Week 2 - Biggest, Fastest, First! with the Young Professors

Cody, Tyler and Zoe - Team Red! Building the tallest tower! Good team work!

Paige, Jenna, (Cohan behind her), and Abby! Team Blue! Great stuff!

Hurray! Today marks the second meeting of the Young Professors! And again our attendance held at a steady 7 kids ... although we at the library always welcome more! But even with the same numbers of kids we had some no comers to the groups which is great! During the summer it'll probably continue like this since we all have fun trips to take and lovely places to go! Next week I just hope we get more kids! It'll make our Week 3 Theme very fun!!! 

So today keeping with out Biggest, Fastest First theme I started the group off with a Steve Jenkins book called - wouldn't you know it? - "Biggest, Strongest, Fastest". This book is perfect! It's full of interesting facts and beautiful - very Eric Carle-esque - illustrations! The kids loved it! Even though its a short book with not many words to read, it took me a good 20 or so minutes to read the whole book to them! These kids are awesome, Cohan and Abby were full of stories to share and Jenna and Zoe were so patient and raised their hands up every moment they needed to say something to add to the book! Paige, who had joined Rhonda yesterday since her little brother is in the Little Einsteins group had already read the book! and she lend some very exciting foreshadowing to the reading! 

All in all this was a fun read - like for instance did you know that the sun jellyfish is the looooooooooongest animal in the world?? or that the Galapagos tortoise can live for over 150 years! Great Book! Thank you Mr. Jenkins! 5/5 for you sir! If your looking for another book like this you should check out Hottest, Coldest, Highest, Deepest! or Actual Size, both by Steve Jenkins!

My lovely display!

After this I showed the kids the display I worked on yesterday! I made a colourful measuring board that stretched from the ceiling to the floor! Attached to it, I displayed the height of the world's tallest recorded man, Robert Wadlow (1918-1940), who was 8 ft 11.1 inches!!! and the world's shortest grown-up man, Chandra Bahadur Dangi, who is 72 today and from Nepal, he is recorded at being 1 ft 9.5 inches!!!



The kids enjoyed the display, as I noticed last week they were measuring themselves against each other before reading time! So I thought they would like to see for themselves who of our group was tallest, shortest, or in the middle!

I WIN! haha, no surprise here, I'm the tallest! But not counting me, Zoe is the tallest of the Young Professors! And the kids from the Guest Wednesday visit saw the display and added their names to the board! 

During the Guest Wednesday craft, kids measured themselves and added their names to the board!

After that we read the story "The Legend of Ninja Cowboy Bear" see the review here: http://beavervalleylibrarykids.blogspot.ca/2012/07/library-book-reviews-children-books.html

I love this book! Although I think for the kiddos today they were a bit too old for it! Or at least, some of them had already read it! So the kids enjoyed it but I felt them getting a little bit restless in their chairs!!

We then moved onto our craft for the day which was called build the tallest tower! I split the kids into two groups (see pictures at the top!) and timed them for 15 minutes! Given limited supplies and tape they had to try to built a free standing tower! It was lots of fun and we made a big mess!

After the fall of our magnificent towers we all reconvened on the tarp and I passed out copies of the calendar I made (see the post here: http://beavervalleylibrarykids.blogspot.ca/2012/07/hot-of-presses.html) that shows the schedule of our programming at the library this summer, along with all the Guest Wednesday lined up! Speaking of which! Check out this post for our Jayne Garry poster: http://beavervalleylibrarykids.blogspot.ca/2012/07/guest-wednesday-jayne-garry-ez-rock.html

After passing out calendars and reading records I got out my trusty interlibrary loan copy of "My Father's Dragon" (see here for the review: http://beavervalleylibrarykids.blogspot.ca/2012/07/childrens-book-review-my-fathers-dragon.html) I read two chapters to the kids and they seemed to really enjoy the book! I'm hoping to continue to read from it over the summer!

And that was our club today! I unleashed the kids into the library to check out some books and to check their reading records! (30 minutes of reading = 1 ballot into the weekly prize draw!) and then I frantically cleaned up and set-up for our guest Wednesday! I'll add a link here once I've posted about it! Needless to say IT WAS AWESOME!

Enjoy the sun today! :)