What's Happening Next Week?

Oh, what's that title of the post? You have a question? Well next week we got lots happening next week, thanks for asking!

For one thing our theme for week 3 is "It Came from Outer Space - Space Exploration, Astronomy, Alien Life and Science Fiction"! So we are going to be talking about space, planets, gravity and aliens!

I'm really excited about this theme because it also leds into the classic science fiction novels in our library! And I'm hoping to somehow tie in a little Ray Bradbury tribute since he sadly passed away this year. Fahrenheit 451 has been one of my absolute favourite novels and I just recently found the authorized graphic novel of Fahrenheit 451 in our library, so I'll be giving that a read! Look for the review here once I've finished! 

Hopefully, I'll find someway of incorporating him into the programming! I know his books are mature, but maybe I can find a good short story of his to read to the kids! Let me know in the comments if you have any ideas!

I'm also looking forward to doing something H.G. Welles oriented, since we had Jayne Garry of EZ Rock Radio come in this week for Guest Wednesday, maybe the Mad Scientists would like to hear about the whole War of the Worlds radio show fiasco!

We are also going to be making some fun and easy alien masks! I'm excited for these! Rhonda found some glow in the dark star wall decals and we are going to unleash the kids (sans glitter this time) to decorate up their masks and be creative.

I snapped a couple of pictures of my mask! I went crazy with my camera for the second one to make it look fresh from outer space!

Also next week, besides exploring the limitless bounds of space and science fiction, we are welcoming some special guests for our Guest Wednesday! Diana, Ryan and Marnie with Columbia Basin Water Smart will be coming in on Wednesday afternoon to talk to the kids about water conservation and tips on water saving! Should be fun!

I ran off a quick poster with all the details, here it is!

So that is what we have to look forward to next week! Should be awesome!

Until then, I'll just have to endure this Friday the 13th morning, ripe with muggy, overcast weather and in the meantime prep for our Summer Reading Club adventures next week! I'm going to be painting a lot of black mask templates, that's for sure! 

Oh! I also grabbed some of the pictures from the Mad Scientists and beautified the shelves with their art work! I love these colouring sheets! .... You might also notice that Chase's Crash of Rhinoceros (top right picture!) have sadly caught the chicken pox! Poor things!
Although speak of the weather, I just ran out to take a look outside and looks like that morning overcast didn't last for very long!

I'll end here with some wise words from the late Mr. Bradbury himself. 

Happy Reading!

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!

Guest Wednesday! - EZ Rock's Jayne Garry! – Or the Story of how I will forever have glitter on my face… IT’S EVERYWHERE!

Jayne Garry (middle) surrounded by all our Mad Scientists, Young Professors, Rhonda (far left) and me! (far right!)

AWESOME fun-filled day today at the good ol’ Beaver Valley Public Library! While outside the heat and sun beat down its whip of fury and sweat, inside the library we all basked in the air-conditioned greatness like lazy cats do around the house on spongy couches!

Today while we had the absolute pleasure of hosting the second meeting of the Young Professors (you can see my previous blog post about that here: http://beavervalleylibrarykids.blogspot.ca/2012/07/week-2-biggest-fastest-first-with-young.html), we were also amazingly able to have our first Guest Wednesday of the Summer! 

The fabulous Jayne Garry of our local radio station EZ Rock, graced us with her loveliness and amazing voice, bringing along her mother and two cute children to join our group for the day! All in all we had 16 kids! Yay!

While lots of kids came in earlier before 1 o’clock, I set up our craft and let the early birds grab the worm! – or in this case the comfy seats and a fun colouring sheet (you can print out your own  Summer Reading Club, Strange … But True? Colouring sheets at the kids SRC website here: http://www.kidssrc.ca/quizzes.htm)

When Jayne arrived, nice and prompt, she also came in with an awesome surprise! She brought some swag and goodies for the kids! Also she carried along a huge poster board showing pictures of the history of the radio station! I introduced Jayne to the kids and they all behaved lovely and sat very well in their seats! 

Jayne told a whole bunch of awesome stories, the kids learnt about the radio station, about Jayne’s career and where its taken her, and I think her talk also inspired the kids into thinking about their own future careers. Jayne told stories of how when she was a child, she and her younger sister would pretend play that they were radio announcers and make up their own stories to tell. She also shared some stories of interesting people she’s had to interview in the past, such as, Rick Hanson and even a brief encounter with Jerome Iginla! One story the kids loved that Jayne told us was about how one special occasion for her job she had to go to Disneyland (it might’ve been world… but I’m going out on a limb and saying land!) The kids loved it! Some of them even said excitedly “so, you got paid to go to Disneyland!??!” 

She also shared a strange fact, which I loved! It tied in perfectly with our theme: Strange … But True? Now, apart of the atmosphere, the ionosphere has a strange characteristic in that AM radio waves bounce off it and travel back to the earth. So countries far away can pick up signals from countries even further away!

After her presentation, we gave out applause and Jayne bestowed her gifts to each Mad Scientist and Young Professor in attendance!

We then set to our crafts!

 Now let me first start off by telling you a backstory! So after the Young Professors club in the morning I reset the Children’s Section of the library and added craft tables, covered in newspaper! And chairs arranged in audience formation towards the bulletin board where Jayne would present.

So the craft today was to tie in the idea of communication – since Jayne spoke about the news and radio and how influential it is in people’s lives. We decided, then, that we would do the classic tin cans on string telephones – substituting the tin cans for plastic cups (it still works, just not as well!) since we didn’t want anyone cutting themselves on a rough edge. Anyways, for my example I foolishly decided to paint the inside and add glitter to the paint, for me it was simple, easy and didn’t take too long to dry.

But when I showed the kids my example today, I didn’t realize that they would all decide to do glitter as well! Rhonda, wisely saw the disaster while I was setting up, saying something like “oh, my girls are going to go crazy over that glitter”. If only I had listened!!!

Hahahaha, long story short (too late) the library is now covered in glitter! Myself, included! I didn’t realize until Jayne pointed it out to me but glitter infected my face like a bad case of acne and I came to work (at the theatre) and my boss, Lisa, and customers even! have been doing that thing where instead of looking you in the eye, you can feel their eyes wandering over your face, questioning “what the---?”. Oh well!

But really even with the massive tornado of sparkles that looks to have past through the library, this Guest Wednesday (my first Guest Wednesday) was awesome! I enjoyed listening to Jayne’s presentation! I loved how her little daughter perpetually danced around her, and how her son quizzed me on mathematics that no average grade 3 student would know!

I hope the kids had fun! They all glitzed up their telephones with glitter, feathers, pompoms and gobs and gobs of liquid glue, that may take a century to dry! They even naturally gravitated towards the height chart and measured themselves on the wall! Still no one has beat Robert Wadlow!

So that was our first Guest Wednesday! I would like to reiterate my extreme gratitude to Jayne Garry and EZ Rock Radio for being so easy to get into contact and so supporting to our library! We had such a great time!

Here are some more pictures from our day! Enjoy! Happy Reading! 

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! :) 

Library Book Review: YA Graphic Novel "Marvel 1602"

by Neil Gaiman, Andy Kubert, and Richard Isanove

Cover art by Scott McKowen 

In the name of the moon! I shall
punish you!

Now, I've always been a fan of comics, at a younger age, Young Amanda was - how should I say? - OBSESSED with a little japanese anime show by the name of SAILOR MOON! oh goodness how I loved that show! I shamelessly read the whole manga series during my first midterm season of college! Sailor Moon inspired my love of manga and I wanted desperately to be a manga/comic book artist. Alas, my creativity peaked very soon and I was doomed to a career of only being able to copy the work of other much better artists!

Anyways, my comic book prowess went into a dormant stage only again to be inspired by korean dramas that were based on japanese manga!! and then again my love for movies led to comics as the renaissance of comic book movies came to fruition! and also the awesome-ness of Avatar: the Last Airbender (made into comic book continuation), cartoon shows like Spiderman, Gargoyles, X-men and more recently Young Justice!! and of course the massive amazing-ness of the movie The Avengers have gotten me real excited about comics!!! trust me... you don't even wanna know how many times I saw the Avengers! Needless to say it's amazing and I have to many feelings about the whole thing!!! haha

Grace Randolph's series Supurbia

Also, I've been subscribed to a great comic book themed youtube channel that has definitely helped spark my comic book interest! It's done by Grace Randolph, who is also a comic book writer and movie aficionado! She's writing a series that I've had yet to get my hands on but I am very tempted to just go ahead and by it online!!!

You should check out this video of Grace's and the rest of her channel here's a link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U1ik22uYQyw&feature=plcp This video is a review of the first episodes of Legend of Korra! Awesome!

So anyways! Walking among the Beaver Valley Public Library, I found a Neil Gaiman comic! Awesome! The only other book of Neil's I've read was Stardust! Which is magical and enchanting! I also really love the movie adaptation of the book!

I've heard lots of good things about Neil Gaiman and his American Gods and Sandman series. So when I saw he wrote a version of the Marvel Universe set in 1602 I fangirl-ed right out!!

I was not disappointed by my high expectations! This graphic novel is great! It compiles the whole 8 parts of the series together and the art work is awesome! Especially the action scenes and movement of Daredevil! The whole first part of the book for me was a great time! Sir Nicholas Fury!?!?! That's awesome! And Peter Parquagh? And the slight allusions in the "Ballad of the Fantastick" where "there were four brave souls rode the oceans abroad" man, this is great! The one that really got me laughing was Carlos Javier! Genius!

It also does a great job of incorporating so many characters and heroes together seamlessly in a time long ago! And still there are so many more characters that you discover on the way, that left me cheering out loud and holding my breath!

The story mainly follows the workings of Sir Nicholas Fury and Doctor Stephen Strange who work for the Queen! Strange weather and odd earthly behaviour is plaguing much of the world, bringing on rumors of armageddon. However, King James of Scotland and other forces outside and inside the country threaten the crown. Also some intense anti-mutant/witchcraft movements are starting to spread (mostly due to the influence of the church!) and also Sir Nick is trying to insure the safe travels of the Templars "weapon" to England. EPIC stuff!

This gets a solid 5/5 from me! Fantastic artwork, story and characters!

IN THE NEWSPAPER TODAY ... WHAT?!?!!

HURRAY!

Today we were featured in the Trail Daily Times Newspaper (click the link http://www.traildailytimes.ca/ to see their website)

I'd like to thank the Trail Daily Times, so so much! It was so nice of them to put our picture in the paper! Awesome!

If you didn't manage to see our picture in the paper or aren't subscribed to the paper this is the picture they had on page 2 of Monday, July 9th's issue, I'll post it again here!

This came from last week's post, from the Mad Scientist's first meeting!
Here's a link to that post! http://beavervalleylibrarykids.blogspot.ca/2012/07/week-1-wild-wild-life-with-mad.html

Anyways! Another thank you to the good people at the Times and Guy Bertrand for his help! 

Children's Book Review: "My Father's Dragon"

by Ruth Stiles Gannett (published in 1948)
illustrated by Ruth Chrisman Gannett (the author's stepmom!)

My goodness, how I love this book!?!? Let me not count thee ways and just tell ya about it!

I grew up reading this book religiously! Young Amanda just loved the pictures, loved the story and loved loved the map! I was a fool for maps as a young one! And this book has the grand-daddy of all awesome maps in it!

Now this story follows the writer's father, Elmer Elevator, and his mysterious and adventure-packed journey to Wild Island to save a baby dragon from the grips of the wild and very very mean animals of Wild Island! Now Mr. Elmer Elevator is a very smart and cunning young boy and equipped with his street smarts, thinking prowess, and very well packed backpack, he makes his journey possible!

Such a lovely map!

Now not to give away the whole story, since it is only 10 chapters long, this story is great! A definite 5/5! There is a sequel and I think even a third book to the series, of which I haven't read yet! Perhaps I'll read 'em and continue to review the series!

But really this book is such a sweet little thing, easy to read, filled with beautiful pictures and filled with cool exotic animals ... who can talk! AWESOME!! oh yeah, and a DRAGON!!! Can't get better than that really.

Thank you Ruth Stiles Gannett, you made my childhood awesome!