February Events for Kids

 

LEGO Robotics

This was Week 3 of Robotics Club, hosted at the Gordon-Nash Library by New Hampton School students who are presently part of their school's Robotics program. Here's Ashley (and Ben in the background), explaining the parts of the robot to groups of New Hampton Community School students. 

Kids are learning to program the robot using Scratch on an iPad. NHS students set up simple challenges for them as they learned the program and the capabilities of their robots. 

Moving the robot from a start line to a finish. 

A race to the finish. 

Man-made (kid-made) tunnels to go through on the way to the finish line. 

We have four more weeks of Robotics! Stay tuned!

Animals in Snow - and a surprise!

 Under and Over the Snow by Kate Messner is the title of the book we read and talked about today at Storytime. It tells of the adventure a child has as she skis through the woods with her father and learns about the winter habits of the animals who live there. In the book, we found squirrels and chipmunks, mice and voles, rabbits and frogs, a fox and a bear, and many more animals!

At craft time, we took blank cardstock glued to a craft stick and decorated it to look like one of the animals in the story. After the mice and owls and other animals were finished, we played with them at our brand new table-top Puppet Theater, making their sounds as they moved over and under the cotton "snow"!

Polar Bears

This little polar bear appeared in the Children's Room on the day we were going to hear stories about polar bears! Everyone thinks that I brought it in, and I did not!

We read two books about polar bears at this week's Storytime. My favorite is A Polar Bear in the Snow by Mac Barnett because the illustrator, Shawn Harris, makes the bear appear and disappear within the pages of the book! Amazing! Check it out next time you're in the library! We also read Polar Bear Night by Lauren Thompson, about a small bear who leaves his cave at night only to witness the Northern Lights. After our craft, we read Little Dog Lost, The True Story of a Brave Dog Named Baltic by Mônica Carnesi. The children were captivated by this true story of a dog in trouble on the icy sea.

Here's our craft - polar bear shapes collaged with lots of white matter. Some glued their polar bear to white paper for snow, some to black paper for night!

Re-reading the story on her own.