Week 3 - It Came from Outer Space with the Mad Scientists!

Kyleen's amazing alien mask! 

Today we welcomed a few Mad Scientists in to the library! Today we had a small number of 6 kids! We had Sara, Kyleen, Emily, Caleb, Alicen and Kyle, who dropped in from Rosedale to see us!

We started by following the Young Professors suit by making our own alien name tags!

After adorning ourselves with our alien name tags, we sat around in a circle and grabbed a strange fact from our Strange ... But True? fact jar! We all took a fact and read it out loud to the group!

We then talked about space and science fiction!

I introduced some Ray Bradbury and H.G. Wells to the kids and we talked about the infamous War of the Worlds radio broadcast done by Orson Welles in the early 20th century! This tied in well to last week's Guest Wednesday visit with Jayne Garry from EZ Rock Radio!

We also talked about NASA and astronauts, comets and asteroids and the giant telescopes and satellites in space! I was shocked at how much the kids know! Wise Caleb knew all about the Hubble Telescope and told as all about the process of how after its launch into space the telescope sent back blurry pictures back to Earth and how lots of planning, time and money had to go into fixing the telescope to fix it!


We didn't have time to watch this video, but here's a video from NASA for kids about engineering and the process of planning, answering and working out important questions!

We watched a clip from a beautiful and fascinating documentary called iMAX Hubble. It's a great 45 minute movie about the repairs done to the Hubble Space Telescope and as a bonus its narrated by Mr. Leonardo Di Caprio! It's a win win situation right there, let me tell ya!

It's such a lovely delivery of the story of the Hubble Telescope and the magnificence and vastness of the world in which we live in. Seeing the infinite amounts of space and galaxies that the Telescope is able to view after its repairs really gives you a huge appreciation for our own planet Earth!



Here's the clip that we watched on YouTube, its a really beautiful documentary! This clip shows the beautiful clouds of the Orion nebula where stars and solar systems are being born!

Then after our story time with Leo, we delved into our craft today which was, you guessed it! alien masks! Hurray! :) 

Crafts, crafts, crafts!

Sara working on her alien mask as Caleb watches the camera!

Alicen, Kyle, Sara, and Caleb at the craft table!

Caleb and Alicen

Miss KylMcm

While the Mad Scientists worked on their alien masks I took an opportunity in utilizing their quiet craft time to read an excerpt from "The Phantom Tollbooth".

This book is awesome! I haven't read it fully, but I managed to read a good two chapters of it today to the Mad Scientists and it's amazing, hilarious and fascinating! I may have to read it this weekend! So look for a review of it in the future! From what I gathered from read the first two chapters today, this is the story of Milo, a boy - not unlike Claudia from "From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankenweiler" - who is bored out of his mind with school and life! This poor boy!

But then, upon coming home one day, Milo finds a mysterious surprise package in his room! What's in it? Care to guess? A Tollbooth of course!

Funny enough, Milo decides to test out his new Tollbooth and drives through it in his toy car! Wacky adventure and silly sci-fi ensues!

Group shot! The library was invaded by aliens!!!! :O

2 little aliens! CalFri and EmiShr

I also shared this really cool website with some of the girls after we finished our crafts! Its an awesome scale from atoms to galaxies and gives cool comparisons of animals, mountains, countries, planets, etc.

Here's a link to that website! It's a whole lot of fun: http://www.numbersleuth.org/universe/

Oh! and I also showed this great video/time lapse taken from the International Space Station sometime last September! It's a great view of the Earth! There are parts where to can see the northern lights and the massive bright lights of cities! My favourite parts are the parts with lightning storms where you can see the huge amounts of lightning striking the Earth! It's amazing! 

Here it is:

 That was are Summer Reading Club for today! I really enjoyed the theme this week! It was lots of fun and really gave the opportunity for the kids to explore a different genre of books that they may have not looked at before!