my first flannel friday: mrs. mcmurphy’s pumpkin

a few months ago, one of the librarian bloggers that i follow began a series she called “flannel friday” where she’d post a different flannelboard story each friday.  this caught on quickly and there’s now a wonderful weekly following, a pinterest page and it’s quickly becoming an excellent resource for children’s librarians.  i have a few favorite flannelboard sets that i’ve created recently, so i thought i’d jump on the bandwagon and ride along for a few weeks (possibly not all consecutive weeks, but bear with me).

just in time for halloween, i thought i’d start with my absolute favorite halloween book, mrs. mcmurphy’s pumpkin by rick walton.  i love it because if you’ve got older kids in the audience you can really play up the spooky part and make it rather chilling but if you’ve got a younger crowd you can play up the laughs and read it in a more lighthearted voice and no one gets scared.  plus, it’s got a funny ending.  aaaaaand, it lends itself rather handily to being made into a quick-to-make flannel story.

for my flannel version of this story, i cut out a simple pumpkin shape from orange felt (added a green felt stem) and then cut out all of the face parts in black or orange felt and you add them one “day” at a time as the story continues.

at the end of the story, your pumpkin looks something like this: 

but if you want him to look less scary, just flip the eyes around so that the slant goes the other direction (like in the photo above before i put the eyes on the pumpkin).  the mouth was a little tricky to figure out because the story hinges on the pumpkin not having “teeth” until the last day, but he has a “wicked, wicked grin” on day one.  i’m pretty happy with the grin i finally came up with.

i hope you’ve enjoyed my first flannel friday contribution.  i’d love to hear your experiences if you decide to use this story!  (and for those of you faithful readers who are not children’s librarians, i promise we’ll get back to regularly scheduled programming here on happy stuff for the rest of the week)