Flannel Friday: Socks!

I’ve wanted to follow the example of Miss Mary Liberry and Storytime Katie and make a bunch of socks for matching games and I finally found time to make 28 socks this weekend!

Mine are on the small side so that I can use them on my small traveling board. I can’t fit all of them, as you see here, but I can fit enough to still play some matching games with my outreach kiddos.

But because making 14 pairs of socks just isn’t enough for me, I also grabbed this pattern from Loons and Quines @ Librarytime to make these awesome snowflakes.

I made mine a few different colors because they’re fun to look at and they present more options for conversation. I also plan on using them as another extension for my Little Mouse games!

Books I’m Enjoying: December

My favorite picture book this year is one that doesn’t have any pictures at all.

 

The Book With No Pictures: B.J. Novak

Which is no surprise. It’s been a huge hit with all of the wonderful librarians in the Storytime Underground facebook group and it went over famously with the kids in my outreach storytimes. They requested I reread it and laughed even harder the second time I read it. I’ve never seen a group of kids have a more visceral reaction to a book before.

And that’s the brilliance of B.J. Novak- he does it all with no pictures. The typography is lovely, of course, but when you’re reading to a group of pre-readers, the type is much more for the reader than for the kids.

I plan on including this one is many, many storytimes to come and I encourage anyone who’s hesitating to give it a try! Even if the kids don’t glom onto it the same way, no kid can resist laughing at the phrase “boo boo butt!”

Passive Program: Post Office!

It seems like post office stations have been all the rage lately and for good reason- they’re a great idea! I’ve wanted to start my own since I saw Rebecca’s post in Sturdy for Common Things in August. December seemed like the best time to launch because midwest winters can be… unpredictable. Ice, snow, rain? Who knows! Since the weather is always up in the air, programming is hard to do. So in comes the passive program!

I spent a few hours on a Saturday setting everything up. I didn’t go all out with anything; my mailbox is just a cardboard box wrapped in white paper with a felt flap (a great idea from Library Village) and construction paper letters.

I made some instructions in Publisher,

threw together some paper catch-alls when I shouldn’t find a single thing to store my paper and markers in, used some abandoned Oriental Trading stickers as stamps,

and then stuck it all on one of our puzzle tables in the children’s department!

I then immediately got sick and missed a lot of work and wasn’t able to check in on my mailbox for almost a week. I came back to a stack of mail! I plan on displaying some of it in my office window (which opens into the department) for kids to see. Next step: Inter-branch communication with some of the other children’s departments!