It's Flannel Friday time! There are some great additions this week, so without further ado...
Liz from Storytime Whoopdeedo shows off her version of Book! Book! Book! by Deborah Bruss. This story is always a hit in story time!
Who doesn't love garbage trucks?!? Check out Kathryn's three garbage truck flannelboards at Fun with Friends at Storytime. Danielle at Storytime with Library Danielle shows off her version of Five Strawberries. I love how she added in animals eating the berries. While not flannel, check out her scarf rhyme and early literacy messages here.
Mel has been hard at work on an outer space set over at Mel's Desk. She shows off many different ways to use it with multiple age groups. Plus, it is a great addition if you are adding STEAM to your story time lineup.
Jaime at Ms. Jaime's Library Journeys shows off her version of Lynn Reiser's Hardworking Puppies. I love all of the career felt pieces that she created to go with the puppies.
We have a great relationship going this summer with our local Parks & Rec department (yay Julie for organizing!) and are doing a lot of neat outreach events out in the community this summer. Next week we will be doing story time in the park. There is a good possibility of there being 150+ people there, which means that we began to rethink how we will be sharing picture books with a large crowd. We are pulling out puppets, props, and our newly painted Pete the Cat prop boards.
This is Pete the Cat painted on a large foam board with acrylic paints. The buttons all have velcro so we can tell the story of Pete the Cat and His Four Groovy Buttons by Eric Litwin and have the buttons pop off. Of course, you need a way to see his belly button so we made a 2nd board.
While we will still be using the book to tell the story, these boards will help illustrate the actions to the crowd.
Last summer Abby at Abby the Librarian had a great post about how she revamped her summer reading program prizes. While I wanted to revamp our prizes for this summer, most of our staff didn't when we started to plan for 2015. We all know that you need staff buy-in to make a radical change. To test the waters, we offered her science activity packs as a prize option in our Winter Reading Club. After seeing how popular those were, we were ready to go.
Our science activity packs form 1/4 of our first prize for summer reading (5 hours or 20 books). This is the level where kids get to pick their own prize out of a treasure chest. The other three prizes are mustache sticky notes, superhero erasers, and superhero kick balls. The science activity packs are, by far, the most popular item in the treasure chest. So if you were on the fence about this sort of prize, you will definitely want to try it!
Activity Pack #1-Balloon Rockets We totally "borrowed" this one from Abby. We used this as a winter reading prize and the kiddos still aren't sick of it. In fact, they are picking it again. Abby's directions and supply list are located here.
Activity Pack #2-Catapults We used the directions from our catapult program and created packs with all of the supplies needed. We also included 1 pom pom so they had something to launch.
Activity Pack #3-Floating Ball When looking for new ideas, we looked for things that we could easily and cheaply assemble in a plastic bag. This is a little harder than it sounds. We lucked out when we found the Floating Ball. Our baggie includes:
1 5-inch paper circle cut out of cardstock
1 straw
1 ping pong ball
With 2 pieces of scotch tape, a pair of scissors, and the instructions that we wrote up, kids can do this activity.
