After-School Club: 3-D Papercrafts

Missed a couple of weeks of the after-school club, thanks to illness and school vacations, but we're back at it now!

I still wasn't feeling too hot this week,  so I didn't have a chance to plan my own craft, but I found some fun downloadable stuff online. If you check out this page on HP's site, they have lots of cool printable 3-D papercrafts; we used the How to Train Your Dragon and Madagascar characters. Very cool!

Disney's Family.com also has some neat papercrafts, like this cute Rapunzel from Tangled:

 

They're pretty time-intensive, so I recommend doing these with older kids, or younger kids with good scissor skills and patience.

We also used an adorable idea for owl collages from B.D. Designs, which I saw on Craftster.org. Thanks for the inspiration! Here's one of B.D. Designs' fantastic collages, to give you an idea of how neat these are:

Owl Collage by B.D. Designs

We didn't manage to finish any of these, either, or I'd post a pic of a finished product...but we had a lot of fun anyway! Plus the kids finally decided on a name for the club, and it's so cute: from now on, it's Monday Fundays!

Finally, I also booktalked a really great title, When You Reach Me. Of course, if you're into children's books, you've heard of it already -- it only won the Newbery Medal! But I actually hadn't read it till recently (bad librarian! No skipping Newbery winners, no!), and I wanted to promote it to the kids, since it's not like kids are exactly running out to grab Newbery winners on their own, necessarily... Anyway, it's a great book, and since the kids had recently been talking about A Wrinkle in Time, it seemed like the perfect time to tell them about this one.

Check back later this week for a Preschool Storytime post!

Barnyard Animals storytime

Another fun Preschool Storytime wrapped up... Nothing beats this age range for enthusiasm - they act like you just threw the best party ever no matter what you do!

Our theme was Barnyard Animals. I'm not actually wild about using themes, and this was a good example of why not. I was trying so hard to fit the theme that I ended up with some books that I wouldn't normally have used. It's not always easy to find five or six books on a topic in our small collection, so I went with a couple I wasn't so sure about because I couldn't come up with anything else that fit the theme - and they definitely weren't the biggest hits. I should've gone with my gut!

So, anyway, here's the "setlist", and commentary on what worked and what didn't...

Wait...what did I do last week again?

That's the question I'm always asking myself at my new job as the youth services librarian at a small public library. I'm very scrupulous about writing down what I do at my programs for kids every week.

Unfortunately, I write these meticulous records on whatever notepaper or post-it or old sock or what-have-you comes to hand first, and then when I want to remember something from a few weeks ago I never seem to be able to find the relevant sock. It's impossible for me to remember programs from up to seven whole days ago without notes! (The new-job stress isn't exactly doing my memory any favors.)

So anyway, I thought as long as I was REALLY, seriously going to start keeping records of what I do all in one place, I might as well make it into a blog to tell people about all the cool stuff that's been going on here at the library.

I have lots of stuff up my newly-minted children's librarian sleeve, like kid-tested, mother-approved craft ideas and storytime themes, craft templates, fun photos from our library programs, book reviews and recommendations, and lots more neat things to share. Stop by again soon!

After-School Club: Salt Paintings

Last week at our library's after-school club we did a neat project that only requires thick-ish white paper or watercolor paper (card stock works--anything at least a little thicker than printer paper), white glue, salt, a 9x12 baking dish, watercolors, and paintbrushes. The kids really seemed to enjoy the weirdness of sprinkling salt all over glue and observing what the paint does with this mixture. They even wanted to do it again this week!

Here are our finished works of art adorning the wall of the kids' room:

Salt Painting Instructions:

-drizzle glue on a piece of thick paper to create a design--can be a picture or just abstract shapes, but thicker glue will spread, so keep lines fairly thin unless you don't mind the glue running together.

-lay the sheet of paper in the baking dish and sprinkle it with salt. Tap off the excess salt.

-paint into the salt-covered glue lines (nope, the glue doesn't need to dry!). The salt makes the paint spread in interesting ways, creating neat color-blending effects and cool patterns. This is especially noticeable once the paintings are totally dry (at least 24 hours) and all the extra salt can be rubbed off of the glue lines.

-it's as easy as that! Have fun experimenting with different effects--you can either keep the paint neatly on the glue lines or spread it around and just pool up around the glue.