Nothing particularly noteworthy occurred on Monday, other than multiple phone calls to ask if we were open (surprise! we were!) and a chance meeting with the middle school librarian, which led to my realization that I was not booked for a visit to the 7th and 8th grades at the middle school, but at the local Catholic parochial school. Whoops! Fortunately, I had barely started to gather books and didn't have anything too inappropriate selected.
Tuesday was more of the same, with the adding interest of switching desk times so I worked Tuesday night (and our director was working my Thursday night, then realized she had a conflict, so she switched with our cataloger...in short, a good time was had by all). An interesting observation - while it's all fun and games during regular school days, when it comes time for finals and the teens settle down for study, they divide up strictly by gender. No coed study groups here!
Wednesday Another nice group for Preschool Interactive, with some renewed interest in Messy Art. Made more book bundles - we can't keep them on the shelf! Check out the slideshow and links to see them.
Messy Art: A patron suggested we make felt snowballs and brought in a sample. It look cool - and easy. Just tie lots of strips of white flannel together and voila! indoor snowball! It looked really simple, but I didn't have time (and didn't think I needed to) actually test it. It, um, didn't work. Maybe we cut the strips of flannel too wide? Didn't tie the string tight enough? Anyways, I now have a huge bag of strips of white flannel.
BUT I didn't think that would be enough to keep everyone interested, so I had collage as well - the tubs containing paper scraps, foil scraps, and fabric scraps, a bag of cotton balls, cardboard cut out scraps, and black, blue and white paper. With scissors and glue and a few pencils my 35 people were happy, many of them staying over an hour.
I wasn't happy with what I had pulled for the class visits tomorrow, so when I got home I went over to the library in my new town and got Sara The Librarian to help me pull another bagful of books. Only took about an hour.
Thursday Came in a little past 9 to get ready for my booktalk and have a quick chat with Miss Pattie about various things. This was the best visit I've done with our local Catholic school, for the upper grades. At least, I think so! Not all my booktalks were as smooth as they could have been, since I ended up pulling a lot of things that I hadn't read or wasn't familiar with, but I changed around the format of my booktalks so I was interacting more with the kids and had them all come up and look at the books afterwards, which worked out really well. I have to remember that I can do these small classes differently than the 100 sixth grade groups I do! I also absolutely MUST purchase a rolling cart of some kind before I again take that many books in my bag...so many thick books!
Crazy busy with patrons, trying to fill in displays, getting ready for booksale (not me, but the business infected me) and then went to the regional meeting of school librarians. It was really nice of the local school librarians to invite me and I had a great time, chatting with the school librarians, trading ideas and stories, and finding out more about how their funding works - which affects us! Just another reason why we have GREAT school libraries and collaboration here in Elkhorn! Got home around 7:30pm.
Friday Did I mention we're having our big book/bake sale? Did I mention it is BLIZZARDING SNOW? We can't win. Hopefully we'll do well anyways. I opened and covered the desk all morning, then loaded up a bunch of work and took off early for home, before the roads became too bad. I can do publicity and collection development anywhere, after all.
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