Here’s the program we presented at my library, to the best of my recollection:

Little Blue and Little Yellow by Leo Lionni
We just did a straight up reading of this classic, which I love, love, love. Best not dwell too long on how they hugged so much they became green; that could become an awkward conversation. Sometimes I’ll ask the kids if they’ve ever been so sad that they cried themselves to pieces. I tell them I hope they never do.

Mouse Paint by Ellen Stoll Walsh, with special guest the mouse
I brought in my own personal white mouse puppet to introduce this book. As we read the story we draped him in the appropriately colored scarves. It was pretty interpretive puppet dance-tastic.

Make a Rainbow (fruit salad flannel board).
See the pictures below. Our “pot” kind of looks like a robot, so of course I made it talk in a robot voice, demanding fruit.

Make a Rainbow
(some good soul who typed out our copy made this poem all grammatical by using “have”, but the rhyme demands that you use “got.” Usually I am a grammar stickler, but poetry takes precedence, and colloquial usage is near and dear to my heart, so please, got it up here. Although the last line doesn’t rhyme with anything, but after all that vigorous stirring, you just have to hope no one notices or cares. The robot voice helps distract from the crappy lack of rhyme as well.)

Take some cherries and put them in a pot.
Stir them, stir them, stir them a lot!
Pour them out and what do you got?
The prettiest red you have ever seen!

Repeat with: oranges, lemons, limes, blueberries, and grapes. If you can’t figure out which colors go with which fruits on your own, might I suggest another line of work?

Pinkalicious!
Ah, the book we’d all been waiting for. This book was a hit with everyone.

“Sunshine, lollipops and rainbows” with shakers! (dance party)
We handed out shakers to the kids, put on this song, and busted a move. If you don’t dance in your storytimes, might I ask why you hate having fun?

And that’s it!

I use this alligator to eat the monkeys from our monkey mitt during the song “Five Little Monkeys Swinging In The Tree”, which is really just Battle Royale/Hunger Games for toddlers and preschoolers. The old alligator was able to adeptly “spit out” each monkey after eating, contributing to the ruse that he was snapping those monkeys right out of that tree.

The new puppet, however, must have a more felt-y, less plush mouth, because with him, the monkeys stick. In his mouth. Between his teeth.

Oh, the hysterical laughter. The squealing. The joy tinged with bloodlust.

I could have freaked out that something went wrong. I could have stopped in my tracks because something was different. Instead, I made a joke, went with it, and ended up with an even better performance than usual.

You never know unless you try.

The full body puppet, by the great people at Folkmanis.

Watercolor "character"

For the second stage of our Eric Carle Art Adventure, we used watercolors on heavy paper. I gave kids the choice to draw something first, or just paint and draw and cut out a creature next week. Most of the kids just went ahead and painted. We talked a bit about how the watercolors were different than the acrylic paints that we used for the backgrounds.

Next time, they’ll add details with colored pencils and cut out their characters.

Themes have included Frog and Toad Tea Party, Colorlicious (a more gender-neutral Pinkalicious program), Winter Wonderland, Shark Versus Train, Hot Dogs (there are so many encased meat picture books, you guys), and many more. I’m going to write up all the materials for the individual programs, but for now here’s a sampling from them to show you how we do:

Colorlicious Tea Party

Frog and Toad Tea Party

You can see more videos from these programs on my youtube channel as well.

My love of A Wrinkle In Time has been documented before on this blog, and because I love it so much, it is one of those books that I can’t share lightly, and I have to be careful not to put it in the hands of a reader who isn’t ready for it. Usually when I suggest books to kids, it doesn’t hurt my feelings if they decide they don’t want it, but if a kid were to reject Wrinkle, I’d be ineffably sad. (I was recently talking with a parent whose daughter was reading A Wrinkle In Time for a school assignment, and struggling with reading it. I wasn’t sure what to tell her. Every book its reader, and every reader its book; perhaps, sad though it sounds, she just wasn’t one of this book’s many and ardent readers.)

But I have to do something to celebrate this book’s 50th anniversary, so I’m going to throw a big book party. I’m looking to have an event in the fall, maybe October or November, so that the chance of somewhat dark and stormy weather will be increased. I’m thinking this will definitely be a family/all ages event, because I am sure there are some parents and grandparents out there who have some warm feelings about this book.

There will definitely have to be a buffet of all of the different kinds of sandwiches that the Murrays eat in the beginning of the book, and some hot chocolate. I also think having my fellow librarians and volunteers dress in costume as various characters would add a lot of fun to the event.

I want to booktalk Wrinkle and a bunch of L’Engle’s other books, and of course read aloud that first amazing chapter. We could also tie in When You Reach Me, which, as a contemporary Newbery winner, might pull in additional readers to the story. We’ll also booktalk other great fantasy and science fiction titles for kids.

How will you be celebrating the anniversary of this wonderful book?

My other posts about Wrinkle: It was a Dark and Stormy Night and How it All Began.

Read what other bloggers are saying about A Wrinkle in Time.

Yet, I am not completely insane. The program was popular and well-attended, and people looked forward to it. I didn’t want to sabotage that. So what could I do?

I decided to tweak. (Not like a meth head. As in, to fine-tune or adjust a complex system. Because, yo, storytime is a complex system if ever I saw one.) I would keep the name, the day, the time, and the basic format–but this time around, the literacy activities would be replaced by art activities. Which, when you think about it, are literacy activities. There’s a rich, fun vocabulary in the art word: brush; stroke; acrylic; watercolor; collage; paste. Using a paint brush or colored pencil to draw develops the same fine motor skills that one uses when writing. And, of course, we began each sessions by reading aloud a  picture book with beautiful art  to serve as inspiration for our own art projects, specifically the collage technique of one Eric Carle. Perhaps you’ve heard of him.

This is a five week series. Week one we talked about the project and I gave everyone time to peruse Eric Carle’s books and other picture books that use collage. The second week we painted our backgrounds onto our very own canvases (foam board from the craft store). I’ll talk about the next steps in further posts.

How about you? Do you use art in your storytimes–art, rather than just a craft? Do you ever get BORED?

Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Syndey Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 8,900 times in 2011. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 3 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

Looking at my top posts, I realize that people love it when I write about things that a lot of librarians are probably thinking but are too scared to talk about, and my programs for children. I’m going to make an effort to write more about these topics in 2012, and also write more from the gut and the heart, no matter what the topic (my angsty review of Ingenue being an example of this new goal).

Thank you to all my readers for commenting, emailing my posts to your colleagues, and generally being awesome. Let’s do more of this in 2012.

top posts (excluding static pages):

11. Meow Mix. I think this is solely because of the cat picture, although I think my cat who doesn’t know how to meow storytime through line is pretty awesome.

10. Make it Happen: Teen Space. Pretty much an airing of grievances post that also allowed me to congratulate and laud a fellow librarian. Now complete with a comment I didn’t initially approve because it’s super negative, but hey, whatevs. Different strokes for different folks.

9. New Storytime Favorites. Why is this so popular? I dunno. Probably because I mention cats and I’m a librarian. The cat/librarian diagram is so venn it’s almost just a circle.

8. Tales of the Madman Underground: A Love Letter. This was a very personal post and book review, and I almost didn’t publish it. But this book is amazing and I think that librarians—much like teachers—need to fight for the right to be real, flawed, human people with pasts and problems like any other people. Just because we work with children doesn’t mean we’re all Mary Poppins, and we shouldn’t be punished for being real people. But seriously, read that book.

7. The Ethical Librarian. This one is me totally ranting and raving on my high horse while my horse is standing on a soapbox. You might as well call me the Bughouse Square librarian. I took an information ethics class in library school, one of the few actually challenging courses I took, and it ruined me forever. You’re welcome.

6. #makeitbetter. I just hate bad librarians. Sorry if you’re one of them.

5. You might not being doing it wrong, but you could certainly do it better. Ah, my screed against library schools. I might not get so worked up if I weren’t $50,000 in debt, but that ship’s sailed, huh? Good times. And by good times I mean kill me.

4. Librarian, Weed Thyself! Wherein I apply the CREW and MUSTIE methods to people. I am a monster. A pudgy, cuddly, hyberpolic monster.

3. Beginning Reader Storytime. A warm and fuzzy post about how I revamped my library’s preschool storytime. How…charming.

2. How to Become the Best, Most Versatile Baby & Toddler Programmer Ever. Babies and toddlers are tricky audiences.

And, unsurprisingly, the number one post of 2011 is…

1.  Summer Reading, Pain in my a**. So many people enjoyed my rants about the sacred cow of summer reading, which really pleased me. I love when people reassess long running programs with a fresh eye. Can’t wait to see what people do with their 2012 summer reading programs.

Happy new year, everyone!

Love,

Miss Julie

I really want to like these books. I love jazz, I love the flapper era, and I like historical fiction–but Larkin drops the ball several times. With more research, editing, and commitment to the time period, this series could really be something special, but as it stands it’s a missed opportunity.

“Black” is not the term that is most historically accurate, yet it’s the one that Larkin uses exclusively. “Colored” or “Negro” or even “Nigger” would have been used more than “black”. If you’re going to write about a period in history, you’re going to have to use the vocabulary of the time. Using popular slang while avoiding the uncomfortable terms makes me feel like the author is lacking in bravery. Further, having all the white girls in this novel capable of commenting on the handsomeness of the black characters doesn’t ring true. Racism is an ugly facet of American history that I think you have to acknowledge when you’re writing historical fiction. I also think that the Mann Act would have come up somehow in regards to Gloria and Jerome, but it never did. The issue of race is talked about a lot, but we never really see it portrayed in an effective way.

In this installment, we meet Louis Armstrong, and are told he has the nickname Dippermouth because he chews tobacco. I’ve read a lot about Louis Armstrong, and everything I’ve seen indicates that Dippermouth is one of his nicknames because he loved the song “Dippermouth Blues”. His more common nickname was Satchelmouth, which came about because of his wide satchel like mouth (or because he hid money in his mouth as a child, reports vary), and it was often shorted to Satchmo. Louis Armstrong has a very unique voice and way of speaking, and with a little research this could come across even in a brief appearance–yet Larkin has Louis sounding just like the four teenage girls who are the focus of the novel.

People who aren’t as interested in jazz and this time period probably won’t have as many problems with this series as I do, even with the weak writing.

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I love this cover, which is just one of many wonderful middle grade covers that have been appearing lately. So much better than the severed heads and badly photoshopped models that YA covers have been suffering from. I love a book cover that tells you about the book you’re about to read. The anxious expression on the girl’s face is perfect, and the perspective of peering out from the bread box is intriguing and hints at the slightly strange, magical realism of the story.

Laurel Snyder’s books are a joy to read. Snyder’s writing is clean, crisp, and entirely in service of the story; I never feel like the story has wandered off topic or led me astray as a reader. Her characters are consistently real without being boring, and the interplay of family dynamics in this story especially ring true.

You could hand this book to kids who enjoy gentle fantasy, or to parents who are seeking a read-aloud with a character building message. You could also tuck it inside a vintage bread box for a unique gift this holiday season.

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