Calling all Superheroes!

A few months back, a colleague mentioned a superhero storytime that she had recently tried and I had a feeling it would be a good program for the families at my library. Once I learned March was superhero month, I was sold! I knew I wanted to make capes and read some great adventure stories, but other than that I wasn't sure...

Here is what our superhero storytime ended up looking like. It turned out to be a great success. We had lots of interest, but we capped the program at 15 participants (ages 3-7).


Our "superheroes in training" entered super excited! We started off the fun by reading 2 really great superhero stories:
  
Timothy and the Strong Pajamas: A Superhero Adventure by Viviane Schwarz
(This was the first time I tried this book in a program and the kids loved it! Oh if only all pajamas gave you super strength at the end of a long day...)
  

Eliot Jones, Midnight Superhero by Anne Cottringer; illustrated by Alex T. Smith  
(I didn't love this one as much, but when I polled the kids we had 14 thumbs ups and 1 sideways thumb.) Eliot is a quiet kid during the day because he is using all his energy being a midnight superhero!

Once we had read 2 stories talking all about super strength, bravery, and courage; we created our own superhero masks and capes.

Masks: we found a free template online and printed them onto primary color cardstock ($4 for a pack of 50). We precut and hole punched the masks, so that our superheroes would just decorate them. Here is the full supply list: 


brightly colored cardstock
elastic cord
superhero mask template 
hole punch
scissors
glitter glue
markers
foam stickers

Capes: we cut $1 brightly colored tablecloths into 4 capes and supplied each child with various strips of duct tape that we used to decorate the capes.  Supplies:

various brightly colored duct tape
brightly colored plastic tablecloths (from our local dollar store)
scissors

Now that we had our masks and capes, we read one more superhero story! (We used lots of things we already had in-house, so I ended up spending about $20 on duct tape, cardstock, and tablecloths.)
 

The Adventures of Max and Pinky: Superheroes by Maxwell Easton III

While our superheroes in training were decorating their masks and capes, we set up our obstacle training course.  We used a tunnel, small brightly colored cones to run around, a balance beam, hula hoops to jump into, and balloon bad guys to crush. (Our superheroes opted to just keep their balloon bad guys with them.) If I had thought ahead and booked another program room, I could have made the obstacle course more detailed (jumping over lego brick houses and yarn laser mazes were in my original plan!) However, it was fun to go through the training course in masks and capes!

We had 5 minutes left and I laid out all the superhero books that I had pulled. 

All in all, a successful and easy to prepare program!