Spanish ABC's and Circus Subject Headings

Daily Hours: 6

Total Hours: 48

I started off this morning helping out with the first of what will be a four week bilingual early literacy “storytime” series.  The series was planned (and is led) by a local teacher who teaches in the Spanish immersion program at Aldo Leopold Elementary School.  The experience was especially informative for me as I really have no background with children’s library programming.  But I am especially keen on getting experience with that side of things, because if I end up in a library with a Spanish-speaking user-base (as I hope to), I’d love to do a bilingual story time in the future.  Overall, everything went well and I got a good feel of just how flexible you need to be in planning youth programming, especially for the 3-6 age group (the target group for this series).  Around five mothers and eight kids showed up; we were happy with the turnout, considering it was a really stormy morning.  We sang a few songs, read two stories, and then ended with a cool take-home craft that the kids played with while she put on a bilingual sing-along DVD.  The kids were given ziplock bags with a thin filling of cornstarch, water, and food coloring.  We had them put the bags down on the table and floor and draw letters on the bags.  They were just as excited about popping the bubbles, but I thought it was a cool idea to have a take home tool for the mothers (and fathers) to extend the learning at home.

After the program, I spent some time tying up some loose ends with Kim, the staff person in charge of the Adult Summer Reading Program this summer, planning our first prizes etc.  In addition to creating a template for the Friends group membership cards (and actually significantly expanding my Microsoft Word graphic design skills in the process!), I also did some planning for this Saturday’s book club I’ll be helping with.  In particular, I was charged with the enjoyable task of browsing LINKcat for other Circus-related titles (the book we are reading is Queen of the Air: A True Story of Love and Tragedy at the Circus) to request so we can make a display of additional reading suggestions for the club meeting.  And, man did linked subject headings make my life easier as I searched for a well-rounded mix of fiction and non-fiction!