All posts by Abby

Coolest thing today

I’ve been feeling a little grumpy today – technically it’s my day off, but I have quarts and quarts of work to do AND the house needs cleaning AND there are piles of laundry to get through AND I need to fit in stuff like taking a walk and having lunch with Dad and cooking dinner for Jim…you get the idea.  It’s a Bad Abby Day.  Kind of like a Bad Hair Day (which is also true for me today), but more all-encompassing.

But then I went on to Google just now, and had a good chuckle when I saw the ode to PacMan.  And then, even better, I realized that you can actually play that PacMan game.  Awesome!!!  Guess what I’ll be doing instead of work for the next twenty minutes or so…

Five Little Monkeys

And another of my feltboard favorites, used often and with great gusto:  Five Little Monkeys Sitting in a Tree, which I sometimes use as a simple fingerplay, and other times use in conjunction with Eileen Christelow’s book of the same name.  The monkey that appears to be white in this photo is actually a pale blue (far more attractive).  When presenting the story on the feltboard, I always have the children in attendance help me count out the monkeys, and sometimes we also name the colors of the various monkeys. This feltboard story helps me to remember that simplicity is often the best approach when making felt figures.  Click on image to enlarge:

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Bear Snores On

It’s time to update my online documentation of my library of homemade feltboard stories.  Today’s featured story is Karma Wilson’s Bear Snores On, one of my storytime favorites.  Notable in this feltboard interpretation are the awake bear’s moveable eyebrows, so that he can go from intimidating/scary to upset/crying to happy.  Unfortunately, these photos don’t do justice to two of my favorite figures in this story, the crow and the wren, who just look like a brown blotch and a black blotch in the photo but actually look pretty cool in person.  Click on image to enlarge:

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Patriot’s Day

Ok, so I’m almost a month late posting these photos – but I only just downloaded my Patriot’s Day photos from my camera to my computer.  I’d actually forgotten all about them, and thought I was only transferring the photos I took of Grace Lin’s visit to the library and some of my feltboard stories…and then all these great parade photos popped up.  Patriot’s Day this year was sunny and gorgeous, and the photos I took came out really well, for a change, so I’ve picked a few of my favorites to share here over the next few days.  Mostly of horses, of course, but also look for the Old Manse hiding in the background and a few Middlesex County Volunteers (click on photos to enlarge):

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Grace Lin visits today!

It’s not too late – come to the library today at 1:00 (for children ages 4 and up and their adults) or 2:00 (for children in grades 1 to 5 and their adults) and meet famed author and illustrator Grace Lin!

Grace Lin received a 2010 Newbery Honor for her book Where the Mountain Meets the Moon and just won the Massachusetts Book Award for Children’s and Young Adult literature for the same book.  She has also written and illustrated many picturebooks, including The Ugly Vegetables.

I’m extremely excited about her visit; Where the Mountain Meets the Moon is my favorite book of the year – the best book I’ve read in many months – and the preschool storytime kids and I have been heartily enjoying her picturebooks for the last several weeks.  We read The Ugly Vegetables together this past Thursday, and we all loved it!

Please do join us for this special author and illustrator program.  Drop-ins are welcome!

Wardrobe malfunction

Yup, even children’s librarians have wardrobe malfunctions.  But not quite like Janet Jackson’s…

In the middle of today’s Mother Goose on the Loose Storytime for the very youngest kids, I was singing my heart out while we all rang our jingle bells:  “We ring our bells together, we ring our bells together, we ring our bells together because it’s fun to do.  Ring them up HIGH!!!”  >kablam<  …bracelet explosion…

The glass bead bracelet that I was wearing literally exploded while my right arm was high in the air, waving the bell around.  Meaning that glass beads and the metal spacer beads went FLYING around the story room.  Nice choking hazard for the little ones, eh?

I think I turned BRIGHT red as I scrambled around the room to collect the rolling beads, dumping them in the storytime drum while trying to explain to the parents that my bracelet had just broken.

No harm, no foul – no one choked, no one stepped on a bead and took a header – but this definitely proved that old adage: “Expect the unexpected.”

T.A. Barron article

In case you missed it (or in case you don’t live in Massachusetts), here’s a link to the article published in today’s Boston Globe Globe West section about T.A. Barron’s upcoming visit to the library in which I work.  (If you do live in Massachusetts, and haven’t bought a copy of your own yet, please purchase one and support the Globe’s continued existence!)

Friday update

You’ll have to forgive me for being less than intelligent in this evening’s post; there was a little incident earlier in the day when my forehead met the corner of the refrigerator door, leaving a dent and a bump, and seeming to remove a few brain cells.  But I promised myself that I’d post an entry tonight, so here goes…

The Lego Expo went off beautifully last weekend, thanks to many volunteers and volunteer judges and fantastic kid entrants.  There were fewer glitches than last year, and less chaos, and fewer tears.  Some things could still be improved, most significantly the scheduling of the Expo, but I’ve typed up three pages of notes (single-spaced) for myself of “Lessons Learned” to use towards improving next year’s Expo.  My apologies to anyone who couldn’t attend the Expo because of the start of the soccer season last Saturday; please know that I had to schedule the Expo about a year ago, blindly, in order to get it printed in the Community Calendar.  Had I known that April 10 was the first day of the soccer season, I wouldn’t have scheduled the Expo for that date (can you tell that I’ve had a few people speak to me about this?).  Next year’s Expo will be scheduled for a Saturday towards the end of March.  And we’ll make some adjustments in the age groups for next year.

Despite the soccer conflict, a lot of kids came last Saturday with their awesomely creative Lego models.  The models ran the gamut from concept pieces to Star Wars pieces to extremely creative and unique pieces.  I made a point this year of taking a photo of each kid’s model, sometimes with the child in the photo, and made my first attempt at creating a photo album through Shutterfly.  The album arrived today, and it looks great!  It will be on display in the Children’s Room starting on Tuesday.

As I mentioned two posts back, April is a busy month, and next Thursday will be the biggest event that I’ve been a part of in my time at the library: a visit from author T.A. Barron.  Yesterday morning I came in to find an exciting message on my voicemail from a reporter at the Boston Globe – the Globe will be publishing an article on Mr. Barron’s visit in this Sunday’s Globe West section.  The reporter had already interviewed Mr. Barron, and was requesting a quote from me about his visit.  Hopefully I was semi-coherent in my response to her (I don’t have the vaguest memory of what I said, since I spoke to her immediately before yesterday’s preschool storytime).  Most importantly, the article is bound to increase the already fervent level of enthusiasm for Thursday’s event.  Good thing I got those highlights refreshed today at Salone Arte…and the cute new shirt from the Grasshopper Shop won’t hurt, either.  Not that it’s all about me, of course, but a girl does like to look put together for a big event.

And the library’s regularly scheduled events continue to move along – we had 76 adults and kids at this week’s Infant Storytimes, for instance – leaving little downtime in the children’s room.  It’s good to be busy, and even better to know that my work is touching a lot of lives.

Good heavens but I get maudlin when I’ve been concussed.  Time to feed the cats and rest the brain before the craziness of T.A. Barron’s visit hits.