Librarian's Choice 1

I like to do these periodically, usually when we’re nearing a holiday and I think that attendance will be low.  I just pick a few stories that I like that might not fit in a theme and that’s what we read.  I didn’t feel up to the Fourth of July since I’d had some holiday related storytimes already this year that I thought fell kind of flat.  (Best one was Thanksgiving because of the turkey puppet craft).

BOOKS:

We read The Napping House by Audrey Wood and Knuffle Bunny by Mo Willems.

I started with The Napping House because I’ve found that I have a tendency to start with the narrative-heavy stories first and then go to the shorter, rhyme-y books.  Gotta shake it up!  But really, with its rhythmic text and nice flow, The Napping House would have been the best book to end with.  Oh well.  Lesson learned.  Moving on.  Knuffle Bunny is great.  Mo Willems writes FABULOUS read-aloud books, in my humble opinion.

SONG:

We listened to “Happy” by Pharrell Williams.  Since this was an open day, I wanted to do some contemporary music, with the thought that it’s okay to listen and sing to “normal” non-child oriented music.  The kids recognized the song from Despicable Me 2, but I don’t mind.  WE ALSO USED SHAKERS because nothing gets kids up and moving around like a shaker.

CRAFT:

We used an old stand-by for this week: noodle necklaces.  I think this one was more fun for me than for anyone else because I got to dye the noodles.  I had some baby tube noodles left over from a failed Christmas craft and boxes of penne.  I dyed them using rubbing alcohol and food coloring.  I will say this: BUY THE NEON FOOD COLORING.  It is fabulous.  You get REALLY bright colors.

For Tuesday’s storytime, I used liquid starch to make a pointy end of the yarn.  I thought it would be perfect.  NO.  Kids are not always delicate ladies when it comes to threading and stringing so the ends quickly got smashed and frayed and we had to resort to makeshifting ends out of scotch tape.  For Wednesday’s storytime, I wrapped all the yarn ends in a little bit of masking tape.

This worked SOOOOO much better.  I highly recommend the masking tape over the scotch tape and preparing it ahead of time.  Anyway, here is my noodle necklace which I made today to match my outfit.  Yes, I will probably wear it all day.  Even during summer reading program.