July 16th: The Last Big Plan

 


Today was the last day I was planning for a week with two programs and the last time I was reserving books for the program of the week following. I started out the last big planning session by utilizing the library catalog to reserve books. My computer was taking forever to update, so I accessed the library catalog through my phone. From there, I conducted two different searches for the same fantasy genre. For the last week of internship, I will only be at Sweetwater, so I wanted to do a magic and fantasy theme. However, searching fantasy in the catalog yielded few children’s picture books. Therefore, I searched magic and found a lot more options to peruse. The books I chose all explored magic and fantasy in different ways from magical hats to mythical creatures like mermaids. The two books I read will ultimately be determined based on the children in the crowd at that program.

I then retreated to my living room and pulled the monster books I had previously chosen off my shelf. I did a quick skim through of all of them, before reading aloud three of them for practice. After, reading one of the books aloud I realized it might be to long so I grabbed another one from the stack and read it aloud to  give myself another rehearsed option. Once, I had done my read throughs of my books for the programs this week I wrote out my monster movement activity. For the activity, I planned to have the kids act out specific kinds of monsters based on select adjectives. They really seemed to enjoy acting out different things which is why I made yet another movement activity centered around play acting. Lastly, I reviewed the craft for the week and made some last minute simplifications before calling my last big planning session to a close.


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