June 23rd: Mixing it Up

 

It was weird planning on a Friday; however, since I will be out of town this weekend and the next week I was planning today instead. I started off by reserving books for the week of July 10th, which is a safari and animal theme. For the books, I tried to mix it up and added a few nonfiction children's picture books about typical safari animals as well as some fiction safari stories and stories about lions. I also found a really cool wordless picture book about a young boy drawing various safari animals and placed that on reserve as well. The goal with this book is to use it with the older groups at Summer Squires and ask them to tell me the story by what they see in the illustrations. The hope is that even if they are rowdy like last week, the need to interpret the story back to me will keep them engaged, while helping them build visual literacy and critical thinking skills. Then, the plan is to have all the groups play an animal-based charades game after/during the binocular craft.

After, I finished planning for the week July 10th, I went ahead and reviewed my materials for the week of July 3rd- despite it being over a week away. I am not sure how tired I will be after flying twelve hours back, so, I wanted to spend time reading through the two stories that had already arrived for that week. However, after the reading the two stories out loud, I wasn't sure if they were the ones I wanted to read to the kids- especially since one of the books was about mermaids, I wasn't certain it would interest the boys at Sweetwater. So, I checked back on my reserves list to see what others I had planned for the week and realized I had only reserved two books for that week- the two I had. Therefore, I went back to the catalog found two American themed books as well as options too since storytime will be following the Fourth of July. This planning session seemed to be all about mixing it up by trying new ideas with a program like having the kids tell me the story and then adding more books to a week I had previously planned. All of this just goes to show that it is okay to try new things and change ideas as well.




Popular posts from this blog

July 11th: Animals and Telescopes

Image
  Animals are a hit with kids. When I told each group today, we would be talking about animals in our story and game they all got really excited. I noticed this helped the kids focus more on each of the stories I read. For the younger groups I read a counting animal safari book that I had them actively participate in. So, on each page they held up the number of fingers for the number of animals present then as a group we would say the type of animal present. The kids seemed to love this and would usually progress to enthusiastically shouting out the animal. The level of engagement with the animal themed stories was impressive especially for the younger kids. Additionally, I loved seeing that excitement on their faces because they were invested in the theme/topic. So, I made a mental note to start creating list of topics that interest kids to reference throughout my career.  After the story we moved onto our telescope craft. I introduced the craft by asking the children what ki...
Read more

July 5th: Themeless

Image
  This was the first program I have run up to this point that I was themeless. Two weeks ago, I had picked out a few more books that were what I thought to be just fun- the only correlation really between them. Terrific is just a fun book I hope to make the kids laugh. Ninja Camp is all about doing silly movements and moves for the kids to have fun being a more active participant in the story. The whole group was a little on the smaller side we had about seven kids participating and three moms. There were also two toddlers that the moms were amusing behind the chairs as not interrupt the storytime- they were very high energy and playing with toy cars. The group overall was super sweet and eager to help in the stories- from doing speedy ninjas to stealthy ninjas to shouting terrific. I was a little more tired this storytime- still recovering from hours of flying and time changes from being out of town- as I felt like my story voice was a little less prominent and quieter than norm...
Read more

May 25th: Training on the Bookmobile

Image
  Let's start by talking about how cute the Lake Travis bookmobile is! My hometown library growing up did not have a mobile library or library vehicle, so I relish in the fact that this summer I get to spend the majority of my time on this little book bus. Bookmobiles are such a great way to reach other members of the community especially youth populations as they have no way of accessing a library without the help of others. However, bookmobiles are a lot of work as I discovered today. This morning I spent a good two hours learning the in's and out's of this little bus. My supervisor started by showing me which keys belonged to the bookmobile, then out of those five keys on the chain which key opened which lock. I practiced unlocking the doors and latching them open with a little metal hook that enables the doors to stay open and steady. I was shown where all the various supplies where kept such as the first aid kit, the checkout computers (and back up computer), roll out ...
Read more