All posts by Abby

Librarianship, Summer reading, Teaching

School visits

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I had a fabulous time last week visiting classes at the elementary school.  As the week went on, the visits got better and better, culminating in the terrific last day where I actually got to read to the kids in their classrooms (the school library was being used for another purpose).

I LOVE being a children’s librarian, but visiting those classes made me think (not for the first time in my life) that I would also love to be a classroom teacher at the elementary level.  To spend a whole year, day in and day out, with the same group of kids, really getting to know them and teach them and see them progress intellectually and socially – it’s got to be a cool feeling.  Hard work, for sure, but also rewarding work. 

But back to my visits.  I chose a bunch of newer books to read to the kids this year, and a lot of them were very well-received.  This year’s favorites include: 

For the 1st graders:  I Lost My Bear written and illustrated by Jules Feiffer.  Ok, so this isn’t a “new” book, but it’s a fantastic readaloud, and most of the kids had never heard it before. Then Help! A Story of Friendship written and illustrated by Holly Keller.  An oops on my part worked out just fine – I remembered that this story was a hit last year, so I brought it out again this year.  What I didn’t remember is that I read it to the Kindergarteners last year, and to the first graders this year – in other words, I read it a second time to the same kids.  But it was actually ok, and the kids loved it just as much this time as they did last time.  Then, the last story for the 1st graders was Lissy’s Friends written and illustrated by Grace Lin.  I really love this story, as do the kids, and it gave me a chance to show off one of our freshly-signed Grace Lin books.

For the 2nd graders:  Cupcake: A Journey to Special written and illustrated by Charise Mericle Harper.  Such a fun story – and great for 2nd graders, because they could slap their foreheads in frustration as the candle and the cupcake totally miss the obvious.  Then we read Not Last Night, But the Night Before by Colin McNaughton, illustrated by Emma Chichester Clark.  At first the kids thought it was too young for them, then they’d realize the subtle humor and the cameo appearances of fairytale characters, and then they’d smile and laugh and enjoy it.  Cool book, just right for 2nd grade.  And then we read Bad Bears Go Visiting by Daniel Pinkwater, illustrated by Jill Pinkwater.  This is a fun book, good n’ silly, and we all enjoyed it.  I just have one beef with this book:  Pinkwater overuses the word “says” in his dialogue, which isn’t too noxious on paper, but gets pretty tedious when reading out loud.  It’s weird, too, since it doesn’t go with the variety of the rest of Pinkwater’s writing.  Maybe he did it intentionally, but that doesn’t make me enjoy reading “says” out loud fifteen million times…

For the 3rd graders:  Timothy and the Strong Pajamas written and illustrated by Viviane Schwarz.  I LOVE this book, and the kids do, too.  It’s wise to start off with this book and end with quieter books, I’ve found, because the kids get pretty riled up by this story (a good thing, if you ask me).  Mid-way through the book, I usually mention that Monkey reminds me a bit of Yoda, and the kids go “Oh, yeah!!!!!”  Another favorite for the 3rd graders was Why Epossumondas Has No Hair On His Tail by Coleen Salley and illustrated by Janet Stevens.  The kids usually started off skeptical about this book (obviously thinking it was too young for them), then were transfixed by the end.  Then, if there was time, I also read Too Many Fairies: A Celtic Tale by Margaret Read MacDonald and illustrated by Susan Mitchell.  I love MacDonald’s books, but have to admit this is not my favorite of her works.  It’s ok, though, and the kids enjoyed it pretty well.

For the 4th graders:  A Giraffe Goes to Paris by Mary Tavener Holmes and John Harris, illustrated by John Cannell.  The kids loved that this was a true story, and it definitely kept those mature almost-fifth grade minds fully engaged.  They also loved Princess Hyacinth: The Surprising Story of a Girl Who Floated by Florence Parry Heide, illustrated by Lane Smith, which is just silly enough and mentions Royal Underwear just enough for this age group.  And, on Friday, I also read to them What Really Happened to Humpty: From the Files of a Hardboiled Detective by Jeanie Franz Ransom, illustrated by Stephen Axelsen.  I had held off on this book earlier in the week, because I thought perhaps it wouldn’t resonate with the kids, that they wouldn’t “get” the detective jargon, but in fact they loved it and laughed at all the sly allusions to fairy tales.  A big hit!

I didn’t get to see the 5th graders this year, sadly, because their schedules are too tight, and I’ll be seeing one of the Kindergarten classes next week (hopefully the other three Kindergarten classes too, we’ll see).  It’s been a lot of fun, and we’ve read a bunch of awesome books together.

Cats Dogs Plants Animals, Spare time - Culture

Pitter pat

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It’s raining on our tarp garden.  It’s very soothing, the sound of the rain bouncing off of that brown tarp, but it’s also reminded me that the tarp garden exists – something which I had forgotten.

Three years ago we ripped the vinyl siding off of our house, repaired and replaced the clapboards underneath, and painted the clapboards a cheery yellow.  The house looks great – huge improvement – but we never figured out what to do with the old vinyl siding, so we stacked it in a pile just behind the house and covered it with a brown tarp.  We weighed the tarp down with large brown plastic plant pots filled with dirt and kind of forgot about it.  Last time my brother visited he commented on the lovely field grass and clover we grow in those pots, and sometimes I hear the rain on the tarp, but otherwise it’s become part of the scenery.

And it will probably stay part of the scenery.  Jim tried once to recycle some of the siding at the local transfer station, but the transfer station booth attendant yelled at him that it wasn’t recyclable.  “So what can I do with it?” Jim asked him.  “Have the guy who did your siding get rid of it,” said the attendant.  “I’m the guy,” said Jim, which earned him some respect but no disposal options other than the suggestion to cut the siding into small pieces and put it in trash bags.  Which Jim tried, but soon discovered that cutting siding into pieces chews up your hands and takes forever.

Maybe someday we’ll get a dumpster and put the siding in there, along with some other home project detritus (the crappy cardboard bathroom and bedroom doors that are moldering in the shed come to mind), but dumpsters are so darn expensive these days – at least $500, more if you go overweight.  And first we need to do a few things like replace the leaky hot water heater and fix the crumbling bathroom floor.  After a year or so without major home projects, things are starting to catch up with us again.

Meanwhile, though, I’ll daydream a little today about how our yard would look with the line of hostas extended through the area where the tarp garden currently sits.  Someday, right?

Feltboard, Storytime

Dog’s Colorful Day by Emma Dodd

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One more of my favorite feltboard creations – the pieces for Emma Dodd’s Dog’s Colorful Day.  It’s a great silly story about a white dog with one black spot on his ear who goes out for a walk in the park and gets all kinds of  spot stains on his coat, including blue paint, green grass, yellow pollen, brown chocolate, pink ice cream…you get the idea.  When I present this story to the toddler storytime, each time I add a new spot to Dog’s coat I ask the kids to help me count the total number of spots on that white dog out loud.  We also talk about the colors of each spot as it’s added to the board.  Pictured here are the spots, as well as the items that caused the spots.  Down towards the bottom of the picture are the yellow sponge that Dog’s owner uses to wash him, as well as Dog’s purple bed that he goes to sleep in after his long day.  Click on image to enlarge:

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Library events, Summer reading

School visits today!

It’s a great day for me – today I begin the week-long school visits at the elementary school to promote the library’s summer reading program.  I already visited one class last Friday, a great group of fourth graders, but today begins the real deal.  I’ll see four classes today, three tomorrow, four on Thursday, and four on Friday.  Then a couple of more classes next week to finish these visits off.

At my visits, I read a story or two to each class, then talk to them about summer reading.  Then, depending on the availability of the computer lab and the age of the students, we might also go in to the computer lab and have each student log on to the library’s website and follow the link to the ReadsinMA page in order to create an online summer reading account to track each student’s reading hours.  Given this summer’s theme of “Go Green at Your Library,” these online accounts seem particularly appropriate this year…though obviously we’ll still have the clock-face paper logs still available (and I can’t deny the educational value of the clock faces for the younger children, since they help them visualize what fifteen minutes of reading looks like on the clock, and also help with those clock-reading skills – a skill with which today’s children seem to be struggling).

Speaking of that theme of “Go Green,” I have one gripe.  I had a GREAT idea of wearing a t-shirt with a big recycling symbol on it to each of my class visits, and ordered two shirts, one green and one black, from an online t-shirt company.  I had visions of making a real statement about the environmental message in this year’s program.  This seemed especially key, since I’m asking that attendees for the Ice Cream Social consider bringing their own non-disposable bowls, cups, and spoons to the Social in order to reduce the amount of trash created (with over 400 attendees at last year’s Social, I felt a little ill as I hauled away trash bag after trash bag of used styrofoam bowls, paper cups, and plastic spoons).  The cool t-shirt would really get the message across, as the recycling logo stared at the kids through the whole storytime and into my spiel about the summer program.

But, alas, apparently the women’s fitted t-shirts on this t-shirt site were made for a twelve-year-old girl and not an actual woman.  Even though I bought size large, I still could only barely squeeze into the shirts.  And it’s not like I’m a really big girl, either – maybe I need to lose seven pounds, but that’s no excuse.  It was a huge disappointment when the shirts arrived in the mail on Friday, too late to order replacements.  The only option now is to wear plain green shirts all week, which still works but isn’t nearly as cool.  In defense of this online t-shirt company, though, they sent me an email saying I will be credited for the full purchase price, and I can keep the two t-shirts.  Since the shirts don’t fit me, I think I’ll make them summer reading raffle prizes for the kids…

At any rate, I’m still very pumped for this week’s class visits, and I’d like to publicly thank Mrs. Harvey, the most awesome Media Specialist around, for making me welcome and putting up with the piles of summer reading bags all week.  Thanks, Mrs. Harvey!!

Feltboard, Storytime

Monkey and Me by Emily Gravett

I love using this feltboard story, because I get the attendees to participate in the chant that repeats throughout the story:  “Monkey and me…monkey and me…”  As the group chants, they also pat their knees to the beat of the words.  Interactive fun!

Pictured here are the pieces I made for this feltboard version of Monkey and Me by Emily Gravett.  A little girl and her stuffed animal monkey have visited a zoo, and they list off each of the animals they saw there, including kangaroos, bats, penguins, elephants, and monkeys.  Click on image to enlarge:

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Feltboard, Storytime

Blue Sea by Robert Kalan

Another in my continuing series of photo documentation of my feltboard stories. Today we are featuring the pieces I made for Robert Kalan’s classic picturebook Blue Sea.  Once again, this feltboard story isn’t too elaborate, and doesn’t look too exciting in a mere photo: this feltboard story is all about the telling and the using of the pieces in a dramatic way.  “Look out, little fish!!” I’ll say with a scared overtone to my voice as I add the medium fish to the board…and the kids always gasp a teeny bit in fear for little fish’s life.  Just enough excitement for the under-four age group.  Click on photo to enlarge:

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Spare time - Culture

Photographic evidence

In lieu of today’s planned trip to the Bead Hive in Ayer to buy more beading supplies (turns out Ayer had its Memorial Day parade today, and not Monday – which I only learned as I almost got road-blocked in on Main Street in Ayer), I’ve decided to post a couple of photos of my new obsession, the leather wrapped bracelets. Click on images to enlarge:

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Spare time - Culture

My new obsession

Man, it’s good to get out and do something DIFFERENT!

I just finished an adult education class, taught by Lily Chen, where I learned to make a leather wrap bracelet.  Ingredients are freshwater pearls (choose your color), brown or black leather, and a cute metal flower button.  Lily is a great teacher, and I learned fast and am now determined to make a million of these very cool bracelets – some for me, some for, oh, sisters and friends and such.

And the best part is that the materials for this totally rad bracelet cost all of fifteen dollars.  I’m sure if I were to buy this from some jewelry catalog (like maybe Sundance, which I love, by the way) it would cost a LOT more.

Actually, the best part is that I used my brain to do something non-work-related and creative and fun.  And I succeeded at it (unlike the pearl knotting class I took a few weeks ago, where I had a defective piece of silk and my knots wouldn’t slide and I got more and more frustrated and hot and sweaty and embarrassed at my incompetence).  It’s good to have a new obsession.  Abby happy.

Librarianship, Summer reading

Before you know it…

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…also known as “Oh, &*%*$*@!!!”

My first school class visit is THIS FRIDAY afternoon.  Then the class visits begin for real – the big time – next Tuesday morning, June 1.  Yikes.  I’m sitting at home right now finalizing the summer calendar, parent letter, and summer reading guidelines, all of which need to be photocopied en masse and stuffed into the summer reading bags before I visit the school.  And if all that photocopying weren’t enough to give me heartburn, there’s also all the tweaking of the ReadsinMA website that needs to happen, the printing of posters for summer events, the creation of sign-up sheets for the summer events, the ordering of the summer prizes, the donation request letters, calling Firefighter O. to ask if the fire truck can visit the summer reading finale picnic in August, the creation and printing of the donation voting tickets, the en masse copying of the old-fashioned paper clock face time sheets, the purchasing of multiple cases of bottled water for movie nights, the purchasing of lots and lots and lots of bags of popcorn for movie nights, the shopping for all the fixin’s for the Ice Cream Social (not to mention the purchasing of and storage of the actual ice cream, which gives me heart palpitations), the choosing of some great new stories to read at my class visits…if I don’t stop there, I might totally freak out.

Oh, and now I can’t have lunch with my dad on Friday, which bums me out.  (Hey, Dad, can we reschedule for Monday?)

Wish me luck – I’ll need it to get through the next couple of weeks.  Though you know I’ll be having a good time despite being a stress-bucket.

Librarianship, Spare time - Culture

Calendars and such

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No post of any substance today, or probably all week:  summer reading is fast approaching, and I’m spending all of my free time finishing off the summer calendar (which takes a huge amount of work, believe it or not), ordering the summer reading prizes, writing the summer raffle donation request letters, and reading book reviews.  We’ve just been phenomenally busy at the library in the last few months, and I’m literally unable to complete any task that requires concentration while I’m there.  So I have been trying to console myself about the loss of my free time to work by drinking lots of Arnold Palmer iced tea, listening to fun CDs (right now it’s Adam Lambert’s CD – and I guarantee Jim will be mortified that I’m admitting that we both own Adam’s CD AND listen to it), and taking cat-ear-scratching breaks.  And no, this at-home work is not on the clock, for anyone who wonders.  🙂

Here’s a thought: we should play music at the library.  Background music, you know?  A little “Whataya Want From Me” would make the day go faster.  And I bet the little kids would love to bop around to it…