Mixed Ages Storytime (K-5): Three Little Pigs

Today, I had to give a storytime to a group of kids who ranged in age from Kindergarten to 5th grade. As we all know, these types of storytimes can be very tricky. Normally, I feel as though I lose the kids’ interest when I attempt a storytime for such a wide age range, but today…today things were amazing, so I’m going to share my plan with you all. This plan was inspired by Amy Koester’s Three Little Pigs STEAM program.

Set Up and Supplies:

You will need:

• A table divided into three areas with tape.
• Duplo
• Plastic Cups
• Index Cards (about half of them folded in half)
• Jon Scieszka’s The True Story of the Three Little Pigs
• Music and possibly other cool books (for later)

Intro:

• Ask the older children to raise their hands. Select 6 volunteers from older children.
• Bring older children over to the table and assign 2 kids to each of the three supplies (Duplo, cups, and index cards)
• Tell them that they should build a structure (house, tower, whatever) using their supplies
• Their building time is during the story. Once the story is over, they are finished.

Story:

• Read The True Story of the Three Little Pigs
• Have children participate by sneezing loudly

Activity:

• Once the story is over, have the builders step aside.
• Tell the other kids that we’re going to try to huff and puff and blow the three structures down.
• Select three volunteers. They get one breath to try to blow the structures down.
• Continue selecting volunteers until index cards (and possibly cups) have been blown down.
• The Duplo will most likely still be standing (unless you’ve got a kid with some amazing lung capacity).
• Have children return to their seats and break out a hair dryer.
• Blow everything down.

Follow Up Activities:

• Depending on time, you can either turn on some music and boogie (the kids really liked doing The Freeze today), read another book, or talk about the library.

How It Went:

This was, by far, the best storytime that I’ve done for such a wide variety of ages. Usually I lose the 4th and 5th graders during storytime, but they LOVED this (even though not all of them got to build). Seriously, I had kids of all ages cheering during this storytime.

And the best part was that they had so much fun during the activity, that they were really up for anything afterwards. This was supposed to be a 30 minute storytime, but the Three Little Pigs activity lasted about 15 minutes, so I had to do a few other activities. The younger ones wanted to read Pete the Cat, and I was afraid that the older ones would stare at me blankly during the story, but they sang along. I then turned on some music, and everybody danced.

So, yes, this was a success, and I’ll definitely be doing it again in the future!