Create Day #2: Silly Science

Silly Science -  making science a little more exciting and connecting it with reading through demonstrations

Age Range:  appropriate for kids that know not to put things in their mouths

Books Promoted:  various science experiment books on display

Supplies:

1. Quicksand Goo a.k.a.  Non-Newtonian Fluid ( 1 box cornstarch + water )  experiment link
2. Bubbles ( purchased or made from soap + bubble wands or pipe cleaners )
3. Soda Geyser ( 1 bottle soda + mentos ) experiment link

Total Program Cost:  for me, approximately $12.  price will vary, depending on how good a shopper you are and how many batches of goo and how many bottles of soda you’d like to explode.

Skills Promoted:  Literacy through the use of an experiment.  Scientific reasoning through guided experiments.  Motor skills (gross and fine) by manipulating the quicksand goo and bubbles.  Social through interactions with adults and peers.

Commentary

Science day was fun for the kids that came and it was pretty entertaining for some parents too.  Either no one really likes science or it was just a really quiet day at the library.  It was hot and I think that a lot of people were on vacation this week.  Ah well.

So I borrowed a lab coat which was really way to big and dug up my googles from high school chemistry.  Got to do the whole evil genius laugh and blew bubbles waiting for people to show up.  Not a wonderful turn out but it was actually nice having a smaller group.  I really need an easel because I really enjoy scribbling on things.  Well, without an easel, I pretty much held up the things that I was using and described a little about how each thing worked.

We went outside because there is no way I’m exploding soda anywhere near the books and allowing cornstarch goo near the carpet.  Bubbles… I had my test tube and blew a few, but just enough to attract people.  Yeah, in retrospect, I should have done the whole program outside and done the experiment while explaining.  Oh well.

Outside we went and I did the whole soda geyser first with a 20 ounce bottle of soda an just one mint.  It was enough to satisfy the kids, but well… not me.  Me: Bigger?    Kids: Yeah!   Me: Bigger!  I dragged out a 2 liter complete with crazy evil genius smile.  There’s quite a few youtube videos on this experiment though EepyBird has the whole fancy fountain display.  According to Myth Busters, any soda with carbonation works, but apparently diet Coke works best thanks to the sweetner.  Yeah, I read quite a bit about this experiment.  I also didn’t want to spend the $6 for the test tube launcher and made my own.  Take one large index card, roll into a tube around the roll of Mentos loosely and tape it.  Punch two holes in the tube about a centimeter or so from the bottom so that you can look through one hole and see through the other.  Fold a length of pipe cleaner in half and insert it through both holes.  The folded end I pulled apart a bit so I’d have kind of a grenade pin deal.  Throw the Mentos in the top part and shove the tube into the mouth of the bottle.  Pull the pin and run!  =)  If you have a test tube, I think I read somewhere that you can fill it up and use an index card to control the drop.

After I did that, I let the kids have at the quicksand goo and the bubbles.  Surprisingly, the quicksand goo was what the kids wanted to play with the most.  A lot of the kids ended up playing with the bubbles after they were done because apparently a bucket of dishwashing liquid and water to make bubbles also is a nice rinse.  Go figure.  While they were in free play experiment mode, I went around to the different little groups and explained why things worked the way the did.  That got quite a few kids interested and I answered questions.

It was an interesting program.  When I needed to close up shop, I blew up two more bottles of soda only I dumped in like more Mentos.  Beware having too many mints to drop in!  Yeah, by the time they all filter in, you won’t have enough time to run and will be covered in soda.  Still fun if you don’t mind getting sticky though.  Not bad for a $12 program

A WORD OF CAUTION when cleaning up your mess.  DO NOT POUR THE NON-NEWTONIAN FLUID DOWN THE DRAIN!!!  The quicksand goo is totally bad for plumbing!  It’s advised that you throw it into a plastic bag for the trash can.  Yeah, I warned you and as it says in the disclaimer, it’s totally not my fault if you get it into your brain to try any of the crazy things I do!

Questions or comments?  Check out the disclaimer tab and my about tab.  Happy reading!

Create Day #1: Crazy in the Kitchen

Crazy in the Kitchen -  bringing reading, math, and cooking together to produce ice cream!

Age Range:  appropriate for most ages though parental help is necessary for the really little ones

Books Promoted:  Duck Soup by Jackie Urbanovic and various cookbooks on display

Per Child Cost:  $0.50 approximately

Ice Cream In a Bag Recipe from Kaboose:  Ice Cream In a Bag

What you’ll need:

• 1 tablespoon sugar
• 1/2 cup milk or half & half
• 1/4 teaspoon vanilla
• 6 tablespoons rock salt
• 1 pint-size plastic food storage bag (e.g., Ziploc)
• 1 gallon-size plastic food storage bag
• Ice cubes

How to make it:

1. Fill the large bag half full of ice, and add the rock salt. Seal the bag.
2. Put milk, vanilla, and sugar into the small bag, and seal it.
3. Place the small bag inside the large one, and seal it again carefully.
4. Shake until the mixture is ice cream, which takes about 5 minutes.
5. Wipe off the top of the small bag, then open it carefully. Enjoy!

Skills Promoted:  Literacy through the use of a recipe.  Mathematics when increasing the recipe yield and measurement of ingredients.  Motor skills (gross and fine) by manipulating and measuring ingredients.  Social through interactions with adults and peers.

Commentary

I must say, I really like the theme for summer reading this year:  Be Creative @ Your Library!  Simple, elegant, and open to so many possibilities.  This year’s theme is wonderful since I enjoy being creative and I’m a big fan of homegrown programs on the cheap.

So June 27th brought my first “Create!  Project Day” in the series of four spread out over the summer alternating performers.  “Crazy in the Kitchen” was a bit crazier than expected.  My library is not big so we generally do programs in our picture book area.  I have all these little racks that I can display single books on top of the picture book shelves with the covers facing out.  I cleared off the regular books and put out tons of colorful cookbooks.   If you get them excited about a topic and put the books in reach, most of them will get checked out.  I also can’t handle more than 10 kids making ice cream at a time especially in my tiny meeting room that will generally hold about 15 people comfortably.  I gave each kid a colored popsicle stick to “pay” for admission and to seperate them into mangeable groups.  If you arrived first, you got an earlier group.

I read Duck Soup by Jackie Urbanovic.  It’s one of my favorite books and enforces that you probably should not cook alone.  Hee, hee.  Duck pretty much wanders out to go get something for his perfect soup and his friends find a feather floating in the soup…  Cute book about cooking even though we weren’t making soup.

We made ice cream.  I spent about $27 to make ice cream with about 60 kids with half a bag of rock salt, half a bag of sugar, and plenty of plastic bags leftover.  I found a really neat recipe on Kaboose for exactly one scoop of vanilla ice cream in about five minutes without an ice cream maker.  Of course, there’s no way I’m mixing things individually so I have to mix everything in batches.  <– insert evil librarian laughter here –>  Not only did I read them a book, I made them do math!  I wrote up the recipe on a big piece of paper and asked them if they wanted to divide one scoop of ice cream or have their own scoop.  Duh.  Okay, but you’re working for it.  Not every child I get is old enough to do math, so I did little signs on popsicle sticks and asked for volunteers.  Two kids holding “1/2 cup milk” signs get partnered up to make one full cup.  So I have how many partners/cups of milk?  You get the idea.

Once the math is done, I get to haul the groups into the tiny meeting room.  Remember the colored popsicle sticks?  If you’re wondering, I applied Warcraft instance tagging theory and pulled the groups according to order in the rainbow.  ROY G. BIV is a great way of keeping things in order without having to actually number things.  Colors also seem less antagonizing than “take a number” in my opinion.

What do you do with about fifty waiting kids and their parents?  You trick them into decorating your library!  Be Creative @ Your Library!  I’ve been having difficulties getting children to bring in their art wok for display and I haven’t been good at remembering to tell kids.  Despite the huge sign advertising and the “Your Artwork HERE” signs hung up all over the place, only one bite.  So I pulled out a really simple drawn frame and asked kids to draw a picture.  Name and age on the back.  Leave the picture and happy librarian will turn her library into an art gallery.

So ice cream.  If you’re a public library, remind parents about possible allergies and such.  This recipe I found on Kaboose called for milk, sugar, and vanilla.  You pretty much mix the ingredients in a small ziploc bag which gets chilled in a big bag of ice.  I spent about $30 total to make ice cream for about 60 with plenty of leftover stuff for a part two if I can bring myself to do this again.   I had two other helpers and the odd parent or two helping out for each group of about ten.  Lots of fun, but it gets REALLY cold.  Be prepared to get wet.

Please learn from my mistakes!  Do’h moments included draining the ice bags and putting more ice.  Don’t forget to “refresh” rock salt when you refresh the ice in the bags unless you don’t want the ice cream to come together.  If you have a way of controlling things outside and it’s a nice day outside, take it outside!  I had a slightly soggy meeting room at the end of the program.  It’s cold and that’s not a joke.  If you have towels around, consider wrapping each bag of ice in one to save your fingers.  If you’re doing big batches of kids, mix everything up before hand.  Keep the pint ziploc bag mixtures in the refridgerator so that all you really have to do is hand each kid a bag of prepared ice and the little bag.  I should have done this and it has the added bonus of keeping the mixtures colder to begin to help cut down on icy shake time.

Overall, it was a good program.  The age range was anywhere from a few years old to teens in this program.  The kids seemed happy to be eating something they’ve made and I got done without a lot of chaos.  Thank goodness for a good staff!  I’m sure you can tweak things for older or younger crowds, but I tend to try for blanket programs that can be modified to make it “younger” or “older”.

Questions or comments?  Check out the disclaimer tab and my about tab.  Happy reading!

National Gaming Day @ Your Library

Board Games Played

• Pictureka!
• Candy Land
• Guess Who?
• Connect Four
• Operation
• Uno
• Hi Ho Cherry-O
• Sorry
• Chutes and Ladders

Story Time Gaming Activities

• Bingo
• Scavenger Hunt

First ever national gaming day at your library on November 15th, so of course I had to do something.  Okay, I went crazy and resolved to participate two days before the actual day, but that’s not bad considering that I only had a little less than two weeks notice.

The kids seemed to enjoy the free play board games.  I have an awesome staff to work with so I didn’t go insane.  I would have liked more teens, but this wasn’t on a weekday when we catch most of our teens.  No worries.  Actually had a parent ask if it was going to be a regular occurance.  Not that I can predict.  I’d need more games and I would rather having gaming in the library as a teen activity.  Ah well.

My manager thought that I was doing straight gaming in place of story time.  It ended up that way but I made organized game activities especially for the little ones.  Yeah, I made them the morning of actually.  Turned out pretty well considering that this was a game day for the little ones.  It’s all good.  There’s always the next game day.  The important thing is that I pulled one together!  I can now tell people that I was part of the first National Gaming Day @ Your Library.  I’m a gamer librarian!

BINGO

Instead of bingo markers that kids can choke on, I passed out little cupcake liners with plain M&Ms.  Why plain?  They’re small enough that they fit in the bingo squares, I don’t have to worry about a peanut allergy, and if they eat them oh well.  Okay, so not exactly the healthiest game, but the kids had an enjoyable time.  I warned them as I gave them the M&Ms that you could not win unless the bingo you’re claiming has an M&M on all the squares.  Eat them after.  Found a really neat Bingo card randomizer that I’ve used before from DLTK’s.  Of course I used the animal boards!  Just don’t try doing black out with the 5×5 cards.  I realized that EVERYONE would get black out at the same time, but that was okay since everyone got to win.

Scavenger Hunt

Okay, this was fun.  I have a nice big box of puppets at work.  I put them in fairly obvious places out of immediate reach of grubby hands.  Each library animal puppet held a bright card with a word printed on it.  I wrote out clues to the whereabouts of the puppets.  When you find the puppet, you copy their word and when you’re done you return to smiling librarian with big box of prizes.  Apparently kids can’t copy words correctly, but they had fun.  I think I had more fun hiding the puppets and writing the clues.  It’s nice because they’re in obvious places so the pages don’t hate me when small children wreck the shelves, and it doesn’t matter how many people play.  I just hand them the game sheet and I don’t care how many people play.  I might try this for class visits with bigger kids since it allows them to constructively explore the library.

That First Story Time – Elephants

Books

• What Pet to Get? by Emma Dodd
• Max and Ruby’s Christmas Tree by Martha Wells
• Peanut by Linas Alsenas
• There is a Bird on Your Head! an Elephant and Piggie Book by Mo Willems

Art Activity

• Elephant Toilet Paper Roll Craft from DLTK’s

Every community is different as I’ve come to realize just bouncing from library to library.  So my first story time was actually November 8th, but I can’t say that I was so thrilled about it that I immediately wanted to throw this on the Bookshelf.  First story time at my library and it was… meh.  Apparently the “regulars” have been trained to interact.  Not all horrible, but I’m not the patient librarian that looks kindly upon children that interrupt EVERY sentence.  Ah well.  I just have to break them of the habit?  It’s fine to participate, but you are so totally ruining the plot.  Please don’t hand me books either.  I know from experience that if I dislike Max and Ruby, I will continue to do so.  You will know that I dislike Max and Ruby since nothing particularly “magical” happens to the story.

Anyways, very different story time styles from the last person.  I cheated on my art activity and pulled the toilet paper roll elephant.  I like elephants.  They’re up there with giraffes for me, so yay elephants.  No for Christmas stories before Thanksgiving.  =T  We’ll see what the next regular story time brings.

First Official Storytime as a Librarian

Books

• Bertie Was a Watchdog by Rick Walton and Arthur Robbins
• Click, Clack, Moo: Cows That Type by Doreen Cronin
• Russell the Sheep by Rob Scotton
• I’m the Biggest Thing in the Ocean by Kevin Sherry

Art Activity – Squid Hats

• construction paper
• glue
• crayons
• scissors if pieces are not already cut

1. Make a crown by joining construction paper into a circle
2. Leaving a gap for the face, glue strips of construction paper for tentacles on the inside of the crown so that the strips are point down
3. Glue or draw eyes directly on the crown
4. (optional) Curl or accordion fold tentacle strips

I did my first story time as a full fledged librarian today!  No, it wasn’t at my real library but soon!  It was a bit unexpected.  I was just supposed to observe which I did for the first story time of the day but I actually ran a story time on my own in the evening.  I say this is my first one as a librarian because I’ve been running story times and programs for a year prior to my appointment but not actually as a librarian.

No worries that I found out today.  I generally walk into the library on story time day without a clue what to do.  I go through books and sit down with the craft materials.  Planning a regular story time never works for me because I’m going to dump whatever precious plans in favor of what I’m caught up in.

Since I don’t know what kind of materials I really had on hand at this library, I went for squid hats.  They’re fun and all you really need is construction paper and glue.  I look pretty stupid with it on and I would have taken a picture of my awesome squid hat but someone wanted to take it.  Ah well.  It’s pretty much a band of paper that forms a crown with eight strips coming down.  You stick eyes on it and you’re done.  If you want to be fancy, you curl the ends.  Accordion folding the tentacles look pretty neat too, but I’m more inclined to curl.  If you flip the hat upside down and use black construction paper, it could be a spider.  I always use blue because the two times I’ve used this art activity, it’s been paired with one of my favorite books.  The squid hats clearly go with I’m the Biggest Thing in the Ocean by Kevin Sherry.

It went over pretty well but I’m sorely out of story time practice.  I think I’ll be less fearful of story time once I get settled in and know my community more.  I’m playing with the idea of incorporating flannel boards and even some songs later on.