the target of much derision. However, with the help of a friendly cricket, Gerald learns to tune into the music of nature. To his great surprise and joy, Gerald finds himself dancing to wind in the grass, swaying trees, and the full moon. His moves are admired by the Jungle Dance attendees. In fact, they want to learn to do it too!

You’ll need:

  • 2 toilet paper tubes
  • Yellow construction paper
  • Hole punch
  • 6 drinking straws (the longer, the better – ours were 10″)
  • 4 foam beads
  • String
  • Scissors and tape for construction
  • Markers for decorating

We found plenty of giraffe marionette projects on the internet, but they all had accordian-folded paper legs. While those are great for bobbing the puppet up and down, we wanted our giraffe’s legs to bend, twist, and swing to and fro. This meant the giraffe needed knees and weighted feet. Turns out drinking straws and foam beads were the perfect solution.

finished giraffe marionetteThe giraffe has a toilet paper tube body, and a 2″ long toilet paper tube head. Both of the tubes are wrapped with yellow construction paper. We used extra yellow construction paper to create the ears, antlers, and tail. Then we used markers to add the giraffe’s spots, mouth, and nostrils. We used eye stickers, but marker eyes work too!

That’s the art part of the project. Now for the marionette part! Punch 2 holes in one end of the head tube. The first hole is on the top:

top of head tubeThe second hole is positioned underneath the first, on the opposite side of the tube.

bottom of head tubeIf my description seems a little confusing, this next image should clear things up. Here’s the finished marionette head with the string running through the 2 holes you punched in the head tube.

string through head holesNext, punch a hole at each end of the top of the body tube:

top of body tubeThen turn the tube over and punch 4 holes in the bottom. As you have probably guessed, these 4 holes are where the marionette’s legs attach in the next step.

bottom of body tubeTo make the giraffe’s legs, thread a piece of string through a foam bead. Secure the string to the bottom of the foam bead with tape. Cut a drinking straw in half, then slide the 2 pieces down the string towards the foam bead. Thread the loose end of the string into the leg hole you punched in the body tube. Secure the string inside the tube with tape. Repeat these steps with the 3 remaining legs.

giraffe straw legsThe lower part of the your puppet is done, now for the upper part! The puppet is attached to its drinking straw control stick by two strings. The first string runs from the control stick to the giraffe’s rear end, where it is secured inside the tube with tape. The second string runs through the head, the neck, and then attaches to the body tube with tape. The neck is a drinking straw cut into 3 pieces.  We used black masking tape to secure the string to the control stick too.

giraffe neck and headYour marionette is done! We put on some tunes and invited kids to dance their giraffe friends. This resulted in some bouncy, twisty, bendy, jumpy dance moves, as well as a few bars of an original song we’re calling “Dancing, Dancing, Dance-a-lee-Dance!”

 

A Good Knight’s Kiss

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a good knight's kiss

Helmets! Shields! Dragons! And…kiss-catching nets? That’s right! The royal kiss has gone amiss, and these natty young knights must find it, posthaste!

We read The Kiss That Missed by David Melling (Barron’s Educational Series, 2002). When a busy King hurriedly blows a good night kiss to his son, the royal kiss misses its mark and flies out the window. A great hullabaloo is raised, and the King orders his Knight to find the errant kiss. Unfortunately, the kiss appears to have strayed into the wild wood, which is dark, smelly, and chock full of horrible creatures. Things are looking bad for the Knight when the kiss bounces past, causing all the horrible creatures to settle down to sleep. Except for a dragon, who hoists the Knight and his horse into the sky. Things are looking bad – again – when the royal kiss streaks right up the dragon’s nose. Ah! The dragon decides he doesn’t want to eat the Knight. He wants to kiss him goodnight, instead. They head back to the castle where the kiss is restored to the Prince, and everyone settles down for a good (and much deserved) night’s sleep.

You’ll need:

  • A piece corrugated cardboard for the shield
  • A selection of color masking tape
  • A box cutter
  • 2 brass fasteners
  • 2 strips of heavy-duty poster board
  • Hole punch
  • 1 jumbo popcorn bucket
  • Silver poster board or mirror board
  • A snippet of a toilet paper tube (approximately 1″ tall)
  • A bit of tin foil
  • 1 full sheet of tissue paper (ours was 19.5″ x 29.5″)
  • 1 butterfly net
  • 1 royal kiss (more on that later!)
  • Scissors, stapler for construction
  • Hot glue

The project consisted of a shield, helmet, and a kiss-catching net. Look, I beg of you, at this adorable knight:

adorable knightYou will find the instructions for the shield in this post. For this particular story time, we used a 12″ cake circle)s, color masking tape, and metallic and glitter markers. And here’s the template for 6 large emblems for the fronts of the shields.

round shieldNext came the helmets! Gentle lords and ladies, I found the most amazing DIY knight helmet at the blog Meaningful Mama. Jodi Durr, genius crafter, made one out of a jumbo popcorn bucket!

knight helmetThe instructions for Jodi’s helmet are here. We did, however, make some modifications. We used gray primer paint instead of metallic spray paint. We used silver mirror board for the visor. Jodi has 8 slits on her visor template, we only have 6. Also, instead of using brass tacks to make the visor move up and down, we held it in place with glue dots.

Finally, instead of a feather plume, we folded, then fringed, a 19.5″ x 29.5″ sheet of tissue paper. Then we rolled it up and hot glued it inside a tin foil-covered bit of toilet paper tube. Then we hot glued the plume to the top of the helmet.

paper plumeOur jumbo popcorn buckets were 8.5″ tall and the mouths were 7.5″ in diameter. Even so,  many didn’t slide easily over the kids’ heads. No problem! To make more room, cut a strip out of the back of the bucket until it fits. Here, for example what the back of my helmet looked like:

back of bucket helmetI’d like to send a big shout out to the Princeton Garden Theater for donating 25 jumbo popcorn buckets to our knightly cause! Last year, we collaborated on a How To Train Your Dragon event (check it out here!) and I do believe we’re going to have some more movie fun in the not-too-distant future.

Your last piece of knightly equipment is a kiss-catching net. I used butterfly nets I found in the $1 section of Target (you might recall seeing them in this post). I’ve also seen them at the Dollar Store. A little color masking tape around the handle helped me coordinate the net with my shield.

kiss catching netAll you need now are some kisses to catch! Given visor visibility and catching abilities, we wanted ours to be fairly large and substantial. We stuck gold embossed foil seals on the lids of 2″ favor tins, and dropped 6-8 flat glass marbles inside. Then we pinched four, 1.5″ x 7.5″ strips of gold mylar table cloth under the lid. Behold! A royal kiss, ready to be caught!

royal kissNow for the best part. Marissa is the proud owner of not one, but two dinosaur onesies. Ever since she sported one at this story time photo shoot, I’ve been looking for a reason to suit up. Dressed as “dragons,” Marissa and I lead the kids outside and had them form two lines. When we said “Go!” a kid from each line would chase me or Marissa.

knight gives chase to dragon danaWhen they caught us, we tossed a kiss in their net!

knight catches kiss from dragon marissa

Important! Keep the chase as orderly as possible. The last thing you need are 20 excited 3-5 year-olds with reduced vision running in a herd with with long sticks. As I mentioned, we had the kids form 2 lines. But we also had a parent volunteer stand at the front of the line to insure the kids wouldn’t all take off at once. Some kids elected to run without helmets (or shields), which was perfectly fine.

the kiss is caughtIt allowed me to see those beautiful smiles when the kiss was caught!

Don’t Wake The Giant

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don't wake the giant

Besides having exquisite taste in socks, these two clever girls came up with a book project that was much cooler than my book project. It involves giants, snoring, caves, and castles perched in a precarious place. It was for To Be Continued, our story time for 6-8 year-olds.

We read The Rise and Fall of Mount Majestic, written by Jennifer Trafton, and illustrated by Brett Helquist (Puffin, 2010). Persimmony Smudge has lost her hat, and her way, in a woods filled with poison-tongued jumping tortoises and restless mangroves. Little does Persimmony know that she is about to be a part of a much bigger dilemma – one that involves a castle, a bratty king, a mountain that rises and falls according to the time of day, and rumors of a snoring giant under said mountain. And then there’s the revolt at the pepper mill, the prophecy of the Lyre-That-Never-Lies, and the growing indignation of the most terribly polite Leafeaters. Will the island be shaken to pieces by the giant? Or will Persimmony and her friends be able to stop this terrible fate?

In the book, elderly Theodore the Potter makes Giving Pots. Basically, there are pots that give you what you need, not what you want. Persimmony’s pot, for example, gives her a single feather (and it turns out later she really, really, really needs it!). I loved the idea of making Giving Pots, so I brought out a slew of Model Magic. Love this stuff. It’s light, no mess, and it dries beautifully (it makes great mandrakes too).

giving pot

Before the kids started sculpting, I asked them to recall a passage from the book that described the beautiful artwork of the Leafeaters. Here’s the passage:

“The walls were elaborately painted with glorious pictures of trees. There were coconut palms bent sideways from the wind. There were clusters of mangrove trees as they grew at the forest’s edges along the shore. And there were stately willows with boughs drooping to the ground like green waterfalls.

The dome above was painted to look like the sky with the sun and moon and stars. Farther down were hundred of pictures stretching in a circle around the room – pictures of Mount Majestic, of fields ripe for harvest and orchards ripe for picking, of fishing boats on the sea and brown seals on the rocks, of goats and squirrels and pelicans.”

Here are the beautiful nature-influenced Giving Pots the kids created:

When the kids finished their Giving Pots, I dropped a single white duck quill feather into them. Because like Persimmony, you never know when you might need it!

So that was my project. However, two story time attendees were trying to guess what the Mount Majestic book project would be, and decided to send in one of their own! It was a contest to see who could keep the castle on their belly the longest while holding up the Snoring Cave. It’s a perfect match to the book (the giant originates in the Snoring Cave and the castle is located directly above him on Mount Majestic). Awesome.

don't wake the giantDid you recognize the castles from a previous To Be Continued? They were the project for Castle Hangnail. Nice to see them make a triumphant return!