Bring the family to the Union Twp. Branch on Tuesday, February 5 at 6:45pm to learn about Chinese traditions while hearing stories, enjoying treats and making a special New Year’s craft. For more information or to register, call the library at 528-1744 or register online.
Join us at the Union Twp. Branch on Saturday, November 24 for our LEGO Club! We’ll supply the LEGOs, you supply the imagination. Take on our themed challenge or create freestyle. Build by yourself or with friends. Anything goes! This program is for ages 5+. We’ll have two sessions, one at 10 and another at 2.
Two of our branches, Union Twp. and Bethel, are hosting pirate themed events. Join the fun!
Arrrr you ready to learn the in’s and out’s of piracy!? Celebrate International Talk Like a Pirate Day at the Union Twp. Branch on Saturday, September 15 at 1:00 p.m.
Kids 6-11 are encouraged to come in costume. Leave your landlubber ways behind! Learn how to talk, act and think like a real pirate. Bring your parrot and wear your best pirate duds! After the program, the whole family is welcome to join us to watch a pirate movie.
Space is limited so reserve your spot by visiting the branch, calling 528-1744, or register online.
Salty dogs, if yer 4-10 years old, join us fer a pirate party at the Bethel Branch on Wednesday, September 19 when the sun’s over the yardarm at 4:00 p.m. We’ll be makin’ our own pirate flags and huntin’ for library treasure. Of course, we’ll be practicin’ our pirate talk skills! Costumes arrrre welcome, but leave yer cutlass at home!
There’s only room for a few on this ship, so visit the library, call 734-2619, or register online to be sure you get a spot.
Children’s books about pirates.
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!
This mon
th 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:
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.
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!).
“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!
Hola! 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:
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!
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!
This 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!
Join us on Tuesday, Oct. 2 at 6:45pm for Squirrel Appreciation Month! Come in your pajamas! Listen to stories about our little awesome friends. Play fun games like Pin the Tail on Scaredy Squirrel and make a squirrel craft. Register