I inherited a fabulous stash of finger puppets in my library, and I didn’t even know I had them until just before winter break. I’ve spent most of the school year so far figuring out where things are, what things are, and what I have; things weren’t labeled when I arrived. But I’ve got some great stuff there, so as soon as the new year started I began using the finger puppets. This month with pre-k I’m doing a series of winter-themed lessons, and I’ve been using the puppets a lot. Here are the books I’ve done so far (more on this winter theme to come!):

I’d never heard of It’s Winter! by Linda Glaser until I started poking around my collection for winter books. But it’s a great little story about a girl and her dog who go out in the snow. She thinks about different animals and how they live through the winter, and I used all the animal puppets I could find to talk to the pre-k kids about the season. The story has frogs, fish, chipmunks (and I had a chipmunk finger puppet!), all kinds of different animals. Much more than just the bears we usually associate with hibernation.

Denise Fleming’s Time to Sleep is a book we’ve been reading this week for Hibernation Week. All of those stories were about bears sleeping through the winter, but I thought this particular circular story was great for the finger puppets. Bear wants to go to sleep for the winter, but first she has to tell one of her animal friends that it’s time. Then that animal tells another one, and on and on until it comes back to Bear–who’s already asleep! The illustrations are wonderful and slightly abstracted, and the kids liked the finger puppets to enhance this story.

I’ve mentioned before that I love Karma Wilson’s Bear books. So do my pre-k classes. I’ve been reading the first book, Bear Snores On, for our Hibernation lesson this week and they respond so well to it. I’ve decided I’ll be reading all the other Bear books with them at some point, but for now this is a great one if you have the right animal puppets. I have most of them, but not all. Several forest animals sneak into Bear’s den to enjoy the winter, and he sleeps through all of it.