The fun begins on May 30!  Stop by between 10am and 2pm to celebrate the kick-off of the Summer Reading Program. Activities will include night sky & space-themed crafts for kids, strolling magician, Rory Rennick, and astronaut & spaceship photo ops. This is just the kick-off, we are dreaming up all kinds of fun things for this summer so watch this space or browse our calendar so that you don’t miss a thing!

Have you and your child attended one of our Learning Lab programs yet? Shake up your routine at the library!  Come try out some fun toys, meet new friends, and learn new skills at this informal, parent-led program.

Think of it as playgroup with a purpose.  We like to shake things up, so activities may vary each week.  But each session will highlight a fun game or activity that teaches one of the big six early literacy skills:

• Print Motivation
• Print Awareness
• Letter Knowledge
• Phonological Awareness
• Vocabulary
• Narrative Skills

Drop in for a few minutes or stay the whole time, but please register so we know how many to expect!  Activities will be geared towards kids 2-5, but we’ll have stuff on hand to keep little sibs busy, too.

We’ll also send you home with some ideas to use on your own, like this fun take home recipe from our last program:

Attention Tweens, ages 8-11!

Monday, May 7th at 4:00pm the library will have some pretty interesting visitors! Some will slither in and some will crawl but all of them will be awesome.

• Did you know that Ohio’s state reptile is the Black Racer Snake?
• Did you know that there are over 8,000 species of reptile in the world and they live everywhere on the planet except for Antarctica (brrrr!)?
• Did you know that snakes and lizards flick their tongues to “taste” the air? It helps them smell!
• Did you know that only a few species of snakes in the US are venomous…most of them are harmless friends who eat the pests that destroy our gardens! They are one of many great creatures who are garden helpers to humans!

Come learn all about Ohio reptiles with our special guest naturalist from Sharon Woods Metro Park who will bring along some live cold-blooded, scaly friends.  Yes, you heard me–LIVE reptiles will be here at the library. You do NOT want to miss this. Register today!

Want to read up on some cold-blooded creatures?

And to wrap it up here is a super cute video of two kiddos reading a book about one of our favorite cats…Pete

Check out our collection of wordless picture books and take a story walk with your child today! Here are some tips to help her get the most of this narrative skill exercise:

• Let your child handle the book. He is learning about how a book works and is controlling the story by deciding how long to stay on a given page.When he is ready for the story to move on, he’ll turn the page.
• Play “eye spy” inside the story. Often wordless books will having reoccurring characters or gags. Follow along and find those “Easter eggs” together.
• Introduce new vocabulary words. If your child says, “There is a cave!” the adult can answer, “Yes, that is cave! A cave is like a hole in a mountain. Sometimes bats or bears live there.” You can also rephrase your child’s response. “Me do that!” becomes, “Yes, you have gone down a slide!”
• Ask open-ended questions. What is happening in this picture? Why does the hen have an angry look on her face? What will happen next?
• Call her attention to inferences. You may have to help your child understand when something is inferred in a wordless book, drawing her attention to the characters’ body language and facial expressions helps her learn to infer too.
• Help him relate it to his own life. Help your child relate the story to something that happened in his own life. Ask him how he felt when it was happening and then ask him how he thinks the characters are feeling in this story.
• Suggest words to help your child build the story. First, second, finally, then, next, etc., help teach the concept of the action happening with a beginning, a middle and an end.
• Have fun! Maybe something silly is happening behind a tree in the story that noone can see but you! Maybe the lion in the story has a squeaky voice and the mouse has a deep voice. Don’t be afraid to experiment with your story–when you are making the story, there are no wrong answers!

Here are a few of our favorite wordless books…

Fluff up your feathers and get ready for some chicken fun with this take-home story time all about our feathered friends…

Read it:

Chick and Chickie by Claude Ponti
Chick and Chickie are best friends and best friends like to play! Join them as they explore masks, funny jokes and the letter A.

Interrupting Chicken by David Ezra Stein
Knock-Knock! Who’s there? Interrupting Chicken! Papa may never get through this bedtime story is baby chicken doesn’t stop interrupting all the time!

Minerva Louise and the Red Truck by Janet Morgan Stoeke
When Minerva Louise accidentally hitches a ride in farmer’s truck she gets to see the wide world beyond her farm yard. Will she want to go back home again?

Play it:

Five Fluffy Chickens
Five little eggs (wiggle fingers)
Underneath a hen. (cover with hand)
Five little eggs (wiggle fingers)
Snuggle right in. (cover with hand)

Mama keeps them warm for 3 long weeks (hold up 3 fingers)
Crack goes the shells from their little pecking beaks! (Snaps fingers)
Out come the chickens, every little one! (wiggle fingers)
And fluff their feathers in the warm spring sun! (make chicken arms)

Make it!

Take a chicken for a walk with this preschool craft.
Step one:  print out a chicken template and cut the chicken out.
Step two: color your chicken and glue on some feathers if you have them. If you don’t have feathers, strips of colored paper make great pretend feathers!
Step three: Tape your chicken to a popsicle stick or a pencil and take it for a walk! Read a book to your chicken or tell it a story about cracked corn and sunny days–chickens love that!

Dance it!

Remember this? Dust off your chicken wings and take your little chick for a spin

Stretch your imagination muscles with our favorite picture books all about pretending! These librarian-picked books are fun and funny and perfect for a family read aloud…

#10 Mitchell’s License by Hallie Durand
Mitchell never wants to go to bed until, at the age of three years, nine months, and five days he gets his license so that he can drive there–at least until he and “the car” have a disagreement about what fuel goes in the tank.

#9 Can You Make a Scary Face? by Jan Thomas
A ladybug invites the reader to play a game of “let’s pretend.”

#8 Space Boy by Leo Landry
Having decided not to go to bed because his home is too noisy, Nicholas flies his spaceship to the Moon, where he enjoys a snack, takes a moonwalk, and enjoys the quiet–until he realizes what he is missing at home.

#7 Sally and the Purple Socks by Lisze Bechtold
When her tiny purple socks start to expand, Sally turns them into a scarf and then curtains, but things soon get out of hand.

#6 Peg Leg Peke by Brie Spangler
When Peke, a pekingese puppy breaks his leg, he fantasizes that he is a pirate in search of buried treasure.

#5 Alexander’s Pretending Day by Bunny Crumpacker
When Alexander asks his mother questions, they use their imaginations to play together

#4 My Garden by Kevin Henkes
After helping her mother weed, water, and chase the rabbits from their garden, a young girl imagines her dream garden complete with jellybean bushes, chocolate rabbits, and tomatoes the size of beach balls.

#3 Lets Do Nothing by Tony Fucile
Frankie and Sal have run out of things to do: “We’ve played every sport ever invented” and “baked enough cookies to feed a small country–” Then Sal hits upon a solution: “Let’s do nothing!” How hard could that be?

#2 Chalk by Bill Thomson
A wordless picture book about three children who go to a park on a rainy day, find some chalk, and draw pictures that come to life.

#1 Not a Box by Antoinette Portis
To an imaginative bunny, a box is not always just a box.

Imaginative play is not only fun, it is crucial to your child’s development and it supports early literacy. Pretending encourages extended vocabulary use, narrative skills and gives children a way to problem-solve and explore new interests in a safe environment. For more reasons why an imagination is your child’s greatest tool, read this article from the Scholastic web site.

Not sure how to encourage imaginative play in your kids? Check out these tips from the Frugal-Mama site.

What is your favorite imagination book?

Many of your favorite characters visit the library too!

You may meet new friends at the library!

Where ever you are headed, your story begins here–at the library! Just like Arthur  and D.W. say, “Having fun isn’t hard when you have a library card!”

When the wind is too much and too chilly is the day,
Get a book with a craft  and stay inside to play!

When the wind kicks up, stop by the library and load up on books about wind and then enjoy the wind at a distance while you are snug as a bug in a rug. If you want to learn about the wind, non-fiction is your friend. If your imagination is ready to fly away, picture books about wind will encourage you!

In The Wind Blew by Pat Hutchins, a mischievous wind enjoys playing with the townsfolk by stealing their items to tumble and roll around in the sky.

Read the book with your child and then try some of these activities:

• What does the wind sound like? Listen for the wind and try copying it with your voice. Blow high and low and loud and soft.
• Give your child a straw and let her blow through it–talk about what wind feels like and try blowing different items around the house (yarn, a cotton ball, a rock). Some move and some don’t–talk about why that is.
• Hang wind chimes outside and enjoy the music the wind makes.
• Make a wind sock out of construction paper and streamers (like in our example above). Then find pictures of objects that the wind blew in the picture book and glue them to the “wind” streamers. Hang your wind sock or dance around with it to make the streamers blow.