Flannel Friday--Puppet Edition

Meet Fergus! Fergus is a very large, very animated puppet. I named him with the help of the Flannel Friday Facebook group. Unfortunately, I can't remember who it was who suggested the name Fergus (Linda, was it you? or was it Lisa?!), but I want to give credit to whomever it was. There were lots of great suggestions, but Fergus just stuck.


So, this qualifies as a Flannel Friday because I'm sharing my method for using Fergus in storytime. Fergus is our letter monster! He loooooooooves eating delicious letters, but he's very hungry, so after he eats them we have to think of some delicious words that start with that letter.


I know I've mentioned them before, but I'm a big fan of this set of Alphabet Soup Starters from S&S Worldwide. There's a 'soup can' for every letter. Inside are cardboard upper and lowercase letters, and a variety of images that start with that letter. On the back of each image the word is printed and the letter is highlighted in a second color. For the vowels there are images for both long and short vowel sounds. I usually tape the images up on my storytime easel to prompt the kids with ideas, especially since many of my storytime kids are on the younger side of things.

I ask the kids if they can think of any words that start with our letter of the day, and as they throw out suggestions I pick one, "OOoh, ball is a GREAT "b" word. Buh, buh, BALL listen to that 'b' sound. Ok, let's feed it to Fergus-he's so hungry!" And then we count, "One, two, three, BALL" and 'throw' the word towards Fergus, who gobbles up words being thrown at him from all corners of the room (Think Cookie Monster).

It's a really fun shtick, and the kids find it delightful. I think it's a great way of making the letter of the day a truly fun part of storytime!

**update** if you are looking for ideas to do a letter of the day, but puppets just aren't your thing, check out this post. 

Here's an idea of how big they are.