Flannel Friday: Way Down Deep in the Deep Blue Sea

For our fall session of story time, I decided to base my theme around colors! Basic, I know, but it's my first time running a full-fledged story time session on my own, so I wanted something simple that also gave me some wiggle room. It feels like I've got a VERY young group this time around, so having the wiggle room is good.

For week 1, I did red, and borrowed the crafty Miss Sarah's Five Red Apples flannel board. The kids LOVED it; I can't even begin to describe how adorably silent and worried they went when I brought out the farmer's wife to exclaim about how there weren't any more apples.

We did blue my second week, and I decided to make a flannel board based off of Jan Peck's book, Way Down Deep in the Deep Blue Sea. It's a cute story with great illustrations, and it has a lot of repetition, which I like to use with my flannel boards. The animals are made out of craft foam, though the background is flannel.

Here's my full cast of characters:

 Please excuse the dolphin's terrifying eyes. I promise they're normal googly eyes, there's just an unfortunate light glare. (Though based off this picture, I am seriously considering naming him Stormageddon, Dark Lord of All. I feel like it fits.)

 My background:

And some close ups:

Ms. Whale and Mr. Octopus are fancy. Probably on their way to an under-the-sea ball. The BEST kind of ball, obviously. I hear life is the bubbles down there.

Oh, Stormageddon. You look so much friendlier now!

But Mr. Seahorse is still keeping an eye on you.

I switched up the book's text a little to work more smoothly for a flannel board. Instead of including the "treasure" stanzas to frame the story, I just focused on "meeting" each sea creature. Here's the rhyme I ended up using!

Way down deep in the deep blue sea,
I spy a seahorse swimming by me!
Hello, seahorse!
How are you, seahorse?
See you later, seahorse!
And we swim away!

I then switched out the seahorse for a hermit crab, a starfish, a sea turtle, an octopus, a dolphin, and a whale. (There was a swordfish in the original book, but I was out of room on my flannel board, and I figured my 2s and 3s would be least likely to recognize a swordfish. Sorry, Mr. Swordfish!)

Then, to wrap up this flannel board, I introduced an exceedingly cute, fuzzy shark puppet (WAY less intimidating than you-know-who a few pictures up):

Okay, he is a wee bit toothy, but I maintain that he is adorable.

And here's the end of our rhyme!

Way down deep in the deep blue sea,
I spy a... a SHARK! Oh no!

Quick, swim away!


And that's it! We ended by waving goodbye to all of the different animals. The first time I did this, I waved goodbye to each animal individually as I took them off the board, which did not hold the kids' attention even a little bit, so we switched to a general goodbye instead. If I do this one again, I also might omit a couple animals - the flannel board as a whole went a bit long, and at one point, I had a little girl inform me, "You're putting too much on there!"

End note: Apologies for the Stormageddon jokes, which you probably won't find funny unless you watch Doctor Who.