For Story Crafternoon - our elementary age, after school storytime - we've been reading Aesop's Fables. This week was "The Ant and the Grasshopper".

In this story, a colony of ants are preparing for winter by building up their food stores with hard work. A grasshopper watches on playing music through the night and disturbing the ants sleep. When winter comes, the grasshopper realizes that he is not prepared for the cold months like the ants and begs them to share their food with him. The moral being: There's a time for work and a time for play.

This storytime itself was incredibly short but loads of fun. Typically I like to have a craft, but instead we had a scavenger hunt to find/gather our own snacks like the ants in the story. As kids came in, I had them sit down at the table were we worked on worksheets to unscramble letters to form words. I acted like it was just to pass time, but it really wasn't. 😉

For this hunt, I printed off 16 leaves on green sheets of construction paper to cut out. I hid them in the room, telling them they were all in plain sight except for some that may be underneath chairs or
hidden behind cushions (plastic square cushions stacked in the corner that we use for PreK storyime).

On the backs of these leaves were groups of colored letters.To find their treasure, they had to unscramble these letters to uncover the location to search next. Just like they had been unscrambling words as they came in!

But first, they had to sort the colors.

Once the colors were sorted and words unscrambled, there were 4 locations to search. These were hidden inside certain cabinets, drawers or boxes. .. Which is why it was stressed that no green leaves were hidden inside anything.  I didn't want them to find these boxes prematurely!!

Inside the wrapped packages were candy: Reeses Pieces, Hersey Kisses, etc.

They had to bring the packages to the table and unwrap together, then I let them decide what the best way to divide their loot among themselves by themselves. And actually, they divided it up so there was even some left over for me to share with some kids who came into the Children's Dept after the program! Of course, I don't think they intended for that to happen.

This was a super easy storytime to set up, it got the kids moving, having fun and problem solving. Overall, it was a success and I would definitely repeat this with another group.

Did I mention we talked about ants too? I tried to make it a little educational, but that's not as exciting to type about...