2-5 Story Time: Here, Kitty Kitty...

I walked out of story time on Thursday and smacked my forehead. I completely forgot about the book that made me want to do Kitty Story Time. Oh well. What Will Fat Cat Sit On Next? will have to wait. (Have I mentioned yet that Jan Thomas rocks? Bold, big simple pictures and stories that make kids and grownups laugh and give you plenty of room to ham it up. Recipe for success.)

Attack of the fussy babies again. Maybe I need to provide some fun fuzzy board books. Or learn to deal with distractions better. Or use this as an opportunity to push baby story time.

Wanda Gag's Millions of Cats didn't go over as well as I'd hoped. I only used it with the 3-5s upon seeing that others had done so in their story times, even though I knew there was a lot of text on each page and the pictures were tiny and detailed. I thought about blowing up the pages and using them faux- Kamishibai style (displaying one picture at a time and reading off the back) but was thwarted by the number of two-page spreads. Perhaps I'll try memorizing and just telling it. Or practicing the "hundreds of cats" etc. with everyone a few more times.


After Millions of Cats, even Kevin Henke's Kittens First Full Moon was a stretch for some of the 3-5 year olds. It was a little bit of a stretch for some of the younger kids too (what with competing with crying babies and latecomers walking in and all), but for this one I'm willing to say "It's good for them." I could stay inside this one for a long time. The parents were enthralled too, predicting what was going to happen next as if I were reading the story just to them (and I totally missed the opportunity to complement them on this and to talk about encouraging their kids to do the same! Ugh!) Maybe I need to work on my timing.

I was really surprised to see how everyone stayed with Marilyn Janovitz's Three Little Kittens. It helps that a lot of people already know the words (and I invited them to help) and that everyone can chime in on the "meow, meow, meow, meow" bits. Even though the illustrations in this one are a little on the greeting-card side, I chose it over Galdone's version because 1) I find Galdone's illustrations garish and not particularly appealing and 2) I like how Janovitz handled the last line about "smelling a rat nearby." I'll admit I had no clue that's how the complete version ended, and was really confused. The rest of the rhyme is all about mittens and pie. Where do the rats come in? Introduce something new at the very end and don't even follow up on it? Who writes these, anyway? Where they leaving it open for a sequel? (Three Little Kittens chase a rat and get bitten?) Janovitz's endpapers show a big-bellied rat next to an empty pie plate.


Denise Fleming's Mama Cat Has Three Kittens is nice and repetitive until the pattern suddenly reverses itself- participatory and funny.