Week 1 - Wild Wild Life with the Mad Scientists (ages 10-12)

Mad Scientists with their well-studied specimen, of the phylum Cnidaria! Whose tentacles contain harmful stinging cells  called cnidocytes! Groups of jellyfish are called a smack! So here's our smack of jellies!
Kids Back Row: Justice, Caleb, Allison, Hannah, Haley, Emily, and Kyleen
Kids Front Row: Chase, Kiri, Sara, and Aliah

Whew! What a day! I'm exhausted! Even yesterday I left work with the soul goal of enjoying some of the sunshine outside before nightfall ... yet alas! I feel asleep... which ended up turning into a very deep slumber!

Today marked the beginning of the Mad Scientist's Program! All went very very well! We started with a small number of kids, which grew and grew until eventually there were a lucky 13 of us! (one girl and I are missing from the above photo) I awkwardly started the group we all introduced ourselves and I managed to murder everyone's name within seconds! Those poor kids! I got extremely flustered with my talking skills... but lucky me! the kids were super gracious!

Newly added books to our display! Extreme Animals is an
awesome read, with cute pictures too!

We quickly played a memorization game I like to call Circle of Animals, where in a circle all of us pick our own animal and make an action for it than we start with one person doing their action followed by a choice of someone else in the circle's action who than repeats their own action and passes on to choose the next person ... and so on...

That probably made no sense!

Needless to say the kids picked this up faster than the lightning of Thor! These guys are truly mad scientists!

Afterwards we read the Wild About Books, which you already know I adore! The kids seemed to like it even when I messed up the rhyme!

When the story ended we moved on to play the game I played with the Young Professors, called Guess My Animal!? With the animals taped to their backs, these guys ate the game whole! We must have played about 5 rounds of these and the kids were still asking to play more!

Unfortunately for them I decided to end the game since in the interest of time we needed to move on! We read a story from the same science/biology series I read yesterday called Down in the Sea: The Jellyfish by Patricia Kite (thank you Ms. Kite!)

The pictures in here are awesome! and great to look at and the kids were both equally interested and grossed out looking through this book!

After reading I set the kiddos lose on the craft table where I set up my two octopus pencil holders - this time bearing lots and lots of scissors - along with various streamers, ribbons, pipe-cleaners, tape, glue and so on! Yesterday I had already painted a 12 paper bowl shaped plates to use today... and lucky that I made 12 (we had 8 kids registered so I made extras - just in case!) - just in case indeed! whew! Two of the girls from today were drop-ins, but were an absolute joy to have! And a few that registered were unable to attend this week ... but I look forward to meeting them all next week hopefully!

Anyways the kids had a blast with the jellies! They are so creative, no a single one looked the same! We had a queen jellyfish, a puppet jellyfish, a very pipe-cleaner happy jellyfish and lots of awesome other ideas!

And lucky for me I had the awareness to start taking some pictures whilst the kids worked away with creating their jellyfish friends!

It was lots of fun. Of course again I ran out of time to do all the activities I had planned! Dear oh dear, there is just not enough time in an hour to do everything! I was hoping to introduce the idea of animal classification and taxonomy and Linneas to the kids ... and even further reinforce those concepts through a hands-on activity involving candy!!!!

And of course I was hoping on reading a chapter or two from "From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankenweiler" ... WHICH IS AN AMAZING BOOK! A co-worker of mine from the theatre lent me her copy ... I read it, and I feel in love with it! It was like reading a missing piece of my childhood! I was hoping to read a chapter a week with the Mad Scientists - just like I was hoping to read a chapter a week of "My Father's Dragon" (which I absolutely adored as a kid) - but alas there was no time!!!!

But today was lots of fun nonetheless ... the kids had fun (hopefully) and left full of books and with their jelly friends. They also left behind a very formidable mess for me to clean up !!!

The mess my monster's left for me! haha, the octopus guys
were completely trampled over!

Once I finished cleaning up I was greeted by a very lovely patron who being of an age not so familiar with computers required my assistance to set up her email and such! She was a joy and we spent a good time getting her computer needs sorted!


I think my reward for today's Summer Reading Club success will be to go out and watch Pixar/Disney's "Brave" at the theatre tonight with some friends! Rhonda saw it this week and I totally gave her the best popcorn ever - since I was working! And she had some very insightful thoughts about the film, so I'm interested in checking it out! I've been drooling over Merida's hair and the sound of Craig Ferguson's voice this whole week!

I'm also excited for "The Amazing Spiderman" which the theatre is premiering this Friday! AW YEAH!

For now here are some more pictures from today! Enjoy!

The updated bulletin board and display books!

This picture is so darling... I love Kiri's photobombing there in the middle! Awesome!