Tra la la!!! The End of Our Summer!

So this week wraps up our Strange ... But True? Summer Reading Club 2012, yesterday we went out with a bang at the Montrose Park! We had a bouncy castle and carnival games from BV Tool Rentals, a refreshing water park for the kids to frolic in, our tie-dye-ing station all set up, and I had my camera at the ready!

I'll be posting my official post later this week or at the start of next week! I still have to post about our Monster Week with the Little Einsteins and Young Professors and Guest Wednesday with Les Anderson. And plus, I took about 250 pictures at the party! So it's going to take me a while to go through them all, pick out the good ones, and edit them! So please bear (pun! .... get it? no probably not, but Les Anderson talked a bit about bears during his Guest Wednesday visit, no? not funny? ok) - bare with me!

Until then here's a teaser picture from our Party from yesterday! This is a shot of some of the kids in the water park. Just before we started our water balloon fight we got a group picture, here the kids threw the water balloons up high and screamed as they were bombarded by rogue balloons!

Anyways, I just wanted to thank all the kids, Rhonda, the Beaver Valley Public Library, all our fantastic Guests for out Guest Wednesdays, the Trail Daily Times (for putting up with my constant emails and for sending the lovely Breanne Massey to the party to take some pictures and ask questions for the paper!), parents, and everyone for making this such a fun job for me! Thank you, Thank you, Thank you!

Happy Reading! 

Prize Draw II!

At the end of last week, on Friday, Rhonda and I drew out the names for the reading winners of the week! We were a bit ambitious and over-generous and decided to draw two names from each age group. Congrats to the winners and keep on reading over the summer and coming into the Beaver Valley Public Library to get your ballots into our draw!

Little Einsteins

Liam 

Griffin

Young Professors 

Zoe

Cohan

Mad Scientists

Kelly 

Sara

Woohoo! 

Stop by the library this week for Science Week! And don't forgot to register for this week's Guest Wednesday with Chemist extraordinaire, Allyson Perrott! 

Library Book Review: "This Dark Endeavour"

 - The Apprenticeship of Victor Frankenstein
by Kenneth Oppel

I grew up reading lots of Kenneth Oppel, starting from at around Grade 6 or 7 ... I just remember at RSS, Mrs. Popoff reading to the class "Airborn". That was a pretty cool book. And then when I went to Crowe I rediscovered Mr. Oppel and the subsequent sequels to "Airborn", "Skybreaker" and "Starclimber"!

After that I read through his Darkwing series, featuring herds of bats and strange creatures. And more recently I bought and read the chimpanzee/anthropology-like book "Half Brother".

All he books, needless to say, are great, adventure-packed and set in wonderful words of fantasy grounded in some truth.

So when I started working at the library I noticed one of his newest titles "This Dark Endeavour", lying lonely and low on the general fiction! So I took it out for a read!

This book is fantastic, the premise itself, intrigued me greatly. The story follow a young teenage Victor Frankenstein, living in the chateau Frankenstein with his family. Joining his adventures are his twin brother Konrad, good friend Henry and adopted cousin Elizabeth! Here in the novel you learn a backstory to the darkness of Victor Frankenstein and find new found purpose in his past that lead to his future as a experimenter or magicks and science.

Here is a book trailer released for "This Dark Endeavour":

Like Oppel's other novels that I've read this one is packed with excitement, but what I enjoyed the most with this book was the character arcs, writing style and maturity of the story!

The characters (well really just character being Victor) are well fleshed out in this novel! Victor is such a well written and dynamic character! His complete sort of fragmentation of morality and desire, good and bad and right and wrong is fascinating, and I really enjoyed the alchemic aspects to the book! Victor is such a relatable character I think, especially for young adult readers who are going through a stage in their life where emotions are running wild and important choices are being made. You get that feeling from Victor and at times when he goes through this internal struggle of what he should do or not do, this sort of feeling is very reminiscent to me of growing up and being super dramatic!

Also, since this is a period piece dating somewhere in the 18th century, Oppel's writing is ripe with ye old English time sayings and I loved it! The way this is all written is charming, romantic and delightful. It takes you in a time machine to a different time and a different place entirely! It's lovely.

After reading this though, even given the sort of mature themes of love, morality and death, I definitely felt that this book belonged in the YA section of the library.

All in all, this was an enjoyable book to read and also very enlightening to me about the history of Frankenstein. It also made me want to continue the saga by reading the original Shelley version of Frankenstein. I'll have to add that to my reading list!

Thank you, again Mr. Oppel for a stunning novel! 5/5 to you good sir! And for those of you who haven't read any of Kenneth Oppel's books, I suggest "Airborn"! That is a wonderful read!

Happy reading!  

Prize Draw!

Here are the winners of the draw today! Good luck to the rest of you for next week! And congrats to the winners of this week! Remember to keep reading and recording your time in your reading records to increase your chances of winning

Little Einsteins - Tim

Young Professors - Ben

Mad Scientists - Caleb

Happy Reading! Enjoy the Weekend!

Week 2 - Biggest, Faster, First! with the Mad Scientists!

Our World Map, Dotted with the places we want to go to!

 Yay! So we had our crazy mad scientists today! 11 kids joined me as we explored world record animals and natural places of the world!

Since we had a couple of early birdies (and I could tell that we were going to have some late comers to the party) I got the girls started on some cute colouring sheets, from this website: http://smackofjellyfish.com/

I love that website's prints! So awesome, and it tied in perfectly to last week's theme of Wild Wild Life! So as the kids continued to colour and more and more of them joined us in the library! Once we had a significant amount in attendance, I started to read to them from the Steve Jenkins book "Hottest, Coldest, Highest, Deepest" which is a lovely book about the natural wonders of nature on earth!

The kids liked it! I gave 'em a quick break from colouring to think about where on earth they would like to travel to and each child got a sticker to add to our world map! So many girls want to go to Paris!!! Caleb, funny enough, wants to stay right in Canada! And we had some kids deviate from the norm with stickers on Ireland, Mexico, Russia and Australia!


As they continued their colouring, I noticed not all had quite finished up so I took out "Biggest, Strongest, Fastest" also by Steve Jenkins and read that one to the kids! They are such fun books!

Chase and Chloe building away!

So, after our story and colouring time, we talked about the science of gravity and I posed the problem to the kids ... what happens when I drop an egg from high up in the air? and how can you save an egg from cracking!?

I gave the kids a bag of materials to each team - chosen at random 4 groups of 2 and 1 group of 3! I gave them 10 minutes to secure their egg all nice and safe and then we tested out each contraption.

It was lots of fun, egg splattered all over the place and the kids enjoyed that! good thing I had the tarp laid out on the ground! 

Kyleen, Abby and Sara working together! 

The kids did such a good job too! I had to throw their egg-mobile so high before any of them broke! Eventually when we were down to 2 survivors, Caleb had the idea to go outside and throw them! so we went out on to the stairs outside the library and I did a little underhand two-handed-bowling-like throw and we crowned our winner! Emily and Hannah!

I gave them each an Ice Age 4 poster that Lisa, my boss at the theatre, so graciously donated to us! Thank you Royal Theatre Trail! See what's playing this week here: http://www.royaltheatretrail.com/ Ice Age 4, starts tomorrow!

Another shoot of Chase and Chloe!

The winning team! Hannah and Emily, team Pink! 

So yeah, after all that fun and commotion building and throwing our egg-mobiles around, I passed out our prizes to our 2 mad scientist winners! and then I handing out pieces of sweet chewing gum to everyone and we finished off class chewing our gum away and reading an excerpt from "From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankenweiler"

The kids were good listeners! even though my reading is ripe with stuttering and big mess-ups, they were quiet and listened well!

After that I showed the kids the blog and passed out book review templates for them to fill out as they read this summer! 

Here's what the Mad Scientist's Book Review Pages look like!

So each week when the kids come into the library they can drop off their Book Reviews and I'll post them here! 

And then the club was adjourned, the kids frolicked around the library and checked out books and we recorded their reading records and all that!   

Happy Reading!