Science Week! ... is AWESOME!

Whew! Sorry guys! Today has been a fun-filled and super hectic morning, afternoon and evening! But tomorrow afternoon I'm going to be uploading all about our Young Professors' adventures though the world of state of matter - solids, liquids and gases!, and I'll got you caught up on our magnificent Guest Wednesday with Allyson Perrott!

Until then happy reading and have a lovely evening! :) and enjoy this page from Ray Bradbury's "The Illustrated Man"

Week 4 - Ants in Your Pants Picnic! with the Little Einsteins!

Brothers Tim and Ben getting ready for some more stories with our ant crafts! 

This morning Rhonda, our fantastic and awesome children’s librarian, returned back to the library after a weekend wedding down in Vancouver! She came back right into the swing of things and was off running to prepare for the Little Einsteins this morning from 10-11am. This week Rhonda and the Little Einsteins were talking about some fun summer activities! Fishing out on the water and having warm, cozy picnics at the park were topics discussed!

Crafts!

The sing-a-long songs, actions and story time readings enchanted the kids! They read stories about ants and their crazy shenanigans! After that they went right into the fun craft of the day in making their own egg-carton ants along with some delicious watermelon, hotdogs and ice cream cut outs to appease their ants’ appetites!

The kids had a blast! Cutting out and gluing odds and ends together, bending their ants’ pipe cleaner antennae and legs, and my favourite thing! – watching the parents and guardians help out their little ones in crafting away their crafts!

Working together in the family! :) 

Now I hope you don't all mind! But today I went CRAZY with the camera so about 90% of this post will be pictures! click on the pictures to enlarge them and use your arrow keys to flip through! Enjoy! And happy reading!! Click the read more link to read the rest see more pictures!

Science Week! Huzzah!

Here at the library I've started setting up for our Science Week! Yay, I'm excited!

Last week, for our guest Wednesday, the kids planted some plants for the environment thanks to the lovely people from Columbia Basin Water Smart: Diana, Ryan and Marnie! Here's some pictures of a few of the plants that were left behind (you guys need to pick 'em up this week! - although they do make nice company in the library!). We planted them last Wednesday (our Guest Wednesday - see the blogpost about it here: http://beavervalleylibrarykids.blogspot.ca/2012/07/guest-wednesday-columbia-basin-water.html) and already they are sprouting hardcore!

Since I already had my camera out for the day, I went about and took some more pictures of this week's events! I went gaga over some rediscovered Magic School Bus books!

And of course, here are some of the books we will be flipping through this week with the Young Professors and Mad Scientists! Have you read any of these?

And we can't forget a friendly hello from our robots and crazy octopus!

Happy Reading! See you in the library!

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! 

TGIF! What's Happening at the Library Next Week?

Oh boy! Next week is going to be heaps of fun, loads of hilarity and mounds of chaos! That's right, next week - Week 4 of the Summer Reading Club - is SCIENCE WEEK! Or perhaps, more appropriately titled "Weird Science - Strange Physics, Cool Chemistry, and Crazy Inventions!", but like the Discovery Channel's "Shark Week" and like Shakespeare's age old adage "brevity is the soul of wit", I prefer "Science Week!" - either way its much easier to remember and way shorter!

So to go along with our "Science Week" this week, we have a very special Guest Wednesday! That's right folks, this week we will be graced with the presence of scientific genius in Selkirk College's Professor of Chemistry - Allyson Perrott! 

I just graduated from Selkirk this past Spring, so therefore I was lucky enough to have had Allyson as a teacher quite a few times! She's a fantastic lecturer, an enthusiastic teacher and a great role model. She has a firm philosophy in teaching her students to understand and question what their learning rather than simply memorizing their textbooks and blindly following a teacher's words. 

Having read an excerpt from "The Phantom Tollbooth" by Norton Juster to the Mad Scientists this week, we met the character of Milo, a young boy who is horribly uninterested in everything. Juster wrote on the first page about Milo saying: "since no one bothered to explain otherwise, he [Milo] regarded the process of seeking knowledge as the greatest waste of time of all." I think had Milo had a teacher like Allyson, he would definitely be thinking otherwise

So here is a copy of the poster I made this week to advertise Allyson's visit! Be sure to register guys!

Guest Wednesday Poster! July 25, 2012

Allyson has already planned out the experiments we will be conducting on Wednesday afternoon and let me just say it's going to be very very awesome! I'll give you some foreshadowing: red cabbages, silver and slime! See what you can make of that!


So .... what else is happening this week? Well, I heard through the grapevine that Mrs. Giles has lots of fun planned for the Little Einsteins on Tuesday morning! For those little guys' theme of the week they will be reading lots of stories and crafts about picnics and ants! Should be lots of fun!
Now, I'm still in the process of planning out our program for next week! My head is full of too many ideas! But I'm pretty sure we may have a couple of fun and refreshing experiments to study next week! 
I've also been on the hunt for good science-y books to read with the Young Professors and Mad Scientists! It's tricky to find a fiction book for kids that goes with science, so we may be reading a few non-fiction books! I'm also thinking about continuing to read "The Phantom Tollbooth" with the Mad Scientists since its a really fun book to read! 

I did find a cool book at the Crockett Book Company in the Waneta Mall a couple weeks ago! A friend of mine and I went out to the mall in sad lament of the rumored closing of Trail's last and only bookstore! (we also went because of the mass sales opportunities for awesome books!) And I found a great Jon Scieszka and Lane Smith book called "Science Verse" which seems like lots of fun! While I was a bit perturbed with its totally misunderstanding of the theory of evolution (I have my Biology and Anthropology college teachers to blame for teaching me to be aware of common misconceptions of evolution) but I realized that this book isn't supposed to be a college textbook, but rather a fun and silly book about science! And hilarious it is! So good in fact, that I interlibrary loaned the prequel to "Science Verse" called "Math Curse" which is just as silly! 

A page from Math Curse by Jon Scieszka and illustrated by Lane Smith

Anyways, long story short (too late), this week we were surprised to hear that the Crockett Book Company is indeed not closing! HURRAY! So please surport our local bookstore and visit their website: http://www.crockettbookco.com/

Also, in my quest to find awesome ideas for science experiments, I have become addicted to YouTube videos! And of course, the classics, like the Magic School Bus and Bill Nye the Science Guy!

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!

Guest Wednesday! - Columbia Basin Water Smart! with Diana, Marnie and Ryan

Our Guests for the day Marnie, Ryan and Diana (back), with the kids for today's Guest Wednesday!
Front row kids: Tyler, Cohan, Sara, Zoe, Kyleen, Cody, Alicen, and Emily!

Sara and Zoe working on crafts before our Guest Wednesday!

This week's Guest Wednesday Poster!

 Yay! Today marks our second Guest Wednesday! It was great! We hosted Diana, Ryan and Marnie from the Columbia Basin Water Smart team and they came and shared water conservation tips, stories and fun planting activities for the kids today!

Alicen and Cohan making giant bookmarks!

Because of the traffic due to the construction going on the paving of the roads here in Fruitvale, I knew we would probably be running a little late today! So for the early birds we started a colouring craft of making giant bookmarks!

Emily, Kyleen and Cody colouring away!

 I printed out a template I found online that goes with our space theme of the week and the kids had fun coming up with far off planets! We had planets called "Potato", "Lonemone", "Ice Cream Planet", "Red Lava" and "Cookie Planet" delicious! Once they finished decorating and writing about their planet we glued them on to tough poster board paper to give them some strength and to make 'em durable enough to hold up well as giant bookmarks! :)

Columbia Basin Water Smart! Ryan, Marnie and Diana!

 Then we had our presentation from Ryan, Marnie and Diana! They introduced themselves and talked about the importance of water and how important it is to try to have the least impact on our earth for our future generations!