Bremen Town Musicians

Bremen Town Musicians was one of the tales that I was not at all familiar with until I decided to use it for storytime. I love the comedy of errors that happens, so I decided that the whole cause/effect thing would be a good way to bring up simple machines and have the kids try to build a Rube Goldberg machine. 

Outline: 

Opening Song: Put Your Hands Up High

Opening Rhyme: Hands Go Up

Story: The Bremen-town Musicians retold by Ruth Belov Gross

Movement activity: Yoga poses – Rooster (modified), Cat, Downward Dog, and Donkey (3 legged downward dog)

Story: Ol' Bloo's Boogie-Woogie Band and Blues Ensemble by Jan Huling

Activity: Simple Machines

Craft: Rube Goldberg

Goodbye Song

How it actually went: 

The kids enjoyed the stories, although when we read the New Orleans inspired version, they kept asking me why the donkey was called Ol' Bloo since it was, in fact, not blue. As I had hoped, they seemed to enjoy the comedy of errors that caused the robbers to believe that the house had a monster in it. This was also the scene that I used for the basis of my STEAM concept this week. We talked a little bit about cause and effect and simple machines. 

We tried yoga poses for the first time in storytime. One of our other branches has yoga mats that I was able to borrow. I found some simple poses online to go along with each of the animals. Well, okay, so the rooster pose that I found was not at all simple. I modified that one for this storytime. Some of the kids really liked adding yoga to storytime, some did not. 

Next, I gave a brief introduction to the six simple machines with the Learning Resources set that I ordered from Amazon. This gave the children the chance to see the machines in action, and explore for themselves. 

For our craft time I wanted the children to try their hand at building some simple machines, and if they could, see if they could build more than one machine and have them interact. One of our maintenance guys helped me come up with a simple pulley mechanism using cardboard and wood dowels. This was another craft where I gave the kids everything from the box under my desk and just let them have at it. Many of them started with the pulley, and added to it from there. 

My original vision had been for some cool Rube Goldberg style machines, but I opted to keep it simple and let the kids determine how far they wanted to take it. 

How about you? Have you ever done Rube Goldberg machines with your kids? How did they turn out?

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