Bookworms Book Club - Goldilocks and the Three Dinosaurs!

This was our last Bookworms Book Club meeting for the school year, and what a great year it has been!

This month we read: Goldilocks and the Three Dinosaurs by Mo Willems

This is a great example of a fractured fairy tale, putting a twist on the traditional Goldilocks and the Three Bears story.

In Willems' version, the dinosaurs make chocolate pudding instead of porridge, so naturally, we had chocolate pudding cups as our snack!

Yum!

We had such a great time reading through this book together because there is so much see! Just check out these endpapers:

These made everyone laugh!

There are also plenty of good dinosaur jokes:

"Wipe Your Talons"

And of course, we hunted for, and found, the Pigeon! Can you find him hiding in this page?

(check the cookie jar!)

After we finished reading our book, we quickly skimmed through this traditional version of the tale by Byron Barton:

Next, it was time to compare and contrast! (yes, I used to be a Language Arts teacher) I like using visual aids, so we drew a big Venn diagram on our dry erase board:

We talked about what was the same in the two stories (i.e. Goldilocks, three of everything - animals, bowls, chairs, beds, etc.) and what was different (Dinos vs. bears, etc.) The children really did a great job with this, and thought about things such as the characters' intentions in both stories, as well as their actions.  There was definitely some critical thinking going on!

Next, we brainstormed other fairy tale stories to which we would like to add dinosaurs.  Here are some of the titles we came up with:

Dinorella
Beauty and the Dinosaur
Sleeping Dinosaur

Snow White and the Seven Dinosaurs

If you had more time, it would be great to have kids draw a cover page for one of these fractured fairy tales!

Next, it was time to get up and play! Since Goldilocks couldn't find a chair to sit in, I thought we should play Musical Chairs! This was so much fun!

We even used a dinosaur song: We Are the Dinosaurs by the Laurie Berkner Band

As the kids got "out," they were handed a goodie bag (leftover SRP prizes from previous years), so there were really no hurt feelings about losing.

Next was our craft, which we actually ran out of time for and didn't get to do! This was a little sad because I spent quite a bit of prep time tracing and cutting out pieces, but I suppose I'll just have to save them for another time.

Here is my Dinosaur Suncatcher (thank you, Pinterest!)

The outline of the dinosaur is cardstock, stuck to a sheet of clear contact paper.  You fill in the inside with pieces of tissue paper, and the close it up with another sheet of clear contact paper, and cut out your dinosaur! Voila! I think he's pretty cute!

I did have time to have the kids vote on their favorite books that we read this year and here are the results:

Easiest to Read: TIE between The Hallowiener by Dav Pilkey and Fancy Nancy Sees Stars by Jane O'Connor

Funniest: We Are in a Book by Mo Willems

Favorite: Green Eggs and Ham by good ol' Dr. Seuss!

This was such a great year for this little book club that could.  Looking back, I had very consistent attendance all year long, and such enthusiastic little readers! I can't wait to get started on planning next year's meetings! See you in September!

Library Out Loud - Come draw with me

One of the programs that my predecessor had done was called Read, Scribble, and Snack.  I can't claim any responsibility for this program other than the name change.  It is fairly popular with my after school crowd though.

Now I call it LOL: Library Out Loud (get it? after our blog name!)  The premise is easy.

1) Offer a snack, as this IS after school.
2) Offer drawing paper, pencils, pastels or any other medium.
3) Put in an audiobook of the kids choice (or read to the kids).
4) Hang out and draw.

This week, we worked on Flora and Ulysses by Kate DiCamillo (Newberry Award winner this year!) I brought in a couple different books to vote on.  The kids could draw from the book or from their imaginations.  Most of them had their own ideas of what they wanted to do.

You can see here some of the kids drawing, and even see my own creation - yes that is the squirrel named Ulysses from the book...or a reasonable facsimile!

I get a good mix of kids out of the main library space and into the meeting room, where they can hang out and chat with me about whatever, draw whatever, and fuel up (most importantly to them).  Not all of the boys enjoy drawing, so I allow them to play a quiet game off to the side if they would rather do that.  They want to be included but they also don't really want to sit and draw, and that is OK.  This is one of the after school programs the kids ask for, so I am happy to continue it.  Once you have these art materials (or get donations), the upkeep is light.

Some kids really like audio books, so why not include them into your programming?  The materials are right there on the shelf, and you might get one kid hooked on a book.  Go for it!

Bookworms Book Club - Fancy Nancy Sees Stars

My K-2 book club met this month to discuss Fancy Nancy Sees Stars by Jane O'Connor.

 

While the book is fairly simple and straightforward, I saw a lot of potential possibilities for activities to do with this group.  And stars are just so much fun!

 

First, we obviously had to eat star-shaped sugar cookies.  With frosting.  And sprinkles!  If Fancy Nancy eats them, we can too!  Of course, I forgot to take pictures, but they were pretty yummy.  I let the kids frost and sprinkle their own cookies, which they thoroughly enjoyed!

"Sprinkles make them sparkle." So true!

 

We read the book together once, and while the boys in the group were not thrilled about doing a Fancy Nancy book, they actually participated the most in the conversation! What I love about these books are the "fancy words," so we had some great discussion about vocabulary words. These words were all related to space and stars!

And there is a nice guide in the back of the book!

 

Next, we had fun with a game I made up: I split the kids into two teams, gave them each a felt board, and a bunch of felt stars.  Their task was to create a constellation out of stars.  The other team then had to guess what picture the constellation made.  This was so much fun, we did it three times!

This was my sample - can you guess? It's a house!

 

I also had a Fancy Nancy MadLib game, but we didn't end up having time for it.  You can find it, along with many other great teacher resources at Fancy Nancy World.



Our final activity was a simple, open-ended craft.  On black paper, the kids could create a constellation of their own with star stickers and white crayons.  They got really creative here and had a lot of fun with this!

This is my simple example - the big dipper!

 

This book club is so much fun to run, and fairly low-stress and low-prep.  These kids are so excited about books and reading, and I love being a part of that!

 

Next month is our last meeting of the school year - we're reading Goldilocks and the Three Dinosaurs by Mo Willems!

Book Spine Poetry - Middle School Book Club!

Did you know April is National Poetry Month?  A few weeks ago I came across a blog post by Travis Jonker on 100 Scope Notes (an SLJ blog) about Book Spine Poetry.  He was calling out for submissions, and I thought this would be a great activity to do with my middle school book club (grades 6-8)!

I showed them an example and set them free in the YA area of the library.  Here are some examples of what they came up with:

("Gorgeous/ Lucky/ Brilliant/ Smile")

*Cute and simple, I like it!

("Fact of Life #31/ Hot, Sour, Salty, Sweet/ Skinny/
Withering Tights/ Geek Magnet")

*Huh?

 

("Confessions of a Serial Kisser/ I Was a Non-Blonde Cheerleader/
My Name is Not Easy/ My Mother is a French Fry")

("I'm with Stupid/ Beauty Queens/ Flirt Club")

*Hillarious, btw!

("The Adventures of Tom Sawyer/ The Killer's Cousin/ Impossible")

("The Orange Houses/ After the Moment/ Moonrise/ Midnight/
The End of the World")

("Blood Wound/ Death Sentence/ Okay for Now")

("What Are You Afraid Of?/ The Disappeared/ So.B.It")
*This one's pretty good!

("Fat Angie/ Struck by Lightning/ The Hunger Games")
*LOL

 

 

To be honest, this didn't go as well as I had imagined.  We had already spent about 40 minutes discussing our book of the month, and the kids were pretty wound up.  Some of them went sprinting out of the room to grab books before I had fully explained what we were doing, and they succeeded in making a pretty huge mess of our YA area.  Even though I told them they had to put everything back, I was finding stacks of books just shoved on shelves afterwards, so I wasn't too happy about that.  In the future I think we might do this activity at the beginning of a meeting, rather than the end, before I fill them up with lots of sugar :)  Still, it was a fun activity to try, and I just emailed our submissions in, so I will be excited if they end up posted in the 2014 gallery! 

 

 Be sure to visit 100 Scope Notes to learn how to do this yourself!

Bookworms Book Club - Green Eggs and Ham!

The Bookworms Book Club just celebrated its one-year anniversary! This book club for Kindergartners through 2nd graders has been such a fun and rewarding program, and I just can't say enough how much I love these little kids!

We celebrated Dr. Seuss' birthday this month with my FAVORITE Seuss book: Green Eggs and Ham!

Of course, we needed snacks.  Like green eggs:

(sugar cookies, frosted white, with a green Mega M&M)

And rainbow Goldfish crackers, because why not?

We also needed awesome eggy nametags:

(These were just drawn free-hand.  I had teen volunteers help me cut out the pieces and I glued them together.)

We always sit and read the book together at the beginning of the meeting.  I think Green Eggs is fun to try to read really really fast, and they thoroughly enjoyed my getting completely tongue-tied several times!

On to the games! I cut out printouts of a bunch of Seuss characters from various books, and pinned the books' titles to our bulletin board.  The kids had to place the characters up on the board with their proper titles.  Some were easy like The Cat in the Hat and Sam-I-Am, while others were less known, such a Thidwick, the Big-Hearted Moose and the Zizzer Zazzer Zuzz from Dr. Seuss' ABC.  They did a great job and helped each other when they weren't sure!

"What's that giant green ham for?", you ask! Why, it's the Seuss version of "pin the tail on the donkey!"  The kids used their egg nametags (with a piece of tape on the back), and "pinned" them to the board.  As a blindfold, I borrowed a big red Sam-I-Am hat from a coworker, and it fit perfectly over the kid's faces.  Even without being able to see, they did a pretty good job!  They had a blast with this and wanted to try it over and over to get their egg closer to the ham!

(This was just drawn free-hand on green paper, and glued on to the "tray," which is white paper, colored gray. This idea came from Seussville.)

We always finish with a craft, and this month they made a set of Dr. Seuss "Memory" cards to play at home.  "Memory" (or "Concentration") is just a simple game where you flip cards over, two at a time, until you find a match.  If your two cards match, you keep them, but if they do not match, you have to flip them back over.  I made these cards myself and printed them on cardstock.  The kids cut them out, and decorated little cardboard boxes (they look like Chinese takeout boxes) to keep them in (We just happened to have these so I used them!).  We had Dr. Seuss stickers and markers to decorate with.  

I searched high and low for a Green Eggs and Ham craft and never found anything I liked for this age group, so I ended up coming up with this myself.  I think the kids enjoyed making it and I like the idea that they went home with a new game to play.

This monthly program is always a blast, and really gets kids excited about reading!  I had 8 attendees this month (this is average), which is a very manageable size.  We had a lot of fun celebrating Dr. Seuss and can't wait until our next meeting! 

Next month we are reading Fancy Nancy Sees Stars by Jane O'Connor.  See you then!