Drive in Storytime

I've seen a few "drive in" ideas floating around on Pinterest using cardboard boxes. We having been getting quite the stack of boxes in our community room, and with Earth Day on Monday I thought it would be fun to do a drive in storytime with the toddlers. It went pretty well (most box stories are short), so I thought since it the toddlers seemed to have fun in the boxes (most toddlers sitting at storytime ever!), I would do a drive-in box storytime with the preschoolers as well. 

When the kids walked into storytime, alot of them were confused by the boxes I had set out all over the floor. "Hop in!" was all I had to say and the boxes started filling up. The question of the day today was, "Have you ever made something with a box?" I started with the easy reader "What Is That", Said the Cat by Grace Maccarone. It is very rhymey (yeah, probably not a word). I allowed for a pause in the middle of the phrases to see if the kids would come up with the rhyming animals "I will try, said the . . . fly!". The book ends with "later alligator" so I used the Five Little Monkeys Teasing Mr. Alligator flannel and song. Some knew it, some didn't.

Then I read a rare two books in a row! Sitting In My Box by Dee Lillegard which is a little bit like Brett's The Mitten. There was opportunity for the kids to knock on their boxes as each animal approaches then asks to get into the box. Then I read Not a Box by Antoinette Portis. The rabbit gets a little frustrated that I, the reader, kept talking about his box when it clearly was not a box. Kids were giggling. The book ends with the rabbit shooting off into space with his rockeship, so we danced to Rocketship Run by the Laurie Berkner Band. The countdown and blast off were easy for the kids to catch on to, then we just used our arms to fly around during the "boring" parts of the song. I finished up with The Birthday Box by Leslie Patricelli.

Our craft used a recycled cereal box chopped up to look like a little cardboard box and the kids got to make their box into something using markers. This was not one of their favorite art projects, there was no messy glue, paint or glitter, just some boring old markers. I made sure to walk around and ask everyone what they had made their boxes into and wrote it on their sheets... words have meaning!!

Sadly, no one asked to take their boxes home- I would have let them!

Picture Book Place- Traditions

Major Category: TRADITIONS

Subcategories:

• Each holiday is its own subcategory. EARTH for Earth Day, MOTHER for Mother's Day
• BIRTHDAYS
• RELIGION- In one of the other libraires that I was looking at, they had placed Religious books in "Tales". This worried me a lot since we are located in a heavily Christian populated area. I think I found Traditions in METIS, thank goodness! It was a small stress point in the whole process. All of the Noah's Ark or other Christian based stories that mention "God" in them are in this section. There are also some books about Jewish families and customs in this section. There were not many "picture books" of the other different world religions.

This section was pretty easy to put books in. The categories are pretty straight forward.

PTRADS
MOTHERS
394.2MIL

"Be Ruthless in Weeding Juvenile Fiction"

Re-reading the CREWing Children's Materials really got me geared up to seriously look at my Juvenile Fiction Collection.

There are about 1500 books in our Juvenile Fiction section. I ran a list of books that had only been checked out 1 or less times in the past 2.5 years (which is as far back as our data goes because of a system update).

I ended up with a list of 454 books (28% of the collection). I used the CREW method as a base for weeding this section and the first sentence was, "Be ruthless in weeding juvenile fiction."

I tried to be ruthless, I really did. I weeded 138 books, which ended up at about 30% of the books on the list. My only relief from getting rid of that many books is the hope I have that somebody will buy them at the Friends' book sale this summer and take them home to read them!


Newbery Medal Winners and Honor Books were hard for me to weed. The CREW method recommends getting rid of roughly worn award books and award books that there is no demand for in the juvenile fiction section. "Unless your library serves a school of education or a library school, there may be little or no demand for decades-old award winners." Although we have nice new copies of Newberys that are only three years old, I got rid of the all of the ones that had been checked out ZERO times on the list. Most of them were from before 1990, if not 1970.

Little House Knock-Offs and other 19th century books that show little respect for American Indians. . . I got rid of many of them. . . good bye Sarah Noble (zero circs), good bye Orphan Train Quartet, and The Days of Laura Ingalls Wilder series (1 circs each).Some of them were hard to let go... I will ponder the infatuation with those books at a later date.


Multicultural books were the hardest for me to weed. I live in holy-white-bread Northern Wisconsin. In my Multicultural lit class, one of the most important things that I learned was that kids like to read books about kids like themselves. I bet you can guess how often multicultural books go out around these parts and how many of them were on the list. Thankfully some of the teachers require the kiddos to read multicultural books for assignments and many of them have gone out, but Buddy Not Buddy and Elijah of Buxton?? Oh no, those two are staying. I did get rid of several with bad covers or spines and some with brand new shiny spines that were four years old and had never been opened.

I Can't Believe This is a Real Book Cover! There were a few books with the most horrible covers. I've heard two different teenage girls talking about how they would not read a book with a weird cover in the past week. Some of the books with covers that looked way old had to go. There were a lot of classics in this group. I have a pile over a foot high on my desk that I'll need to find newer editions for to make them look like they didn't come out of the last century.

Yeah, weeding sucks, but my shelves are less crowded, look better and there's room for new books!

Thank you CREW method!

Crew: A Weeding Manual for Modern Libraries.https://www.tsl.state.tx.us/ld/pubs/crew/index.html Texas State Library and Archives Commission

April Displays. . . or Cats & Dogs and Poets in the Air

It's a poet tree! Prelutsky, Silverstein and others who have written books that are in our library are all stuck in a tree! This display has been moving some books this month. Yeah for poetry!

My director Kim and I co-brainstormed this display. Kim did almost all of the work and brainstorming, I just contributed a little bit, but it was too cool not to share! I am sad to report that it hasn't just been raining cats and dogs, but spitting out that nasty four letter s-word stuff too. 

Picture Book Place- Tales

Major Category Number Two: Tales.

There are no official subcategories in this area. This area contains all of the books that would be found in the Dewey section 398.2s along with their counterparts. Instead of subcategories, I used the major story title on the second line of the spine labels. For example: Cinderella, ThreePigs, Rapunzel, etc. The third line on the spine label is the last name of the author.

This was by far one of the easiest categories to put books into, they were either a folk or fairy tale, or they weren't.

Spine Label:

PTALES
CINDERELLA
STEPTOE

It was Juusst Riiight!

I love the Three Bears! I get to use my GREAT BIG PAPA BEAR VOICE, My Sarcastic Mama Bear Voice, and my squeaky, high-pitched baby bear voice.

The question of the day was "Have you Heard the Story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears?" It ended up being split down the middle, 6 said they had and 6 said they hadn't. There were a few moms who were upset when I wrote down their child's name under "no" when they child told me they hadn't heard it before. Apparently it is the sign of bad parenting if your kids haven't heard that story (I was not aware of this).

The stories: Goldilocks and the Three Bears adapted by James Marshall. Then we ran in place to The Laurie Berkner Band's I'm Gonna Catch You. Somebody and the Three Blairs by Marilyn Tolhurst, our second book was a huge hit! The kids could bearly (ha ha) contain themselves when the roles were reversed, and there was even more laughter when the bear was trying to drink out of the toilet. We sang the We're Going on a Bear Hunt song with some flannel pieces that I have. Thank goodness for the grandma who helped me out with the call and response part of the chant. It really helped the kids out to have a role model, teachable moment anyone? There was only time for one more three bears story and the popular vote was for dinosaurs, so we read Mo Willems' Goldilocks and the Three Dinosaurs. They were already giggly from the Three Blairs, so they had fun with this one, too. After the stories, it was time for painting bear shapes and sprinkling on coffee grounds... 

the room smelled juusst riiight!

Picture Book Place - Favorites

Favorites is the first main category in our new picture book area. There is only one subcategory in Favorites:

• CALDECOTT: All of the Caldecott Medal Winners go here. They are arranged by the year that they won the award.

Also included in this section are:

• Favorite authors: Jan Brett, Eric Carle, Lois Ehlert, Mo Willems, etc. 
• Favorite characters: Berenstein Bears, Clifford, Curious George, etc.
• Classics: A Chair for My Mother, Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day, The Little House, etc.
• Popular Books: Disney, Dora, Lego, I Spy, etc.
• I also put some of my favorite read-alouds on these shelves for parents to find.

The books in this section were pretty easy to pull. If they were in Favorites, then EVERYTHING in that group went into Favorites. For example, Clifford's First Christmas is in the Favorites rather than the Traditions. The Hungry Catepillar is in Favorites rather than Animals.

The books in his section of the collection have two or three lines on the spine label. 

The first line is for the main category I used a P for Picture book before it, so it would read: PFAVES

The second line contains the subcategory (if there is one). For Favorites it would be CALDECOTT, or if it wasn't a Caldecott winner, the second line would just contain the author's last name and would read, for example REY. 

The third line of the spine label for the Caldecott winners is the year that it won the award. The two different spine labels for this section look like this:

PFAVES

CALDECOTT

2013

or

PFAVES

CARLE

This is the only section in which books with three lines on the spine label are placed on the shelves before the books with two lines on the spine label. Why? Because they are "winners" and "winners" don't belong on the bottom shelf.

Picture Book Place!

Okay, so this post is coming a little late. We finished up the bulk of the books last Friday. They have been slowly trickling in all week, but I'm pretty sure we are within a handful of books of being finished. Not much feedback this week.

Dreaming of Spring

That's what you get when you wait and plan your storytime at the last minute... all the spring books that haven't been checked out yet. They weren't horrible, but they weren't as fabulous as some of the other spring books out there. They did work out though, not too long and some new vocabulary to boot. 

Cold Little Duck, Duck, Duck by Lisa Westberg Peters went well, the kids helped make all of the repetitive words and sounds. We sang Five Little Ducks with a flannel set after that and a little bit of stretching to settle down. Hopper Hunts for Spring by Marcus Pfister went all right, we paid attention to the smaller details like the spiders in the cave. The we danced to Jumping and Counting by Jim Gill, because rabbits like to jump. Finished up with Rabbit's Good News by Ruth Lercher Bornstein which was a rather slow read, but the kids were catching on the the Spring theme and were able to guess what rabbit was listening for. After the stories we worked on some spring branches with little flowers on them. Painting is one of the more popular art activities I do after storytime.

April Fools!

There was no school today, so not many kids were in the library to see my April Fools Day display. 

I like it so much, I might leave it this way all month.