Storytime From the Liberry: The Color Brown

My favorite storytimes are the ones about colors. But instead of doing one a year about all the colors, I've decided to focus on one color for a story time, which will give me a chance to talk about a variety of things that fall under one basic theme.

For this storytime, we will focused on the often overlooked and unloved color brown. Things we featured in this story time beside the color were construction, mud, teddy bears, cows, and boxes (to name a few) I opened the story time with the discussion of what things can we think of that are brown and got some great answers like dogs, chocolate, dirt, cookies and shoes. Thankfully poop did not pop up as answer but I guess you could include a book about potty training if you are comfortable with that sort of thing. (Sorry, I will never do a potty training story time, not just that I find it gross but I don't trust myself to talk about it with a straight face!)

Books:

Brown Bear, Brown Bear What do You See? By Bill Martin Jr.
(A necessary evil, most people love this book but it bores me to tears. However it was very fitting)

Tip Tip Dig Dig by Emma Garcia

Moo Moo Brown Cow, Have you any Milk? By Phillis Gershator
A expansion on the rhyme Baa Baa Black Sheep. Can also be used for a storytime about farm animals and agriculture

Not a Box by Antoinette Portis

I think the best reaction I got when I asked what the main character was pretending to be now was a little box excitingly exclaiming "A Box Troll! A Box Troll!"






Activities and Songs:

Two Little Blackbirds with some additonal verses

Two Little Blackbirds sitting on a BED
One named BROWN, the other named RED

Two Little Blackbirds flying by a KITE
One named BLUE, the other named WHITE

Teddy Bear, Teddy Bear- There alot of different version of this song, most of them involving say your prayers which...yeah I rather not use in a public library. So I have a miss-match verison of my own.

Teddy Bear, Teddy Bear, turn around
Teddy Bear, Teddy Bear, touch the ground
Teddy Bear, Teddy Bear, dance on your toes
Teddy Bear, Teddy Bear, touch your noes
Teddy Bear, Teddy Bear, touch your head
Teddy Bear, Teddy Bear, go to bed
Teddy Bear, Teddy Bear, wake up now
Teddy Bear, Teddy Bear, take a bow

I also had a flannel rhyme Five Little Hedgehogs that just didn't get a big response as I hoped when I used it with my group. It got skipped over the next times. Pity, because my hedgehogs were really cute!

I also brought out Little Mouse Little Mouse, Are you in the Red House because the toddlers really love this game/chant! I'm planning to use it whenever I do a color storytime.

The best part about banned books week is seeing the faces of my co-workers when they pull a banned book from my display and exclaim "Really? Seriously" (Bone, James and the Giant Peach etc)

Also the fact that I had two teen girls ask me to find them copies of Fifty Shades Darker and A Game of Thrones and I reserve them copies/found them on the shelves without any hesitance or judgement.

(Well okay I was judging the 50 Shades kid, seriously if you are looking for erotica I can recommend several more well written titles.)

Storytime from the Liberry: Happy Feet

So I've done a storytime about hats so it seems a good idea to talk about an article of clothing that rested on the opposite side of our bodies- shoes! (get your mind out of the gutter)

When I previewed it two years ago, my co-worker and friend confided in me that she thought a storytime about shoes was one of the lamest idea she had ever heard.  Oh how she wounded me! Well this co worker left for a while but decided to come back. Welcoming her back I informed her I would be doing her favorite storytime next week.

"The one wear you read 'The Duckling gets a Cookie'?"
"No the one about SHOES!!" *cackle*

I'm sticking to my guns, I like this storytime. Plus we get to use our feet so there is a lot of jumping up and down, stamping our feet and all things toddlers love to do.

Books:

 Shoe Baby by Joyce Dunbar with illustrations by her daughter Polly Dunbar. Just really a cute little story with pleasing rhymes and repetitive phrases. 

Dancing Feet by Lindsey Craig It goes without saying, you need to get up and use your feet to make noise with this one. Most of the children got the general idea of making loud stomping noises with their feet or making tip toe quite noises. The text also follows a pattern which is easy to recall and even memorize in case your mind and hands are busy elsewhere directing your group to remember whats on the page!

My Two Hands/My Two Feet by Rick Walton
Whose Shoes by Anna Grossnickle Hines (and one of my favorite illustrators LeUyen Pham)

Yes even for a storytime on the obsure subject of shoes, there are pleanty of great books to choose from. I have at least half of dozen "back up" books I could use that worked well for this storytime, but I simply can't read them all in one storytime.

Activities and Songs:

We did the nursey rhyme, One two Buckle My Shoe
I also repeated the song I used in a summer storytime- Walking Walking

Walking Walking (Tune of "Frere Jacques")
Walking, walking, walking, walking
Hop hop hop! Hop hop hop!
Jumping, jumping, jumping, jumping, jumping, jumping.
Now we stop! Now we stop.

Extra verses including swaying and swimming, stretching and flying. 

So a storytime about shoes! What do you think?

Scientific Mystery

We help teacher and day care providers by assembling teacher collections. We are one of the few in our area who still offer this service. A teacher collection was dropped into my lap, after it was left on the desk for hours and my co workers refused to start on it. (but that's another story)

This collection for a selection of biographies and books on different scientist. The teacher had listed some names on the back (my favorite one was "polio vaccine guy") but one named stumped me.

"Mendeloveh"

I'm sure it was a long diffcult name to spell but after Googling it, I got nothing but random twitter handles and facebook pages.
Could it be Mendelssohn (no he's a musician) some how the name Mendel was ringing at the back of my brain but I couldn't place it. Wasn't he that Nazi scientist/doctor/torturing slimeball? Well at that point it was time to close, so I left this mystery till the morning.

I quizzed my co-worker on the name the next morning. She came up with a similar answer. "There was a scientist named Mendel, but wasn't he a Nazi?" No that can't be right, so more researching.

Sorry all the useless knowledge of the order of the Wimpy Kid books, Star Wars trivia and presidential anecdotes block out the information in my brain that Gregor Mendel was indeed a scientist and considered the father of modern genetics. And we did have biographies about him on our shelve. Guess who he's shelved next to? Dr. Josef Mengele, the Nazi.

My co worker fretted that that might be the person she was requesting and I boldly said I would never willingly give them to a child (we are talking 3rd grade here) So Mendel it was...until we found who we were really looking for....

Dmitri Mendeleev, A Russian chemist and creator of periodic law.

Well I gave them both Mendel and Mendeleev, but not the Nazi. And I learned some more about scientists....all in a days work

Storytime from the Liberry : Puppy Love

Storytime Season is back in full swing here @ the liberry. It is rather shocking to see how fast some of my storytime friends have grown up. Some kids I haven't seen since April and they look completely different. I work with toddler so I get to experience their some of the supernatural growth and development they go through at that age.

I used some new things with storytime that I had worked on through the summer and decided to introduce to my regular group in the fall. Our opening in closing song is "Wheels on the Bus" so I ask the kids to pretend that the storytime area is like a bus and I am the "bus driver". We have to try our best to sit on our bottoms and use our listening ears to hear stories and directions. I used the suggestions of having a puppet come out and tell the rules because it seems to relax the kids, make them smile and creates a better atompshere. I don't feel like I'm lecturing the kids and grown ups if they are smiling at me and my puppet.

I also had the balls to state this rule at every storytime to grownups.

"We know that kids often model our behaviors, so please turn off you cell phones and save your personal conversations till after storytime. We will have time to play and socialize after the stories. Let's all do storytime TOGETHER!"

I put this together by gathering examples of other brave and seasoned storytime pros from around the interweb.  I got a few nods in agreement when I stated this to my first group. I had a few cocked eyebrows and disapproving looks from previous offenders in my second group but I'm sorry, not sorry ..It is so nice to have quiet while I'm reading stories!!  It makes a world of difference. Not that I need complete silence, I understand the squirmy nature of toddlers. But reading aloud and having just the sound of my voice carry, knowing that kids were watching and listening and not having to overhear caregivers talking about last week's church service lunch date or whatever BLISS. My job is not to ensure everyone likes me. I'm not going to be the chatty track suit wearing grannies' best friend. I'm here to read and inspire children. My job is to spread the joys of literacy so sometimes I have to be the cranky librarian and tell you to shush.

Okay enough of my blathering. Onto the stories. My theme was Puppy Love- because come on who doesn't love puppies?

Books:
The Best Thing about A Puppy By Judy Hindley

What Puppies Do Best by Laura Numeroff

Bark George by Jules Feiffer- I LOVE this book. I ADORE reading it out loud and getting the kids to laugh and the end is slightly twisted.

Activities
The Saints of Pinterest provided much inspirations for this storytime.
I did Dog's Colorful Day (by Emma Dodd ) as a flannel storytime.
I also sing BINGO whenever I do a storytime about pets or dogs. I just had crummy flannel letters on a board until I saw this super cute design done StorytimeABCs .

We also had fun talking and acting like puppies.
We did our closing song of Wheels on the Bus before we did our last activity, which was a song that was going to introduce puppets to to group. I knew I would lose their attention once those puppets came out. The kids and I had a blast singing Going to the Pet Store


Verses I use for Wheels on the Bus (Opening and Closing Song)
Opening:
The Wheels on the Bus go Round and round
Round and round, Round and round.
The Wheels on the Bus go Round and round
all through the town

The horn on the bus goes beep beep beep
The kids on the bus go up and down
The driver on the bus says "Have a seat!"

Closing:
The babies on the bus go "wah, wah wah"
The grown ups on the bus go "shush, shush, shush"
The doors on the bus go open and shut
The kids on the bus go "See ya next time!"

Banned Book Displays

I get really passionate about Banned Books Week.  Especially in my library which in a community heavily populated with churches and conservative Christian groups, it's my time of year to be "cheeky" for the sake of highlight the wrongs of censorship. I've already ranted about it this month.

I was stoked that BBW was going to focus on graphic novels this year; another part of the library that I'm passionate about. I got the resources, spent a lot of time on the Comic Books Defense League website, discovering new stuff and taking a great deal of time making a display.

We have three display cases in out library that are offered out to local artists/artisans/collectors to display their wares. Usually 2 of 3 are left empty so I got clearance in June from my boss and the library director to use it for September. I had prints out of banned/challenged graphic novels, examples of art work, QR codes so patrons could reserve them and fact sheets all about how books are still banned in the US. I was pretty proud of it. I put it up in the morning, before we opened, and by after lunch I was asked to remove it.

No not because I had offended anyone. Not because a patron thought it was inappropriate to encourage readers to check "bad books". Nope. That would have been worth writing to the papers about.

Instead the "artisan" of the month (and I use that term lightly) demeaned she have all the display cases, including the ones with my display set up in it. She couldn't produce a written agreement, and the person in charge of booking them with the public was out of the office. But she made enough of a stink, yelling at the other libraries that while I was apologized to by administration, I was asked to take my stuff out. I was crushed and humiliated as this old lady patronized me like I was her 2 year old grand-kid (As I younger person working in a library with older patrons and co-worker way past retirement age, I hate when people do this crap to me) While she "thanked" me for moving out my "stuff" I worked in silence because I didn't think I could tell her how heartbreaking this was for me without losing my cool. I had to remove my display about censorship to make way for some cheap ceramic chotskies! (Seriously it the junk in your grandma's curio cabinet that no one wants after she dies)

This is my consolation prize (I guess) I put up a display on the slate wall by the book drop. Which means I will probably get this added onto my work load as well.  There are some great graphic text quotes about censorship accompanying the books. Let me pull all the "sexy" "racy" "nasty" books to shock you as you walk in!

Teens had their own display of their books.

sigh

*If you are looking for a display idea for Banned Books Week covering graphic novels, email me. I have a whole bunch of materials that I now obviously have no use for!*

Sorry for the ranting posts, I'll turn my attention to other matters. Fellow librarians doing collaborative summer reading! Have you seen the catalog and artwork for 2015 yet? What do ya think?

September Displays

After having the library covered in robots, gears, and science experiments for Fizz Boom Read for the past few months, fall has come and it's time to change the displays.

  

This fabulous display was done by my co-worker, the only other member of my department who graciously helps me with displays. Isn't it beautiful?  She modestly protest her creativity saying she found the idea on Pinterest but her execution is lovely! Simple yet eye catching. You can't really tell from this angle but the letters are 3-D. I told her she should make bigger ones to put on display permanently. Plus she is also the master of putting up paper without air bubbles, or tears.

Another nod to the nostalgic films of the 90's I watched 10 more times than I should have. This quote is from "The Pagemaster" which some people loath, but it holds a special place in my heart (Please note if you have a plush doll of the Fantasy character from this film lying around your attic, please email me so I can complete my collection!)

We used to have big posters with summer reading icons and graphics made up, which I loved because they covered the boards and looked great with little fuss. What irks me about these bulletin boards is we rarlely have a meduim in house to cover them completly. Our background paper and our paper from out long format printer is often too short. So I used a different program to create these posters that anyone can use even if you don't have a large printer poster.

The Rasterbator

(Yes with a very cheeky sounding name)

Basically this FREE site will change any images into a large piece of wall art. You determine the size. You can have it enlarged or rasterbated them which converts them into little dots. If you got up close to these posters, you would see all the little dots. I determined the size and had them print out at 3mm which is the smallest you can go. You can use the images' original color, black and white or make up your own. It prints out on regular 8.5 x11 copy paper and then assembly is required.

It took me almost a whole day to print, cut, aline, tape, reinforce and assemble all of these. They used about a 20-24 pieces of paper each, so check in case you have a paper ration enforced in your library. Can you guess who is featured? It's pretty easy. (Some of my co-workers didn't have a clue and I judged them for it. Seriously?)

Banned Books Week Displays coming in the next post.