Week 1 - Wild Wild Life with the Young Professors! (ages 6-9)

Hurray!

Today marks the first day of me conducting a Summer Reading Club session and it was awesome! We had 7 young professors join us for today and all of them were fantastic!

I started the class a little late since we were waiting for a couple more scientist to join us! And I tried desperately to figure out each little ones names - by next week I'm hoping I get the swing of things! I introduced myself and talked a little about how science deals with everything and anything around us and that this week we would be exploring the world of biology and more specifically zoology. The kids were so good at listening and answering questions... or even just knowing everything - super smart  and a joy!

After introductions I read from this fabulous book by Judy Sierra who pays homage to the great Theodore Suess Geisel ... or rather Dr. Suess. It's a fantastic book filled rope with various colourful animals and awesome references to library books! I highly recommend it! Which reminds me! I'm going to start doing some book review posts as the summer goes on - so look out for those .... or remind me, as I'll probably forget! OH oh!!! And I'll try to fit in some movie reviews since I love the movies so!

Anyways! We read through the book which everyone seemed to enjoy!

Speaking of which... we got to the part with a tasmanian devil and I couldn't recall what they look like! One of the girls remembered the Looney Tunes Tasmanian Devil, which was awesome! So here I enclose a photo of the real Tasmanian Devil - such a ferocious thing!

So after reading the read we sang a song and then played a guessing game called "what's my animal" were I taped photos of various animals on the kids backs and they then had to walk around asking yes/no questions in order to figure out what animals they were! It was lots of fun, the kids were also very very patient waiting to be animal tagged! However, I may have chosen some very hard animals to guess! The real winner for toughest animal to guess was definitely the seahorse! Perhaps next week we will talk more about seahorses and I'll be better prepared!

New friends to add to our bulletin board!

After that we read some octopus books which the kids were very keen on listening to! And once we had learnt some more about octopi we went about creating our own octopus pencil holder!

This pretty much took us to the end of the hour! Although I still had plenty of activities planned out! At the beginning of the summer Rhonda and I discussed time-fillers and other strategies to compensate for the kids who finish quickly and have nothing to do, but I never even needed them. The kids were very meticulous and worked very hard on their octopi and the results were very cute!

I wish I had the awareness to have taken some pictures of the kids! But I was too distracted, I managed to catch a couple pictures while cleaning up after the kids. I'll try to remember to get a few shoots in tomorrow!

Next week I'm going to try to manage my time better and try to schedule everything out so everything runs like a well oiled machine!

All in all things are going swimmingly! Tomorrow brings our Mad Scientists (ages 10-12) to the library and I plan on continuing out underwater exploration through to the world of jellyfish, sea horses and perhaps some narwhals! Narwhals are awesome!!!

Oh! and also! we talked about fruits and vegetables .... turns out cucumbers are fruit! These kids are smart!