December is Read a New Book Month storytime

To honor the theme of Read a New Book Month, I chose to...not read a new book.  Ok, I decided to read a few of my favorite picture books.  Yeah, they aren't new books, but I can't help my lack of creativity when it comes to storytime.  Anyway, The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle was our first book.  Then, we made our very own hungry caterpillars by gluing pom-poms to popsicle sticks with pipe cleaner antennae and goggley eyes.  While we waited for our caterpillars to dry a bit, we read Bark, George by Jules Feiffer and one of my very favorites, Owen & Mzee: Best Friends.  Twas another successful storytime, indeed.

National Pastry Day storytime

In case you were unaware, December 9th is National Pastry Day and if you've been keeping up with my blog and paying any attention at all, you should know by now that I love to bake.  And a lot of picture books with baking in the story happen to have various recipes in the back.  Sooooo, I picked one rather cute book and baked the featured recipe the day before storytime to surprise my storytime group.  The first book I read was the one that features the recipe I used: Sun Bread by Elisa Kleven.  When I surprised the kids (and parents) with the homemade sun bread, they were really excited.  (Luckily, I had a leftover pizza box laying around which came in quite handy to both transport the bread and conceal it prior to the surprise.)  While we munched on the bread, we read a classic, The Little Red Hen by Byron Barton and This Little Bunny Can Bake by Janet Stein.  I was a little bummed that most of my regular storytime kids didn't come to see my surprise, but whacha gonna do?

UF Levin College of Law Library tour

This afternoon I attended a tour of the University of Florida's Levin College of Law's Lawton Chiles Legal Information Center Library scheduled by NEFLIN.  I was actually really just glad that I made it there on time because I had to drive all the way from Newberry then, due to UF's parking situation (or lack thereof, rather) I had to park over a mile away from the library.  It was renovated and expanded a few years ago and the library was very nice and plush.  There were only a few people who attended the tour and most of which were from close by (actually, about half were from other UF libraries).  I was the only one from the public library but there were two local school library media specialists, both of whom I happen to be slightly familiar with.  Ms. Antony, the librarian at Eastside High School, made herself available for me to interview her for a project I had earlier this year about the use of Web 2.0 technologies in media centers.  The other school librarian was Ms. Moore from Santa Fe High School for whom my little brother was a media aide when he was in high school.  Ahh, small world in library land.  In any case, the tour was interesting as I have not previously been in a law library and I miss just generally being on campus oh so much.  Sigh...good times.

Eat a Red Apple Day and apple smiles

Today's storytime theme was Eat a Red Apple Day, December 1st.  The first book we read was The Apple Pie Tree by Zoe Hall.  Then we ate none other than red apples in the form of apple smiles.  My mom suggested this edible craft - we took red apple slices and put peanut butter on one side of two apple slices and then stuck mini marshmallows in the peanut butter and between the apple slices, like the ones in the picture to the right.  Of course, with 3-year-olds, trying to get the whole apple smile put together without any part being eaten alone is practically impossible.  I was absolutely amazed at how quickly these little girls could gobble up little marshmallows!  I gave one half a dozen to stick in her peanut butter and turned around to distribute more marshmallows and just a few seconds later the first few marshmallows were no where to be found.  It went well though, except for the one little girl who was apparently afraid of peanut butter, poor thing.  Anyway, while our apple smiles were being devoured, I read Apple Farmer Annie by Monica Wellington.  The girls enjoyed storytime and the parents, as always, got a giggle at my observance of pseudo-holidays.