Welcome Song: Hello, Friends!
Touching Rhymes/Tickles
- Well hello everyone, can you touch your nose?
- 1 little, 2 little, 3 little fingers
- Slowly slowly very slowly
- Pizza pickle pumpernickel
- Roly poly
Book 1: Dear Zoo / Rod Campbell
Songs/Bounces
- Giddyup giddyup giddyup horsey
- Trot trot to Boston
- You be the lemon
- A hippopotamus got on a city bus
Book Two: I went walking / Sue Williams
Movement Songs
- London bridge is falling down
- Up up up in the sky like this
- Zoom zoom
- The elevator song
Soothing Songs
- Come under my umbrella
Goodbye song: Goodbye, Friends!
I Went Walking is very similar to Brown Bear, Brown Bear, so it’s great for babies and toddlers. It can work very well as a call-and-response activity, where the audiences asks the reader, “what did you see?”
I try to include a little bit of sign language in my story times (both my hello and goodbye songs have signs), and Come under my umbrella introduces a few new signs. When it comes to signing, I’m less interested in teaching pre-verbal babies to communicate than I am in introducing and promoting diversity. We often think of diversity in terms of ethnicity, religion, gender or sexual identity, but diversity includes different abilities and means of communication as well. Some of us speak with our mouths, but others of us speak with our hands, or with a computer, but we all have a special voice worth sharing! Hopefully, by introducing children to the diversity of the human race at a young age, we can help them learn to understand and celebrate the differences that make us all so wonderful!