Whew! So for our 5th week of the Summer Reading club, the kids and I pre-celebrated our Guest Wednesday by doing a bat craft, in anticipation for our presentation from Juliet Craig of Kootenay Bats!
We had lots of fun reading/listening (audiobooks FTW) about BATman (ha! see what we did there!) and then watching some national geographic videos about bats!
Everyone also put lots of effort into making their bats, it was nice to see a plethora of variety, as later in the afternoon we learnt about the vast diversity among the different types of bats around the world! Fantastic stuff!
This week at the library we continued with our superhero versus theme and I had the Masterminds read through the book Shark vs. Train with me... and my special guest, Susan! Who stopped by the library for a quick and lovely visit, she also assisted by being the shark to my train and wore the shark hat beautifully!
After reading through our story, the Masterminds went on a scavenger hunt through the library!
Then after some more stories, we went to our craft! Superhero themed bookmarks !!!!
Week 4, we revisited the world of superheroes with our aged 6-9 Superheroes!
It was a fun-filled morning! We started with our craft!
Our craft for today was a superhero themed bookmark! I premade each bookmark by printing out some superhero (Justice League) themed colouring sheets and glueing them onto some construction paper and I added some ribbon as a tassel to the top of each bookmark!
The kids had fun picking out which superhero to colour!
I also left a blank white sheet of paper to the back of each bookmark so the kids could decorate the back, be it with their names, a pretty picture or what have you!
The kids took a lot of time to finish and perfect their respective bookmarks, which gave me plenty of time to take lots of pictures, which is always fun! ^_^
Since the kids were taking a lot of time to colour and decorate their bookmarks, I thought we could use a bit of an intermission with a story, so we went on to one of our stories for today! But before we read the actually book, we watched a quick trailer for the book we would be reading!
Check it out:
We then read Shark vs. Train by Chris Barton and Tom Lichtenheld, which has quickly become one of my favourite books this summer!
The story is about the possibilities that are made when a shark and train meet head to head! But what really decides the winner depends on what the battle is and where it takes place!
So essentially each page of the book and I made some signs for the kids to hold and every page they voted on the winner of the battle, either the train or the shark, or if it was decided that it was a tie they held their sign sideways!
The book itself is hilarious! And I think the kids had fun reading the book together! It was quite the epic battle! Fortunately, it all ended with a happy draw!
After the book we went back into finishing up our bookmarks!
^__^
After the bookmarks we read another story! And since I was fresh from watching the Wolverine the previous weekend (and since we were doing our superhero theme again!) I picked a new Wolverine story!!! The movie didn't quite follow the comic book canon, but it was still enjoyable! The book we read through was much closer the the usual Wolverine that I picture.
After our second story we went on to play a game of scavenger hunt! The premise for our scavenger hunt was that all the villains had come together to form a injustice league to fight against the superheroes, and as a result all the superheroes of the world had vanished! So the kids had to follow the clues in order to find and rescue the heroes!
It was loads of fun! I even found some activity sheets that were superhero themed and gave hints to the next clues location!
The superheroes did a great job in working together to find the clues! It was fantastic!
This week, the Superheroes and I set off to the skies and went flying! Our humble little library was transformed through our imaginations into a plush, luxurious airplane!
I set the children's library and the sets to somewhat mimic an airplane, complete with an aisle down the centre and some comfy chairs in the back to be our "1st class" sitting area!
I gave out some plane tickets to each superhero as they walked into the library and they then had to find their seat on the airplane. And if they were really lucky they might have gotten a first class ticket!
So in between our stories, we travelled around the globe in our library plane, going from country to country!
But before we could lift off, we needed to watch the airplane safety announcement to get ourselves prepared in case of emergencies! One of my favourite things is this video used by New Zealand Airlines! Awesome stuff!
So once our "seatbelts" were buckled we went up into the sky and travelled to various places, I let each superhero choose a country to travel to and we tried to get to each one and plan our trip there! And in between layovers we switched up seats and moved around to stretch our legs!
And of course what's travel without a snack! I used one of the library's book trolleys as a makeshift snack pulley for our plane! For our library plane airlines we had some theatre popcorn and juice boxes/water. Mmmmm mmm!
During our snack break we returned to reading some stories! One fun series we explored through were the various choose your own adventure books we have at the library! And reading them as a group was lots of fun, we all voted together on the choices and it got the kids very involved in the story!
Here's a list of just a few of the choose your own adventure books we have at the Beaver Valley Public Library!
Your Very Own Robot
The Haunted House
Return to the Haunted House
Ghost Island
Owl Tree
We read through the Haunted House a few times to see the just some of the various endings, and it was quite fun!
And we continued our travels around the world, I believe some of our stops along the way were Madagascar, Antarctica and DisneyWorld, fun fun!
Whoooooops, looks like I only took one picture at our Wednesday morning Superhero meeting!!! Bad Amanda!
But perhaps the lack of photos speaks for the huge amount of fun we had at the library!!! This week we talked about travel and mail! So our craft for the day was to colour and decorate our very own postcards to send away to someone over the summer!
I got the template for the postcards from Miss Martha Stewart! Thanks Martha! Here's where you can get them! Martha Stewart Postcards!
Here's Keith's Postcard, front and back!
We also tried to guess how many countries there are in the world... then we tried naming them all and when that didn't work we listened to a song that would help us remember, some if not all of the countries in the world!!!
Here's the song - it's a classic, that is if you remember the Animaniacs cartoon, like me!!
We discussed and talked about flying on planes and travelling to foreign lands and such! I set up three maps and each kids choose a place where they've been, are going and wish to go!
We finished off by playing a memorization game revolving around what we would pack to take on our upcoming trips - imaginary or real.
Here's how you play:
Memory game: I
Packed My Suitcase
(See Activity Village at
www.activityvillage.co,uk/i_packed_my_suitcase.htm)
Sit in a circle
The first child chooses a word that begins with the
letter ‘a’ and says, “I packed my suitcase with an apple” The next child
chooses a word beginning with a ‘b’ and repeats the sentence, adding their
word: “I packed my suitcase with an apple and a banana” Move through the
alphabet
When a child cannot remember the list or makes a mistake,
they are out!
It was lots of fun! I was very surprised by everyone's awesome memory! Although... we did end up packing a lot of animals to bring on our trip! I think there was a cat, elephant, llama and things got out of hand! WHO PACKS AN ELEPHANT WHEN GOING ON A TRIP!?!?!? .... I'm sure there's someone out there!
Anyways we did do some reading! We read Robert Munsch's "Too Much Stuff!", one of my favourites about Temina, a girl who has a hard time packing for her trip as there are so many toys and fun things to bring!
We also two other lovely books, "Knuffle Bunny Free" and "No T. Rex in the Library" by Toni Buzzeo and illustrated by Sachiko Yoshikawa.
