Tag Archives: felt boards

Flannel Friday: Hooray For Hat!

4 Nov

Wow, it’s been a super long time since my last FF post. Happy to be back, even temporarily!

I assume most, if not all, of you are familiar with the excellent book Hooray for Hat by Brian Won. It’s a perfect toddler book – fun story, colorful pictures, repeated refrain the kids can join in on reading, positive ending. Due to its simplicity and repetition, it makes for a great flannel board, too! But I must give credit where due – I got the idea from Laura at Library Lalaland (who’s post I found on the Flannel Friday Pinterest)

While Laura made her animals reversible (genius!) to show their grumpy and happy faces, I did not. I just kept their faces neutral. I also added a tiny piece of velcro to the back of each of the hats to help them stick together as one so it would be easier for me to handle.

Here are the animals, wearing their hats, sans Giraffe, who was still hiding in his tree feeling sad. Note I skipped turtle as I wanted to shorten the story a smidge because I do storytime for ages 0 – 5 and I get a lot of the younger crowd:

hooray-for-hat

And here’s Giraffe with all the hats. . HOORAY FOR FRIENDS!

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Finally, I made a felt “Hooray for Hat” sign that I could put up the first time we say it and then point to each time. This helps with print recognition and children beginning to think of themselves as readers. I cut the letters out with my library’s die cut so I think they look super cute.

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Hooray!

Today’s FF roundup will be hosted by Mollie Kay! Check out all this week’s awesome posts there!

(Not) Flannel Friday: Where to find great (free) clipart for flannelboards

17 Oct

This past week I attended a great training with Kathy Villere, a speech-language pathologist who has worked with young children for many years. She gave us some really valuable information about how children develop language and vocabulary skills, and how this ties very closely into learning to read. Her talk will have to be an entirely separate post, but: she had some great props she uses with kids and shared with us some sites for finding great free clipart (the first 2 in the list below) that can be used for creating flannelbords, etc.

So, fellow flannel friday-ers, I thought it might be useful to compile some of the best sites for free downloadable art that can be used for flannelboards. Please let me know if I’ve missed any of your favorites!

FREE CLIPART SITES:

  • OpenClipArt: Thousands of clipart illustrations, copyright-free for your use. 
  • MorgueFile: free photographs. I searched “monkey” and found 12 pages of photos, including the one to the right. Cute!
  • Free Kids Clip Art by Phillip Martin: For non-profit use only, and education-focused. Super cute! Printable banners and certificates too!
  • Discovery Education: Education-focused cartoon clipart
  • Clkr.com: I’ve gotten a lot of animal images from here. The site bills itself as the “online royalty free public domain clipart.” I got my “5 clean and dirty pigs” design from here.

FREE PRINTABLE FLANNELBOARDS (print, laminate and use as-is or trace on to felt):

What are some of your favorite sites for free, flannelboard-friendly images? Have you found any other ready-to-go flannelboard sites? Please share in the comments so we’ll all know about them! Thanks!
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