Storytimeland

For starters, we read Bob Graham’s “Let’s Get A Pup,” Said Kate.

 

 This heart-wrenching story features a family going to an animal shelter to find a puppy, and also having their hearts captured by a big old dog. At first, they leave the big dog at the pound, but the next day, they realize they can’t stop thinking about her and become a two-dog household.

The story is really sweet, and the illustrations intrigue me – the parents are very “modern,” with piercings, tattoos, and tank tops. Interesting.

The next story I shared was the first that popped in to my head after reading that it was National Animal Shelter Appreciation week:

 

The Hound from the Pound by Jessica Swaim is a rhyming story about a lonely lady who adopts a basset… and all his friends… and falls in love in the process.  It provides some great opportunities for the kids to howl along with the dogs, and some very silly puns they ought to enjoy.

Tired of dogs, and out of pound stories, I moved on to Emma Dodd’s latest, I Don’t Want a Cool Cat.

 

A quick little rhyme that made the kids smile. I love Dodd’s pictures!

Whenever I can, I like to do a story that the kids can help me with, usually a wordless or nearly-wordless picture book.

 

Pet Shop Lullaby, the story of a hamster who keeps all the other pet shop residents up at night, fit the bill. The kids seemed to get a kick out of it, and the illustrations of the hamster are both right on target and really, really cute.

 

After watching an animated version of Ezra Jack Keats’s Pet Show, we moved on to crafting.

The kids had a choice of cat or dog paper bag puppets, based largely on the templates found on the DLTK website.

However, those templates were a bit complicated, not to mention two pages, so I trimmed them a bit and made my own one-page templates for them.


 

Cute, huh?