Posts on flannel boards

Abby (the) Librarian has a great post about how to make a flannel board story, from choosing the story to making the characters to tell it.

If you are a children's librarian or preschool teacher, there undoubtedly will come a time in your career when you are called upon to make a flannel board story—those storytelling kits with people and animals made of felt and told on a large, felt-covered board. Flannels bring stories off the page and invite improvisation and greater audience participation. Children can manipulate the figures to retell/invent stories themselves. Over all, they up the interactivity of a storytime.

Parents can use flannels with their own children at home, too, to promote early literacy. Storytelling in words and actions is a great pre-reading skill.

The best flannel board stories and rhymes, in my opinion, are those that...

• are very concrete (can be represented with simple figures)
• don't involve a lot of action (so once they're on the board you don't have to move them around a lot)
• have a strong pattern or repetition (easier to tell without a script)
• have opportunities for audience participation (identifying animals and colors, counting, etc.)

I confess that when I make a flannel board story, I favor laminated magnetic shapes over felt. (I'll talk about exceptions below). For me, it's easier to make the figures look the way I want without needing a zillion different colors of felt on hand or fussing with permanent markers. Also, you can use any magnetic surface to tell the story, including upright surfaces such as chalk boards, white boards, and refrigerators. (For felt shapes, you need a felt/flannel covered board tilted at a 10-ish degree angle. Not a tall order, but not as readily available to most people.)

How to make a magnet board story:

1. Choose your story and decide what essential characters and props you need. Don't get hung up on details, backgrounds, etc. Stay focused on the action of the story.
2. Draw, print out, photocopy, collage, and/or color the figures on plain paper. Cut them out. (You can also use die cut shapes. Or use pictures from a magazine. Etc.)
3. Use a laminating machine or contact paper to laminate your figures. Cut them out again, leaving a small border of laminate so the figures stay sealed and protected from wear and tear.
4. Apply 1/2 inch strips of magnetic tape to the backs of each figure, enough to keep it from sliding down the board.
5. As Abby advises, write that script!

However—those exceptions I mentioned—for some stories, felt is definitely the better material for the job. Any story that depends on concealment (e.g., "Inside the little red house, there was a little orange house...") is better done with felt, because felt's friction can keep multiple layers on the board at once. Another example is when you want to flip the shapes over to show their back side. For example, we have a wonderful flannel kit about six kittens tumbling into cans of paint. On one side, the kittens are all gray, but when you flip them over, they're each a different color the rainbow. Magnetic shapes are one-way only.

Here are some magnetic kits I've put together using various techniques.

For "The Hair-Raising Adventure of Sara Susan" (from Glad Rags: Stories and Activities Featuring Clothes for Children, by Irving & Currie), I used Microsoft clip-art for the figures. Sara Susan's messy hair piece has snarly yarn glued to it. I paperclip it over the top of her neat hair because, as I mentioned, magnets don't layer well.

I made up a "Five Little Garbage Trucks" rhyme and made these magnetic manipulatives to use with it. I traced the garbage truck from a picture I found online, photocopied it on green paper, and added colored shapes to distinguish the trucks.

I like to draw, so I got more ambitious with this adaptation of Robert Bright's My Red Umbrella. Still, it's nothing fancy: I drew all the characters and colored them with crayons. Voila!