Story Time: Driving my Race car

Since it isn't really feeling like winter yet in New Jersey, I decided to put off those winter themed story times another week and went with a theme from one of my very first story times... 6 years ago? OMG. The craft is the same, I just changed the books.

The Books:

Let's Go for a Drive! by Mo Willems

Who Is Driving? by Leo Timmers

In the Driver's Seat by Max Haynes

Favorite: Who is Driving? by Leo Timmers. Matching up the vehicle to the driver = mayhem. I wish there were more to this book... which means I will probably add more later or make it into a flannelboard story the next time around. The kids really like guessing who was driving (or flying in one case) and they started getting really silly by claiming the LEAST OBVIOUS animal must be the driver. Hilarious time.

What was in the Memory Box? 
I hid a green felt tractor in the Memory Box this time, just to throw them off since my last few weeks of objects were easy. One of the vehicles someone is driving in Who Is Driving? is a green tractor and it really stumped the kids. Besides insisting that I had the egg in there again, I got everything from a firetruck, elephant, barn, until I gave the hint that a pig was driving this in one of the stories. Then of course, they all had to pass the tractor around and marvel at how they just saw the same one in the book! 

Activity: Surprise! I'm usually so lazy, but I actually prepared this in advance to have an activity. I remembered seeing paper plate steering wheels used with In the Driver's Seat on one of my favorite librarian blogs Storytiming and I knew I had to do it with my group! 

I made 30 since I figured the kids would want to keep them. I'm now left with 9 steering wheels since the rest went home with kids, but they were easy enough to make for when I might need them in the future.

Craft: 
Construction paper race cars with moveable wheels!

To make the shiny hubcaps, I cut circles from foil. The kids were really confused by the foil circles and were very fascinated by being able to glue this to their car to look like "real wheels". These race cars were a big hit since the wheels spin and the kids were zooming off to show off their race cars  around the library when they checked out their books.