This week at the library; or, Don't plan anything involving plants in May in Wisconsin!

Monday

• I did not really want to come to work today. It was a lovely day, crisp and cool and sunny and I planted my pots before I left...hopefully they won't all die in what I really hope is our final cold snap this week.
• We were going to make leaf prints ala Artful Parent, but I belatedly realized A. she lives somewhere warmer where there's, you know, leaves and B. my stamp pads were drying out and it just didn't work the way I wanted it to. So we made paper birds instead, ala Catherine Woram's Paper Scissors Glue and painted them, thus fulfilling my promise that there would be paint. Of course, several people got other ideas and made painted penguins, painted hearts, hearts with ribbon, etc. etc. but I am cool with branching out from the main craft idea!

Tuesday

• Argh! I am mad at Google. They went and combined organizational accounts and general accounts. Which means, MASS CONFUSION AND ANNOYANCE. Now I can't have my personal account and work account open at the same time and I've had to shift all sorts of things around. ARGH!
• Helped out at the circ desk, since we were short of staff, had to move an adult program into our storyroom b/c of a scheduling snafu, once again the Wii was buggy and wouldn't work, and the one duck egg that had started hatching on Monday appears to have stopped.

Wednesday

• What happened to Wednesday? I know there was a Wednesday in there somewhere...let's see, we had about 50 at Lego Building Club, our last of the spring semester, some new folks who were excited to learn we'll be doing it over the summer...I lost the perfectly good letter I had written to invite daycares to attend our summer programs so I'll have to do that again...I planned my Monday morning middle school visit...it was a crazy evening and I helped out at the circ desk....

Thursday-Friday

• Our reference assistant did Thursday storytime for me so I could go to an Early Literacy workshop at the Janesville public library. Somehow I hadn't realized the fact that it wasn't just a couple random teachers it was Betsy Diamant-Cohen, the creator of Mother Goose on the Loose and Saroj Ghoting, an amazing early literacy programming consultant. Woo! I found I'm already doing a lot of early literacy in my storytimes - I just need to emphasize and explain some aspects more. I could do a lot more flannelboards and rhymes and props though and I got lots of little ideas that should improve storytime. I have tons of notes and although I feel somewhat daunted (and completely exhausted) I am ready to start completely revitalizing and restructuring my preschool storytimes for the summer. I have one week. I can do it, right? I'll be posting more on this later...
• Friday was all about outreach and implementation. Lots of good ideas and I now have a distinct hankering to work at one of the cool libraries that she showed us that have incorporated early literacy ideas into their building and children's areas, not just their programming. But I would also really love to work at Janesville, nicest librarians ever! and most welcoming children's area! makes me feel happy just to walk through it. Will have to add this to my teen dream of someday working in a Boston library and my retirement dream of supervising collection management at a large library...I'm young, I have dreams!