"When a monster is born there are two possibilities. Either it's a faraway-in-the-forests monster, or it's an under-your-bed monster. If it's a faraway-in-the-forests monster, that's that. But if it's an under-your-bed monster, there are two possibilities..." This story continues in this format, always presenting our monster friend with two possibilities. While not really a Choose Your Own Adventure story, this book does show us that there are always different choices. Besides, some of the options that the monster has are just plain silly. The kids were actually enraptured by this book, and they especially liked it when the story came full circle at the end.
If You're a Monster and You Know It by Rebecca and Ed Emberley
The Emberleys has written lots of fun monster stories. I picked this one from the bunch because it also lends itself very well to some moving and imaginative play as the kids can snort and growl, smack their claws, and twitch their tails just like a monster does as we read. I always like to make sure that we have at least one stand-up-and-move activity during storytime since I've found that it helps to keep the kids focused, and this book fit the bill perfectly.
This is actually one of my favorite Mo Willems books of all time. Leonardo is a terrible monster. Not a scary monster - a terrible monster. He's no good at scarring anyone! So he decides to find the biggest scardy-cat kid in the world, a boy named Sam, and scare the tuna salad out of him to make himself feel better. Needless to say, that doesn't exactly go as planned. But perhaps Leonardo and Sam can become friends instead.
Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak
I ended up not having time for this fourth story, but I always think it's a good idea to have an extra in your back pocket just in case. This classic book could be a quieter, more soothing choice for your group than If You're a Monster if you think that your group needs it.
We also did a few other activities. Credit for both of these activities belongs to one of my co-workers, who created them.
First, we had to look for Little Monster under the bed.
There are seven beds, each one a different color. I put each of the beds up on our magnet board, secretly hiding the little monster underneath one of them. First we counted the beds and talked about what colors they are. Next I asked the kids to guess in their heads which bed they thought the monster was hiding under. After given the kids a moment to make their guess, I said the rhyme: "Little Monster, Little Monster, are you under the _____ bed?" Fill the blank in with a color, and remove the bed of that color to reveal if the monster is under the bed. When I did the activity, I purposely removed all but two of the bed before revealing which bed the monster was under to build suspense. The activity can be repeated as many times as you want, hiding the monster under a different bed each time.
We also told another story using a flannelboard based on Ed Emberley's book Go Away, Big Green Monster.
In the book, die cuts reveal more and more of the monster's face as you turn the pages, and then parts of his face are taken away as the reader tells him to go away. Felt pieces made it lots of fun to assemble and take apart the face. Layering felt pieces is obviously a bit different than using die cuts so I did have to re-order just a couple of the pieces to make the flannelboard work easily, but no harm done there.
As always we did a craft to end our storytime. We made monster masks!
I found a template for a cute monster mask here. I enlarged the mask just a little bit to make it a better size (I think I zoomed in to 110%) and then printed the enlarged masks on cardstock. I cut the masks out and cut string to tie the masks in advance, so all the kids had to do was color. They loved it! We had lots of scary, growling, stomping monsters at the library after storytime was all finished.
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