Family Story Time: Stars

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Hello again! While Story Time at the Union Township Branch might have stopped for the month of May, we just started our new series of evening story hours. Family Night meets on the first Tuesday of every month at 6:45. Our goal is to allow families with weekday school and work conflicts a chance to enjoy stories. All ages are welcome at Family Night, and we highly encourage our visitors to wear their pajamas!

Our Summer Reading theme this year is Read: Morning, Noon and Night, so our evening Family Time themes are all about the night.

Our first session met Tuesday May 1st, and we talked about Celestial Bodies (the kids were very interested to learn that bit of fancy, grown-up lingo). We read lots of stories about the stars and moon:

Our last book, Stars had a great idea, which we used for our craft. It suggested that we make a star and keep it in our pockets for days that we don’t feel so shiny. So, all of our attendees got to make and personalize their very own star to keep in their pocket, as well as one to give away to their favorite person. (After all, while you should always share, you don’t want to give away YOUR star, because then you wouldn’t have one anymore!) I made mine a star-shaped magic wand, so that I could banish all bad days that dared to occur in my presence.

Family Night will be happening every month; we’ll meet again June 5, from 6:45-7:30 to talk about Things That go Bump in the Night! Come with the whole family, wear your PJ’s and bring your favorite stuffed friend to hear stories about creepy, crawly, spooky monsters and to make your very on pet monster to take home with you!

Register online here, or call the Union Township Branch at 513-528-1744 to save your spot! Remember to check out all of the awesome events happening at the Clermont County Public Libraries this summer for both children AND adults!

 

 

Family Book Club: Jumanji

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We had our first ever meeting of the Union Township Family Book Club a few weeks ago. We started the group as a way to encourage families to read together, both during the school year and over the summer. Our books are aimed at middle elementary age children, but we encourage families to read them together. Younger children would enjoy hearing the stories read to them and older children might enjoy reading it to them. Our books are excellent bedtimes stories, as well as good choices for students who have a time goal for daily reading.

Six families joined us for our inaugural meeting. They read the book Jumanji by Chris Van Allsberg before the meeting (Book Club members get to checkout the book for two months so that they have time for all the family members to read the story, either on their own or with each other). Then, we got together to talk about the book, make our very own board game to take home and to watch the 1995 film version of Jumanji. Afterwards, we compared the book to the film and discussed why the film makers might have changed various aspects of the plot.

When asked if they liked the book or movie better, our young reader’s responses were split between the two, with lots of fans of the illustrations in the book, and even more fans of the crazy monkeys in the movie. We talked about some of the themes of the book such as responsibility and the importance of following directions, and we also discussed what we would do if jungle animals invaded our houses. It was unanimously decided that if our little siblings were turned into a monkey it would be very, very cool.

For our next meeting on Saturday, June 30, we will be discussing The Invention of Hugo Cabret, a fantastic book by Brian Selznick.  While it looks terrifying at 550 pages, it is actually a novel in pictures as well as text, with a LARGE part of the book composed of beautiful pencil drawings. Lots of people have described it as a film in book form, which is great because we will be watching the movie Hugo as well. The story follows a young orphan, Hugo Cabret and his secret life living in the walls of a Paris train station. When Hugo’s life collides with a broken automaton, an eccentric, bookish girl, and the cold, old man who runs the toy shop in the station, he is caught up in a magical, mysterious adventure that could put all of his secrets in jeopardy.

We hope you can join us! Stop by the Union Township Branch to pick up a copy of The Invention of Hugo Cabret, and don’t forget to sign your family up online, by phone (528-1744) or in person!

StoryTime: Robots

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This month at  Union Township’s StoryTime, we’re learning about People. And this week, we talked about my favorite type of people, Robots! What’s that–you don’t think robots are people? You better not let them hear you–robots have feelings, after all. We also talked about my second favorite type of people, Superheroes (the two go hand in hand, of course). We read some awesome stories, most of which featured our metal friends (try these titles in addition to my list of what we read).

We also had a special visit from our Five Little Superheroes. They flew in to hear our robot stories and hung out on the flannel board for the rest of class. The kids all learned a cool rhyme:

Five Superheroes
Five superheroes ready to fly,
Here comes a villain. Stop that guy!
This superhero can save the day.
Off he flies—up, up and away!

Last session we learned about the Every Child Ready to Read Six Skills for Early Literacy. This time we’re switching things up and focusing on the new Ready to Read 2 program, which focuses on five simple practices–talking, singing, reading, writing, and playing–that develop language and pre-reading skills in children. We try to have children do all five at the library. You’ve heard about our dance contests and our crafts, but we also spend time working on our other skills, such playing. Every StoryTime ends with cooperative free play, featuring either educational toys or, as in the case of this week, our craft. We used our technological mastermind skills to make our very own robot toy to take home, but first everyone really enjoyed zooming them around the room during play time.

I hope you can join us for our next StoryTime at the Union Township Branch. We’re taking the month of May off to visit our schools promoting summer reading, but we’ll be meeting again in June with a whole new schedule. We will still have ToddlerTime on Wednesday at 10:30, as well as All Ages StoryTime at 11:30 on Wednesdays and 10:30 on Thursdays. We’ll also be having a special monthly Night Time Family StoryTime, the first Tuesday of every month at 6:45. Hope we see you there (wear your PJs!!)

StoryTime: Miss Cara’s Favorites

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should I share my ice cream?Welcome to your first peek at StoryTimes at the Amelia Branch! We’ve just wrapped up our spring session, but we can’t wait to see everyone this summer to explore the Dream Big! theme. You can join us by signing up for All Ages StoryTime on Thursdays at 10:30, starting June 14th.

During the last week of April, we ended our spring StoryTimes with the best books of all (according to Miss Cara, anyway). Because we were celebrating my favorite books, our literacy skill this week was Print Motivation, which basically means that kids learn to love books and reading by having fun experiences with books, especially if the adults in their lives spend time reading and enjoying books with them. You can develop this skill by bringing your kids to the library, having many books available for them, and spending time reading to them.

In ToddlerTime, we read books by some of my favorite authors for toddlers:

Preschool StoryTime featured some longer stories that are by more of my favorite authors:

We wrapped up both StoryTimes by creating huge butcher paper murals that we rolled out on the carpet so that all the kids could draw their favorite things about StoryTime. These murals are hanging on the walls of our meeting room at Amelia, so the kids can enjoy their artwork when they visit the library. I hope to see you this summer at Amelia; until then, happy reading!

StoryTime: Ms. Garria’s Train of Thought

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We had StoryTime this week all planned out. Really, we did. Our session on Concepts is over and we’re moving on to a few weeks about People. Ms. Garria picked out lots of great stories for us about people, like Children Make Terrible Pets and The Boy who Cried Ninja (two of my favorites!).But then our morning shuttle arrived right before StoryTime and it had a copy of Mo Willems‘ new Pigeon book The Duckling Gets a Cookie!? in it.

Needless to say, EVERYTHING changes when a new Mo Willems book shows up. So, instead of having a session on People, we changed our plan and talked about Things That Are Alive. Now, normally, the books we read have some sort of common theme running through them, but this week it would be easy to think they have nothing at all in common with each other. But, if you follow Ms. Garria’s train of thought it all starts making sense. See if you can keep up:

Finally, we made our craft, a self-portrait collage that shows how we were feeling today (because we ended our stories with feelings AND things that are alive usually have feelings!).

In some strange and slightly twisted way, this new theme of ‘train of thought’ actually ties in with our Ready to Read early Literacy Skill for the week: Narrative Skills.

“Narrative skills is the ability to describe things or events and to tell and re-tell stories. Being able to talk about and explain what happens in a story helps children understand the meaning of what he or she is reading. Good narrative skills lead to good reading comprehension.

Parents can help children strengthen their narrative skills by allowing them to talk with you and by listening carefully when he or she talks or tells stories. Encourage interaction by asking open-ended questions, by asking children to tell about their day or an event or by asking them to tell you about the book instead of just listening to you read the story. Choose books that repeat or predict to encourage telling and retelling of the story or choose wordless books that allow children to tell the story. Encourage ‘picture walking’ – allow your child to retell the story using the illustrations as guides.”

We hope to see you next week at the Union Township Branch StoryTime!

StoryTime: Counting

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one pup's upHola! I hope your week was as good as ours at the Union Township Branch!

This week we continued our series on ‘Concepts’, talking about Counting. There isn’t much that kids enjoy more than shouting out the numbers once they learn them and we had an extra rowdy story time because of it. We also talked about our Ready to Read literacy skill, Phonological Awareness, a little more in depth than usual, so you get to learn a little more than usual about it too.

Basically speaking, Phonological Awareness is the ability to hear and distinguish the smaller sounds in words. Being able to hear the beginning and ending sounds that make up words will help children sound out words when they begin to read. Once a child has this ‘phonemic awareness’, they become aware that sounds are like building blocks that can be used to build all the different words and most children have any easier time learning to read.

One of the best way so to help you child grown their Phonological Awareness is to read stories with lots of rhyming words. And lucky for us, it seems that most counting books feature lots of great rhymes that are easy for kids to spot (when they already know how their numbers sound, it’s easier to pick out words that sound the same). This week we read:

I also pulled some harder number books for our older kids (since it was Spring Break in some of our schools we had some siblings visiting StoryTime). Two of my favorites that are sadly too long/hard for regular StoryTime are The Rabbit Problem by Emily Gravett and 365 Penguins by Jean-Luc Fromental.

Ms. Garria made this week’s flannel board to go with the song Pretty Ladybug. Poor Ladybug starts out with no spots and no numbers, and the kids help us add her spots in one by one, and add the numbers as they go:

Pretty Ladybug
(to the tune of London Bridge)
Ladybug has one black spot
One black spot, one back spot
Ladybug has one black spot
Pretty Ladybug
(Repeat with #2-6)

For our craft this week we practiced our painting skills, with a little twist! We used masking tape to block of parts of our paper, painted with our water colors and then removed the paint and counted how many white lines we ended up with!

We hope we see you next week at StoryTime!

StoryTime: Colors

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Don’t tell anyone, but I’ve fallen very behind in sharing what’s happening at StoryTime with you! This post is about a session we had way back in February; it was the first of our session on ‘Concepts‘ and we talked about Colors. I had a really hard time picking just a few books to read, we have so many amazing titles that feature colors. These are some of the titles we actually read:

We also talked about Print Motivation, one of the easiest of the six Ready to Read Early Literacy Skills. It might have a complicated sounding name, but print motivation is simple. Our website describes it like this:

Print Motivation is a child’s interest in and enjoyment of books. Children who enjoy books and reading will be curious about how to read and will want to read more. A child with print motivation enjoys being read to, plays with books, pretends to write, asks to be read to and likes trips to the library. Reading books should be fun!
Parents and caregivers can encourage print motivation in children by:
     -Reading books often
     -Making book-sharing a fun and special time
     -Keeping books accessible
     -Giving them the impression you enjoy reading
     -And visiting the public library often
Choose books that encourage a child’s interest and enjoyment of books and let children pick out books that they want to read or have read to them.

Sounds a lot like what we do at story time, doesn’t it. Our goal is to help you show your kids that reading is awesome!

We started our time together with a fun flannel board game. The kids had to help find Mr. Mouse so he could listen to the stories too. We searched through his ‘neighborhood’ to figure out which house he was in before we settled down to listen. After we read our stories and had our Silly Dance Contest we had craft time. Our color crafts were both recycling projects we made out of old paint chips. We made two different versions of a color matching game. For the younger kids we pre-assembled some color flip books that we took around the branch on a color scavenger hunt, trying to match the the colors on book covers to the color cards we had. The older kids built their own color match wheel, using paint chips to make the color pegs and wheel.

As always, we had tons of fun at Story Time, so we hope you can join us next time!

 

Lego Club Rocks!

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Hi! It was a huge Block Party at the Union Township Branch on March 31st; this past month we had tremendous success with our first ever Lego Club. We knew it was going to be a great day when we ran out of space in our original session and had to add a second morning session after just two weeks of sign-ups.

Over 90 kids registered to attend, with 3o in each session and another 30 on the waiting list. Due to our huge numbers we had to combine our Lego collection with the Amelia Branch’s bricks to make sure that we had enough for everyone (Thanks Ms. Cara for sharing)! Everyone in the room had their creative caps on; parents tried their best to watch from the sideline, but it was hard for them to not hunker down on the floor with the kids and build. Our builders made over 100 unique creations over the course of the day, using their brains and some of the awesome Lego books we have in the system.

We started our class with some free building while we waited for everyone to arrive. After that we did a series of individual and team oriented building challenges, including building robots, our favorite animals (a surprising number of kids picked giraffes), a building (it couldn’t be a house), vehicles and ‘the most awesome thing’ the kids could think of.

Everyone had an great time and the creativity was astounding. Check out pictures of some of our creations at the CCPL Flickr page, where we have our very own Union Township Lego Club photo collection.

Our Lego Club meets the last Saturday of every other month at 10:00 and 2:00. To save your spot at one of the May 26th Block Parties, call the Union Township Branch at 513-528-1744 or register online through our Calendar of Events. Busy on May 26? Check out the Amelia Branch for their Lego Club, which alternates months with ours.

StoryTime: Shapes

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my heart is like a zooThis week at the Union Township StoryTime we talked about one of the very best concepts- Shapes! Seeing and recognizing the shapes that make up everything around us is not only an amusing game you can play with your kids, it’s also huge step on the road to Early Literacy. One of the six skills that can help you children learn to read is Letter Recognition, and a big part of spotting the differences in various letters is being able to see the shapes that they are made of. Knowing that an A is a triangle and an O is a circle is a big deal, trust me!

All of our books we read this week dealt with our various shapes, including some of my favorites; hearts, circles and squares. We read:

For our craft we made collages and pictures out of circles, and as always we had a few coloring sheets that we made up. We also had some great flannel boards; our Preschool Time had a visit from the Shape Monster, who promptly ate all the shapes we had brought out to show the kids and at Toddler Time we played a game with our felt shapes, first spotting the shapes on the board and then later shapes we found around the room. The game has a song that goes like this:

I Can See Shapes
Tune: London Bridge
I can see a circle shape,
circle shape, circle shape.
I can see a circle shape.
How about you?

I can see a triangle,
a triangle, a triangle.
I can see a triangle.
How about you?

I can see a little square,
little square, little square.
I can see a little square.
How about you?

I can see a rectangle,
rectangle, rectangle.
I can see a rectangle.
How about you?

As always we had a great time this week at the Union Township Branch StoryTimes, I hope you can join us next week!

StoryTime: Getting Dressed

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New socksWe’re still having a blast at Story Time here at Union Township. This week our ‘Concept’ was one of my favorites, Getting Dressed. All of our books had to do with clothing, like hats, socks and purple dresses.

Our Ready to Read literacy skill this week was Print Awareness (which is basically learning how to notice the printed word all around us), and our books had some really awesome fonts to help grab the kids attention and pull them into the books. We read:

Ms. Garria made us a very cool flannel board based on the book Let’s Play in the Forest While the Wolf is Not Around by Claudia Rueda. For our craft we used our die cut machine to make paper dolls with interchangeable outfits.

Since we had talked about colors last week, we played a super fun I-Spy game I remember from my childhood about the clothes that everyone had on AND what colors they were. It goes like this:
Red, red is the color I see
If you’re wearing red, then show it to me!
Stand up, take a bow, turn around
Then sit back down right on the ground!
(Additional colors: blue, black, brown, purple, pink, white)

Of course, we always have our traditional Silly Dance Contest from the CD Jim Gill Sings the Sneezing Song and Other Contagious Tunes as well as play time at the end of our craft.

I hope you can join us next time!