Saturday, April 2, 2011

This week at the library; or, The sun finally shines!

Yay! The sun shone for at least part of the week and it was a pretty good week overall.

Monday
  • I switched my schedule around so I didn't come in until 11, because I was covering our evening storytime. We made stickers for Make it and Take it...or we were going to. Only a couple kids were there to start with, so I pulled out the puppets in my cupboard to organize since the kids didn't need me hanging over their shoulder....and of course everyone who showed up wanted to play with puppets. Should have thought of that. Oh well, we had fun and some stickers got made. Although I remembered why we don't do unsupervised puppet play...or even supervised puppet play. Having to remind the kids constantly "our puppets are all friends. they do not fight. our puppets are all FRIENDLY. they do NOT FIGHT" gets annoying. But only one puppet lost a body part.
  • Tiny Tots went really well. I don't think I've ever actually covered for this storytime before. I did my own evening storytime a few years ago, but it didn't work well, probably because I forgot that the all-important function of an evening storytime is not to calm kids down but allow them to expend as much energy as possible so they fall asleep on the way home. We did lots of marching and read Seasons (reviewed on Thursday), Tiny Little Fly by Michael Rosen, and Wide-Mouthed Frog by Keith Faulkner.
Tuesday
  • Had a planning meeting and got as far as September before we had to go do other stuff. I'm working on tentative calendars through next May (that's May 2012, yes) so we'll have to meet again.
  • Wii is finally working again...except we don't have enough batteries. and it doesn't work with the borrowed projector, so we had to get out the old one that can't be tilted or the picture goes yellow...argh!
Wednesday
  • Why am I always late on Wednesday, the one day I don't come in at 9 (or 8:45, or 8:30...)?
  • We did collage for Messy Art. There was some initial resistance to the idea of just making things without direction, but we got over it!
  • I think we need a second bike rack.
Thursday
  • Just a small group for our lizard storytime, we are doing a new opening song - Jim Gill's Face the Fact, and we read Cowley's Chameleon Chameleon, Janet Perlman's Delicious Bug, and George Shannon's Lizard's Song. We made shiny lizards out of paper bags and the fancy foil I have in my scraps tub and then played with our giant boxes! One little boy and his mom had just learned about basilisks (the real ones) so I gave them Nic Bishop's Lizards to check out, since we didn't have time to read that one.
Final and very exciting news....We had a total program attendance during March of 864 at our 33 programs This is compared to last year's 708 at 38 programs...and 528 at 36 in 2009. Yay me! I am going to Ikea on Saturday and I intend to CELEBRATE!!! New stripy apron if I can find colors I like! Plus a stop at Half Price books and Whole Foods on the way back of course...

2 comments:

Kelly Jensen said...

There was something about March, seriously! I don't remember how many programs I did -- I'd venture to guess around 30 -- and my attendance was 1,777. I realized WHY I was so tired this month. Yikes.

Kudos to you too on your huge numbers!

Jennifer said...

WOW. 504 of my attendance was Miss Pattie's storytimes, so I pale in comparison. I want to hit 1,000 next year! I had hoped to hit some really record numbers this summer, but found out recently half our parking and one of our access roads is going to be closed for construction the entire summer, so...yeah...