Turkey Time

After reading a few Thanksgiving stories at this week's Thursday Storytime, kids used a paper plate and lots of different materials and shapes to make a unique turkey to take home for the holiday! Gobble-gobble!

A Brand New Year!

At our last Storytime of 2021, we read award winning books from the past year, like There Are No Bears in This Bakery, which won the NH Ladybug Award, and We Are Water Protectors, which won the American Library Associations Caldecott Award. We made headband hats to wear for New Year's Eve, with sparkly stars and the numbers for the new year - 2022 - chosen from lots and lots of different styles of 2 made with different fonts. 

Happy New Year!

November Saturday

 Lots of fun at the library today as kids and families dropped in to decorate leaves as place cards for their Thanksgiving tables. Won't relatives and friends be surprised to see their names displayed so beautifully? Such variety and imagination shown today - and fun! Happy Thanksgiving!

Spoooky Saturday!!!

On this day before Halloween we had some time for a drop-in craft at the library. Kids and adults came when they could to make ghosts or goblins from several different types of paper. Tomorrow night, these spoooky creations will be dancing wildly in the Halloween wind! 

    

Groundhog Day: Books, Craft, and Shadow Art!

It's February! Will Groundhog see his shadow? We have groundhog books and a groundhog craft kit for your children available Curbside. Call or email for a kit to make your groundhog puppets. Add your own flashlight for some Groundhog shadow fun! And speaking of shadows, there are some really neat ideas for shadow art at this website....easy to do with a lamp and some toys. I bet kids would love it - check it out! 

Look! A happy young patron!! Thank you for the photo!

The Mole Family's Christmas

A Pirate Christmas

I love this book. The illustrations are so detailed and clever. If you get a chance, borrow it and read it to your kids up close. Very sorry about the orientation of the camera...try to view it at full screen. 

If some child knows the answer to the question I pose about halfway through the story, could you post it in the comments, please? 😉Thanks.

Christmas Tree Craft

For this week's take-home craft, we’re making a simple two-sided Christmas tree decoration. There are three steps to this craft - covering a cardboard triangle with foil, collaging over the foil with tissue paper, and finally bedazzling the tree with jewels and sequins. Your child will need glue, scissors, crayons, and some patience (or help!) turning a gold disc into a tree topper. Directions and all the materials are included in this week's take-home craft kit. Give us a call or email to let us know how many kits you'd like to pick up curbside. Quantities are limited! That said, we have a couple of Advent calendar chain kits left from last week - and we even have a leftover moose kit if you'd like to make a Christmoose! 🤣

Let us know too if you'd like some holiday books - we have lots!

December Holidays!

Does your family celebrate a big holiday in December?  There are lots of special days!  Hanukkah starts December 10th, Las Posadas begins December 16th, Christmas is December 25th, and Kwanza starts December 26. The Yule, or the Winter Solstice (the longest night of the year!) is December 21st. And there are more! This week’s craft will help your child see the number of days left until your family's BIG DAY!

Kids connect lots of colorful or sparkly loops, with one for every day of December leading up to your holiday. Each day, they remove the bottom loop. When the loops are gone, it's time to celebrate!

Contact the library for your kit(s), available to pick up from the Curbside Bin. December starts tomorrow!! 

Read Aloud: The Ugly Pumpkin

 I just love this book. Every year when I read it, I laugh all over again. It's pretty short - I hope you and your children like it, too. Post a comment, and let me know your family's reaction.

Thanksgiving Dinner

Even though Thanksgiving this year will not be our traditional celebration, I'm trying to find ways to make it a memorable one for my family. This week's craft is a way for your child to take part in the planning and preparation of your special day by making place cards for each person at your table. Craft bags this week contain cut-out white cardstock oak leaf shapes, tiny paper leaves, stickers, and stick-on gems. All your child needs is crayons, markers, or paints, a glue stick, and imagination! Give the library a call or email us so we'll know how many leaves you need in your child's craft bag. We'll gather them up, get back in touch with you, and we'll leave the kits for you at our Curbside location.  We also have several craft bags left from last week if kids in your house would like to make a turkey!

Maybe your child would like to help with food preparation. Here are a few websites with easy recipes for kids - there are lots more online!

Two Ingredient Cream Biscuits: https://addapinch.com/two-ingredient-cream-biscuit-recipe/#axzz30oMVd89O

Apple Pie Bites (I'm going to make these myself!)

https://theblondcook.com/apple-pie-bites/print/18012/#respond

Pumpkin Spice Chex Mix

https://thenovicechefblog.com/wp-json/mv-create/v1/creations/409/print

Calls for a bag of Candy Corn or Harvest Mix but I bet you don’t need it. 

Butter!

My favorite thing to make with kids is butter! Heavy cream in a jar, shaken vigorously for several minutes. Just past the whipped cream(!) stage, the cream will separate into a lump of butter and a bit of buttermilk. Take out the lump, mix in a little salt, and put it in a small bowl on your table. Believe me, your child will be so proud when that butter is passed for rolls, potatoes, etc. If you need a recipe, there's one here: https://buggyandbuddy.com/make-butter/

Want a read-aloud story with a recipe to follow? We have several in the Children's Room! 

Pancakes pancakes by Eric Carle, with a recipe for pancakes. 

Cranberry Thanksgiving by Harry Devlin and Wende Devlin featuring "Grandmother's Famous Cranberry Bread" 

Amelia Bedelia’s first apple pie has a recipe for apple pie. 

Bear and chicken - make "Bear’s vegetable soup"

The Mitten, with a recipe for Grandma’s delicious hot cocoa.

The gingerbread man, with a recipe for gingerbread cookies!

Pumpkin Soup!: with a recipe for that! 

Soup Day: make delicious "Snowy day vegetable soup" 

And we have two books with pie recipes...

How to make a cherry pie and see the USA

How to make an apple pie and see the world

This year, I am thankful that our community is supporting the library and each other. I'm thankful that kids have resources and adults who are committed to helping them grow and learn in and outside of school. I'm thankful that there is hope for a time when we can all be together again as we were before.

Have a safe and a memorable holiday with your family.

Curbside Service is for Kids, Too!

We've been doing Curbside Service at the Gordon-Nash for a few weeks now and patrons have been checking out books and other library materials. I've had a few requests for children's books and am always so excited to fill them! The new children's areas are just about organized so it's easy for any of us to find books that are requested. And kids can borrow books, too!

So - Halloween's coming later this week! How about a nice spooky book? Here are just a few popular titles - and an opportunity for a take-home craft for kids! 

Bone dog by Eric Rohmann 

Although devastated when his pet dog dies, a young boy goes trick-or-treating and receives a timely visit from an old friend during a scary encounter with graveyard skeletons.

Click, clack, boo! : a tricky treat by Doreen Cronin
Farmer Brown does not like Halloween, but the animals hold a Halloween party in his barn.

Creepy pair of underwear! by Aaron Reynolds

A young rabbit is frightened by his underwear...!

The fierce yellow pumpkin by Margaret Wise Brown 
A little pumpkin dreams of the day when he will be a big, fierce, yellow pumpkin who frightens away the field mice as the scarecrow does.

Halloween Motel by Sean Diviny

When a family mistakenly checks into the wrong motel for Halloween, they do not realize just how scary the other guests are.

Halloween hustle by Charlotte Gunnufson

Skeleton is dancing his way to a Halloween party, but as he grooves across town, he keeps stumbling, tumbling, and falling apart.

John Pig's Halloween by Jan Waldron
Too scared to go trick-or-treating, John Pig stays home on Halloween and has an unplanned party with some unexpected, monstrous guests.

Pete the cat: Five Little Pumpkins by James Dean

Pete the Cat takes on the classic favorite children's song "Five Little Pumpkins" in New York Times bestselling author James Dean's Pete the Cat: Five Little Pumpkins. Join Pete as he rocks out to this cool adaptation of the classic Halloween song!

Ladybug Girl and the dress-up dilemma by David Soman

"It is Halloween and Lulu doesn't know if she should dress as Ladybug Girl or find a different costume for the special day."

The legend of Spookley the square pumpkin by Joe Troiano

Spookley is ridiculed for his odd shape until his uniqueness saves the day.

The too-scary story by Bethanie Deeney Murguia
At bedtime, their father tells Grace and Walter a scary story about two children in a dark forest.

Room on the broom by Julia Donaldson
A witch finds room on her broom for all the animals that ask for a ride, and they repay her kindness by rescuing her from a dragon.

Mercy Watson : princess in disguise by Kate DiCamillo
Persuaded by the word "treating" to dress up as a princess for Halloween, Mercy the pig's trick-or-treat outing has some very unexpected results

Pumpkin Hill by Elizabeth Spurr

The townspeople must decide what to do with thousands of pumpkins that roll down a hill and into their midst just before Halloween.

I've made up a limited number of Halloween craft bags, with materials and instructions for making a simple Pumpkin Person to hang at your house. Kids just need crayons, scissors, and glue - all other materials are provided. If you'd like a take-home craft bag, just let us know how many when you request your books. 

To request library materials, call the library (603-677-3740) or email (library@newhampton.org). We'll fill your requests, get back to you to confirm, and then deliver them to the large bin by the downstairs back door so you can pick them up. If you want to learn how to use the library's online catalog to search for and request books, there's a short video on the library's website that shows how that's done (https://gordonnashlibrary.org/). Pretty easy! Hope we hear from you soon!

STEM Saturday: "Gingerbread" Houses

Our final Saturday program of the year featured our traditional GNL holiday event of building "gingerbread" houses. As we have in the past, families used graham crackers to cover the milk carton bases and embellished the houses with edible decorations like cereal and candy.

We even had some impromptu "sandwich" making! Yum!

Christmas Storytime

Our Christmas books for Storytime were Grumpy Badger's Christmas by Paul Bright and Bear Stays Up for Christmas by Karma Wilson. In both stories, lots of woodland animals were getting ready for Christmas!

Our craft was the traditional Gordon-Nash Library Christmas one - an ornament to fill with our choices of some of the shiny and colorful materials we've used this year in our Storytime crafts! We added a glittery gold or silver pipe cleaner hanger and a tag with our names and the date Christmas 2019.

Mine looks beautiful hanging on my Christmas tree - I trust the others do as well!

#BuildtoGive

This December in LEGO Club, Mr. Dowal and I challenged kids to make a MOC that would help to give bricks to children who might not necessarily have any. Through a promotion by the folks at LEGO.com, for each MOC photo posted on social media, a LEGO set will be delivered to a child in need somewhere in the world. Our LEGO Club kids made the Christmas ornaments and scenes posted here with the hashtag #BuildtoGive. MOCs will be on display at the library until mid-January.