A Snowy Day!

We all love snow, and today we read about it. One Mitten by Kristine O'Connell George first told about all the things you could do with just one mitten, then what might happen with two mittens. The Mitten by Jim Aylesworth was the tale of a child who loses a mitten in the snow and the animals who found it! Holly's Red Boots by Francesca Chessa was a fun book about a girl looking for a missing boot! 

After stories, we made snowflakes from flattened coffee filters. Parents folded them and children practiced their cutting skills.

Then we decorated the snowflakes with markers, and dripped water from a q-tip onto the colors. The colors spread and mixed and looked beautiful!

See?

We took these home to hang them up - and left some to hang in the library, too!

Penguin Fun

For a cold winter's day in January...penguins!! A few funny penguin books...

and a paper penguin craft!

with an added fish - for lunch! Yum!

Snow Globe Snowmen

Do you want to build a snowman? We did at Storytime today, after we read a few stories about snowmen and snow! We began with a new book, If Snowflakes Tasted Like Fruitcake by Stacy Previn, a beautiful rhyming book about what would happen if snowflakes tasted like things like cocoa, gumdrops, fig plums, and marshmallows. Then we read First Snow by Bomi Park, another beautiful new book about a little girl who awoke in the night and went outside to build a snowman. We loved Snowmen at Night by Caralyn Buehner, and laughed at all the fun things that snowmen did while their creators were sleeping. We finished with a favorite, Perfect Soup by Lisa Moser, about Murray, a mouse who bartered creatively to get the missing ingredient to make his favorite soup.

Using a blue paper plate as a base, we made a snowy scene, with cotton "snow" on the ground, a fancy dressed snowman, and evergreen trees. When the scene was complete, we sprinkled it with a handful of fake "snow", then glued it underneath an inverted clear plastic plate. We shook the blue plate, and it looked like it was snowing on our beautiful winter scene!

Crazy 8s: Super Cube Shuffle

Yesterday at the NHCS Afterschool Program, the Crazy 8s Club members worked with concepts of pattern and bilateral and rotational symmetry as they first made their own designs with "super cubes", then duplicated patterns given.

Sometimes tricky, always fun!

S.T.E.M. Saturday: Marble Runs

Our recent S.T.E.M. Saturday had young engineers building marble runs from all sorts of tubes and containers. There was lots of problem-solving, perseverance and fun! Click pictures to see all the detail!

Crazy 8s Club: Glow-in-the-Dark City

We had fun this week at the NHCS Afterschool Program, working with glow sticks and styrofoam balls to build polygons and polyhedrons. We attached many together to build intricate structures and discovered which were best for support as well as esthetics.  

It was so much fun to work in the dark!

Happy Birthdays!

With the start of the new year, we look forward to repeating all the fun, memorable times that happen annually - another Spring, another Summer, another Fourth of July, another BIRTHDAY! Today we read about birthdays, since we all have one coming!

Our books were The Birthday Box by Leslie Patricelli which told about a child getting the best kind of present! Pip and Squeak by
Ian Schoenherr told about two mice friends bringing a present of cheese to their friend. And Happy Birthday, Jesse Bear! by Nancy White Carlstrom was about a Jesse Bear and all the events surrounding his special day.

So we will be ready when our birthdays come this year, we all made birthday crowns from a paper plate. The center was cut into points, and then the whole crown was decorated with markers, stickers, sequins, and stars. Beautiful...and we are all ready for our birthdays to come!