Storytime Love

For a little while, I feel like I've been struggling to get the older of the preschool aged children who come to Storytimes (or Grow a Reader with your Library Classses) at CRRL to actually participate. I usually do action rhymes that encourage child participation, but don't require it. Today at Preschool Time, the Grow a Reader class aimed to 3-5 year olds at CRRL, I tried something new (to me).

I recently requested that the staff get a copy of the book Cooking Up a Storytime: Mix-and-Match Menus for Easy Programming by Susan Anderson-Newham  so that we could look at new ideas for some of our programs and I am so very glad I did! I won't share the rhymes I used today, but I will tell you about them, and I highly recommend that if you work with kids, even as a teacher, you get this book! It has awesome ways to integrate science and math into storytimes also!

Anyway so I read four books, two of which I KNEW I loved to read, the others were new to storytime titles for me.


I Like Myself by Karen Beaumont
I absolutely love this book, and in some ways I think it's because it reminds me of Dr. Seuss. In this story, the young girl says how much she loves herself, no matter how many odd looks she gets, and says how what is important is on the inside. She goes on to say that she would like herself with purple polka-dotted lips, spikes, and porcupine hair, ending with saying I like myself because I'm me. 




I Ain't Gonna Paint No More by Karen Beaumont and David Catrow
This is another one that the entire Youth Services staff likes so much we have it in our special storytime collection so that we always have a copy checked in. It is a re-imagining of the classic silly song "It ain't gonna rain no more" and the kids LOVE it. Usually I just read/sing it, but today each time I got to the part that rhymed with the body part I paused and asked the kids what body part rhymed with that word. They did wonderful on this! The only one was what rhymed with "black"- the parents only had to help occasionally.

Again! by Emily Gravett
This was a new storytime addition for me, and I wasn't sure how it would go over, but I read through it and loved it so I figured I would give it a shot. Again! is all about a young dragon who is being read a bedtime story about a dragon who never, ever goes to bed. When his Mom finishes he yells "again" until eventually she falls asleep... and you'll just have to check out this book if you want to know what happens (but it's cute).


Open Very Carefully: A Book with Bite  by Nick Bromley and Nicola O'Bryne
This was my last book and was also new to storytime for me. I found it when looking for another book and knew I just HAD to use it- partially because it reminded me of the book There's a Monster at the end of this book. In it the ugly duckling is trying to tell it's story when he notices that there is someone in the book who doesn't belong and the rest of the story focuses on the Ugly Duckling's visitor and trying to get him out of the book. This is another one that was a lot of fun and the kids really seemed to enjoy.


Usually when I read stories in storytime I'm sitting down but today I tried it standing up and I felt like the kids had an easier time getting involved in the stories, so for Preschool Time and Alphabet Soup I might start doing that every time.

While I was pretty darn excited with how the books were received I was more excited about the songs and activities I did. Usually my storytimes consist of action rhymes that encourage movement but don't encourage participation and when I try to get the kids to participate they just don't. I decided for my storytime today that just wasn't going to work. All but one of my songs required the kids to give me words in order to continue the song. The songs I did focused on actions- so I asked the kids to provide me with some actions that they were able to do- and they did (with a little encouragement from their parents and caregivers). The next song/rhyme was about feelings and what feelings we have and what they look like. So we said the rhyme and I asked for some feelings and asked the kids to act them out. Some of the kids loved this, some were less interested, but I got better interaction than normal. The final song/rhyme that we did was about a dog and how the dog needed things to be happy. I gave the kids one example (a bone) and asked them to supply the other 5 items. It was really fun seeing what the kids came up with that would make a dog happy- all of them were very common, food, water, a nap, but my favorite was a mud bath. All dogs, LOVE mud baths. :-)

For the final activity, I usually put on music, give streamer wands or blow bubbles and encourage the kids to dance. However, I have noticed that most of the kids just don't want to dance so I used and idea from Cooking Up a Storytime: Mix-and-Match Menus for Easy Programming by Susan Anderson-Newham . I got some easy animal riddles from the book, requested puppets that matched the answers from another branch, and encouraged the kids to figure out the answers. I thought that they would struggle with this and I was SO VERY WRONG. Most of the kids were able to figure out the animals before we even finished reading the riddle. I think having the puppets representing the animals helped. Next time I think I will include some other animals that might match the riddle to throw a bit more of a challenge in there.

After storytime was done the kids were obviously very excited and had high energy. One of the answers to the riddles was Crocodile so some kids were chasing each other around snapping their hands together saying they were an alligator. This was a very fun program for me to do and I think it was very successful and I can't wait to begin working on changing up all my other ones (except Mother Goose- ages 0-2- that one the babies almost always laugh so I think it's fine).

My Grandfather's Trunk

For as long as I've had my own place I've wanted a trunk that could be used as a coffee table, but I haven't wanted to spend the money on one. Well, in the course of cleaning out my grandparent's basement so that my Grandma can move into a smaller place we discovered not one, but TWO trunks. We haven't brought the second one home yet, but we have the first one.

However, it wasn't really in coffee table shape since it had been sitting in their basement for who-knows-how-long. The lining on the inside was so fragile it was cracking and peeling. The hardware that keeps the lid from falling backwards has also broken, so we have to open the lid very carefully.

The outside of the trunk was also extremely beat up. The coloring on some of the leather is gone, the bottom is completely scratched up, and because he was using it as storage, my Grandfather scribbled out some of the previous labels, and also wrote on it (it is also possible that the military wrote on the trunk, it is hard to tell). I tried for a couple days to get the permanent marker off with no success. Luckily, I have a very smart husband who has some really good ideas. He suggested that we use bumper stickers and postcards to cover up some of the damage and marker scribbles. So that is what I did.
I cleaned the outside with some baby wipes. Then I got some out some of the postcards we had from my husband's Grandmother, and got more postcards and some bumper stickers from my Dad. We also went a head and got a few stickers and postcards from the National Museum of the Marine Corps to include since my Grandfather was very involved in the museum. I started out attaching the postcards with a spray adhesive, but apparently I was not paying much attention the day I bought it because it was not a permanent adhesive. So I decided to just go back to my roots, and I used good old Elmer's Glue to attach the postcards and the older of the bumper stickers. I let them dry for a couple days then Shellac-ed the living daylights out of the trunk to help protect it from the dogs. I also pulled off some of the more damaged of the liner and covered it with contact paper. Eventually I might fully rip out the lining and do something nicer, but I like the contact paper solution for now. So now it looks like this!

Most of the postcards came from my hubby's grandma. The majority of the bumper stickers came from my Dad, and most of them are older than I am.

I'm looking forward to doing the next trunk, but I have definitely learned some things from this project.

1. Next time, I will glue the postcards on, cover them with wax paper and put heavy books on top to make sure the postcards and bumper stickers dry flat. No bubbles or curling edges.

2. Whenever using shellac, use the cheap foam brushes that you can just dispose of when you are done because Shellac is REALLY hard to get out of paint brushes. I ended up just tossing the brushes because I got frustrated trying to clean them .

I will post about the next trunk as well!

Corner Cabinet Woes

Every now and then I focus on one project and I HAVE to do it, right away. This past weekend it was the corner cabinet in our kitchen. It is one that has a lazy susan and two shelves. Well it had two shelves and was a lazy susan. It isn't that way anymore.

<---This is what we had. Since we moved in I've been moving things around trying to figure out what I could store in this cabinet to make the best possible use of space. We started out storing our Tuperware here. It worked, but wasn't great. We found that we would just throw it in the cabinet instead of keeping it organized so the cabinet would get jammed with the Tuperware instead of turning easily. So next we tried our small appliances. That didn't work well either, most of them were still too big to really fit without scraping against the side of the cabinet. So we put the Tuperware back. We couldn't really switch the style of storage because the cabinet itself is rounded and I'm in no way comfortable with the idea of cutting that rounding out since I have no idea what the rest of the cabinet looks like behind it. Maybe we'll look into it eventually but not this time.


Well last weekend we decided that we were going to take advantage of the bar-stools that my Uncle and Grandmother offered us, but that meant we needed a new home for the trash can and the recycling. We've been having to move them into the bathroom every time we leave so Nico "Destructo Dog" doesn't get recycling and trash all over the house and make himself sick. I started thinking, "Wouldn't it be awesome if we could put them in the corner cabinet." So I started looking into it. First, I checked to see if the top shelf could come out without losing the support for the door. It couldn't. Then, I looked to see if we could take out that top shelf and rig some sort of support that would work for now. That was a no go. Finally, I decided to check to see would it work AT ALL if I just took out the lazy Susan and the shelves and attached the door like a normal cabinet. Well, it works. It isn't perfect, and we will need to replace the doors with something that actually works well whenever we decide what we're going to do with the cabinets (raise them?, add shelves?, paint them? etc). For now, this works and the Destructo Dog hasn't figured out how to get in there, or has lost interest because he can't smell it as easily, who knows. But so far, so good. This is what it ended up looking like :

This is how it looks open. I plan on making the "recycle" and "trash" labels a bit more fun later on, but that is a different topic. You can see that the door is still at an angle when you open it. That's because it is glued that way and at this point I don't feel like messing with that. I got some basic utility hinges and attached them to the frame, and then the door. It took 2 tries to find a good spot for them on the door, but since I don't see us keeping these actual doors later on, I wasn't worried about it, and the mistake holes were on the inside :-) I also got the wrong type of hinges at first. So I ended up running back out to Home Depot to get the right ones.

 Note: In this case, simple was better- I tried the fancy hinges first.

With the door shut this is how the corner cabinet looks. Now, you can probably see that it is sitting at an angle. My guess is that this has to do with the weight of the door and the fact that the door is a 90 degree angle so it just doesn't lay right. You might also notice that it doesn't sit all the way in the cabinet at the moment. It can close all the way, it is just harder to open, so a temporary handle is probably in the future. I thought about rigging one, but then I'm pretty sure Destructo Dog could open it. Once I attach a handle, I might look at one of those magnet latches to see if that evens out the door for the time being.



So there you have it. The project I thought of over the weekend and just HAD to do, and I love it- it is so handy and I don't spend all day worrying about the trash and my Tuperware stays nice and organized in its new home!