Bloody Jack by L.A. Meyer

Left orphaned on the streets of London by the illness that took her mother, father, and little sister, Mary Faber joins up with a gang of street urchins under Black Friar’s Bridge, begging, borrowing, and stealing to put scraps in their bellies. Until one night, when little Mary finds her gang’s leader murdered, she suddenly sees a way out. She takes his clothing, gives herself the new name “Jack,”  and heads to the docks where she is hired on to the H.M.S. Dolphin—A Royal Navy ship—as a ship’s boy. Life is bliss aboard the Dolphin. It’s hard work, but there’s plenty of food and a warm place to sleep… as long as she can keep up the deception!

But the seas aren't always warm breezes and shore leave, and Jacky has to use her street skills, quick thinking, and wit see her through the toughest of scrapes and earn herself the nickname, “Bloody Jack.”

The first in an ongoing series, L. A. Meyer skillfully builds a story of adventure on the sea using Jacky’s bold and engaging personality; Meyer adds a healthy dose of trouble that’ll leave you on the edge of your seat and thinking, “Oh Jacky, you've done it again!”

If you love Bloody Jack, then continue the story in Curse of the Blue Tattoo and Under the Jolly Roger. Or if you’re looking for other heroines on the high seas, look for The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle by Avi.

Find these books and more on VBPL Recommends.

Camp-In Storytime

So before the snow came in, I took a minute at work to change my files so I could access them from home (hooray for minor moments of clarity). However, I became overwhelmed by the laziness that engulfs snow days and I haven't done thing one with the files since I fixed hem up on Tuesday. Oops! But I'm here now, so let's go for it!

So a while back I thought it would be fun to have a camping themed storytime.

I love making fliers!

It turned out to be really great! I do wish I had had a few more stories or activities planned, because things went by pretty fast. I think we had 15 minutes left at the end where we just had free-for-all time, which is less than ideal. I also did this program with another colleague. We both proposed similar programs, so we went in on this one together. However, her life got crazy so I wound up planning and pulling together most of it.

We started things out by giving the kids a chance to explore a "sensor tent" that I put together. I was inspired by the never ending barrage of sensory activity ideas on Pinterest and thought, since we were having a camp out inside, why not put some of the outside inside inside? I thought it was clever/quirky.

Some of the things we included in the tent were pine needles, rocks, fake flowers, and as many wildlife puppets as I could pull together (we have a ton of puppets). We also had some pine cones, but they turned out to be very prickly, so we kept them in a bin next to the tent and instructed the children that their grownups had to help them look at the pine cones.

After about 15-20 minutes we called the kids to join us around the fire pit. We laid out sleeping bags for them to sit on and I make a campfire out of Christmas lights, sticks, and tissue paper. Once everyone was settled, we did a welcome song and a name song so all the kids could introduce themselves to each other.

We sang some camp songs (I even learned how to play On Top of Spaghetti on my ukulele), we took a make believe canoe trip and we even went fishing! I printed out some colorful fish and put an action word on each of them and I laid them out in a little kiddie pool. We sang the "fishy dance song" (which I made up) and gave each of the children a chance to come up and choose a fish. Then we all did the action their fishy told us to do. The kips and parents both loved it!

This particular fish told us to sleep.

The Fishy Dance Song

(Tune: Shortnin' Bread)

We're gonna catch a fishy, fishy.

We're gonna catch a fishy

and do the fishy dance.

Okay, so the song's not perfect; you have to sing the last bit a little weird to get it to fit in, it it was passable!

We read the book Camping Day by Patricia Lakin.

Then we did some painting with marshmallows. We can't eat food at programs anymore, but marshmallows are just such  huge part of camping! So we used them as paintbrushes. A potentially confusing concept for 3-5 year olds, so I made this rhyme, "Marshmallows are a special camping treat, but these are for painting so please do not eat!" Between the paint and the parental guidance, none of the marshmallows made it into tummies. I wish I had pictures of painting but the camera died at that point. The paintings were very clever, and the marshmallows turned surprisingly beautiful after being used as brushes! I wish I could have found a way to preserve a mallow. They were really gorgeous!

Reading 'round the campfire... sort of.

And that was it. Like I said before, we ended a bit early, so we had the kids play in the sensory tent some more. One of the kids started sorting the rocks and flowers into piles. Very clever! Another child was very suspicious of my pretend fire, so she took a stick and poked at it to try and figure out how it worked. So adorable!

In the future I will aim to have all my storytime-type programs in the storytime room. This one was held in one of our meeting rooms and it just looks so bland! I thought we would need extra space for the painting and the tent, but I think the rooms are about the same size... especially with the chair stacks and other things taking up space in the meeting rooms.

One of my favorite pictures!

All in all, lots of fun! I highly recommend sensory activities for exploration and the fishy dance is a new favorite in my bag of storytime tricks. Go forth and have fun!

Setting the Record Straight

So Virginia Beach is shut down. We've been down for two and a half days because of the snow. Now I keep seeing snarkey things on Facebook like this:

I would like to set the record straight. This is what Virginia Beach looks like:

Well, this is what my corner of VB looks like at least.

My area got 8.5 inches with 16 inch drifts, not to mention the pies from people clearing their cars!

Of course, to all of the northerners out there... this is still basically nothing; and I totally understand that! But get this: the whole of the Virginia Beach snow clearing fleet consists of three show plows and a handful of salt trucks. That's three snow plows for the whole of Virginia Beach!  Plus, one of them flipped in a ditch yesterday. We're just not prepared for this kind of thing. A few inches, sure; but not 8+.

I love my apt. management for shoveling  a bit!

In summation, I have to say I'm proud of my City for taking the initiative to shut down. Go an and make fun of us, but--as far as I'm concerned--there's no reason to encourage people to be out and about until those two remaining plows can get to as many streets as possible.

More Excitement!

For years I've been told to join NetGalley--among other sites--and start doing reviews for up-and-coming releases. I was always told, "well, you blog so they'd totally let you," and, "you really don't have to do anything." But here's the thing: I didn't blog well or dedicatedly, and I wanted to do something! I figured if I was going to join a site like NetGalley then I should do the authors some good... not just get free books out of it.

Well, the time has now come. I've been reviewing titles on VBPL Recommends for a while now, and with my shiny new blog here I thought... this might be the time! So this morning I signed up for NetGalley and started requesting titles. Well I am now here to tell you... I got my first approval!

It's a fun looking children's fiction title by Katherine Rue called:

Carly Keene, Literary Detective: Braving the Brontes

It's about a young girl (Carly Keene) who falls asleep in a magical bookstore and wakes up in 1846! She meets up with Charlotte Bronte who is currently writing Jane Eyre and discovers that Charlotte is being haunted by the spirit of her dead sister and must finish her book... or else!

I'm pretty much ecstatic to start this title! The synopsis reminds me a little of the Magic Tree House series, and I love the literary twist. I can't wait to finish reading and post my review for all of you to check out!

Wish me luck!

Permission Granted!

MUAHAHAHAHAAA!!! I have received official permission to use my colleague/friend's name on my blog! Additionally, I have acquired her new blog page where she will be posting about her teen, adult, and other wonderful programs in addition to musings on library life and anecdotes about her time in library school (an adventure yet in my future).

So meet, greet, love, and laugh with her at: SH the Librarian.

Additionally, I will be updating my previous posts to reflect this new information. I may as well, since I only have six (now 7) posts on here!

Happy blog surfing, my loves!

Fantastic! Allons-y! Geronimo!

I am still stuck at home, living off tea and generic DayQuil. I have also discovered that I cannot access most of my work files here at home because the new laptop my husband bought me doesn't yet have any Microsoft suites. *grumbles* Hopefully this will be remedied sometime this coming week.

So in the meantime, I can only post through program pictures I have access to. And so, we have yet another program from the hat of my amazing colleague and friend, Susan! I had the privilege of helping out with prep and day-of shenanigans.

Me trying to look intense and Dr.-ish.

This one is another teen program for all the Dr. Who lovers! She put this one on in honor of the 50th anniversary release. The turn out was AMAZING and the teens loved every minute! There were a number of stations/crafts that the teens were able to circulate through at will.

By and far the favorite station was making sonic screwdriver pens. Susan got the idea from Doodle Craft but it took a lot of testing on her part to get things to work out. We had to use toaster ovens for baking and first we had to make sure the temperatures were right (one oven ran too hot and had to be put out of commission) which involved getting an oven thermometer. Susan also had some browning issues on her trial runs and found out that baking the pens in a parchment paper tent on ceramic tile was the only fix. Thankfully she's done a lot with that clay before. I would never have figured all that out!

Faces were blurred to protect the innocent.

The second favorite craft was the Tardis plushie station. Fleece was on sale, so  Ibought a  bunch and I spent a few hours (an episode of Sleepy Hollow and some change) stitching and stuffing little blue rectangles. We then gave the teens access to extra fleece, scissors, and fabric glue to decorate their Tardises (Tardi?). This craft was my idea, so I take responsibility for the following: we also gave them puff paint for writing. Apparently they needed a little guidance on what we thought they'd do with what. The first few teens tried using nothing but puff paint to decorate their Police Boxes. Very messy and takes decades (not literally) to dry. Also, Murphy's Law kicks in around puffy paint; any uncovered surface WILL make contact with the paint. Use a drop cloth. A big one!

By far the most complicated (but beautiful) project was the DIY River Song's journal. This involved mini composition notebooks, card stock, tissue paper, and lots and lots of decoupage. It also involved liberal use of an Xacto knife. Which we probably ought to have done before the program, seeing as we couldn't very well give knives to teens. (Legal reasons and such.) I spent about 50% of the program cutting out templates like the ones on Glitter Mint and when I wasn't cutting, Susan was. It wasn't horrible, but it as time consuming.

In the picture above you can also see a scrap from some Dr. Who Papercraft we printed out. However, it wasn't a huge hit... there was just too much else to do! I think only one teen did the papercraft at all; likely the one pictured above. I still have a pile of these things on my desk. (I can't bring myself to waste perfectly good papercraft!)

Another of my brainchildren was the "How to Tie a Bowtie" station. I got a roll of scrap fleece (double sale!) and used my husband's bow tie as a template to cut out 40-some fleece bow tie shapes. I also threw together a how-to paper (which I currently can't access per previously mentioned reasons) using this website and we brought out the staff iPad so the teens could play YouTube clips on how to tie bow ties. (This is the one my husband used to learn. He took the iPad into the bathroom and played the clip over and over until he got it right. Then he taught me. Now we're both bow tie pros!)

Practicing where they can see the bow tie.

Its honestly easier to practice this way.

Throughout the whole program we played Dr. Who Scene It on the TV. Occasionally it would draw small crowds (like the one below), but most the time the teens just shouted out answers at random. It was pretty cool and sparked a lot of conversation. We were lucky to know someone who had a version of Dr. Who Scene It. I can't find it online at all... not unless you want to bid on it somewhere! Maybe I just don't know where to look. Perhaps looking further than Amazon would help... but I'm not up to tempting fate.

The program was a huge hit! We had a line at the door before we were even finished setting up and had to kick people out in the end! There were costumes and sonic screwdrivers everywhere, and all the craft supplies (except the papercraft) was all used up! It was really wonderful. I had the idea that whenever Susan and I left the room we would draw hash marks on ourselves, then come back in like nothing happened. It was funny to see the teens react. The key was trying to be appropriately surprised when they mentioned it. I am not an actress.

And that's that. All around amazing! Admittedly a little pricey, but worth every penny!

Gloomy Day

I'm home sick today. Yuck! So while I'm stuck home and pretty much immobile, I may as well send a shout out to an awesome friend who covered my storytime class today, Miss Susan!

Susan has come up with a superb teen program series she is calling, "Keep Calm and Game On." At each meeting, the teens get to learn a new/obscure game. The last game she did was Gloom.

The front and back of her take-home advertisements.

Now, I still haven't played this one, but from what I hear it's pretty awesome. Basically each player has a family and the goal is to kill off your entire family while working to keep your opponents' families alive. It's also a storytelling game, so when the game is over you can look at the cards and tell the whole story from beginning to end.

Susan and I often bounce ideas back and forth, and one we came up with for this series were achievement charms. I had a bunch of leftover crafting scrabble tiles and jewelry bales from a flopped program (more on that later) so I made a bunch of these guys....

How cool are they!? I just bought some lobster claw jewelry closures and some spacers to make them lanyard friendly... or bracelet friendly, or pin friendly... whatever!

There's my WWSOC button! I miss those kids.

All the teens who attended the event LOVED the game! They were adding it to their online wish lists and asking about checking out the game to play at home (which we don't do... sadly), it was very encouraging! Hopefully the charms will encourage them to keep coming back. You know... "Collect your limited edition charm; available one day only!" Something like that.

Gloomy reads for a gloomy time.

So this amazing friend that I'm talking about also plans on blogging about her programs. You can find her at SH the Librarian on WordPress. Check it out! This is where she'll tell you all about the cool stuff she's doing with teen and adult programming, not to mention her own library musings and tales about her time in library school. It promises to be good stuff!

Tonight's Mini Lesson

So I started this mini storytime series (which I will review in full after our final meeting next week) focused on families who can't make it to our standard morning storytimes (another thing I'll have to explain later).

The opening slide to my evening storytime series.

However, today we had an impending winter storm. It went from 48oF to snowing in about two hours. It's crazy! Even for Virginia Beach.

The view from my porch... and it's still coming down.

I didn't expect a huge turn out since impending weather causes the city (except for the libraries) to shut down. But I thought I'd get some walk-ins or a few confident winter weather people from up north... I had one child. Which honestly doesn't upset me. Just surprises the pants off me!

We still had a good time. We cut down the program so they could get home sooner. The mother and I talked about homeschooling, and her daughter and I sang the snowman song,

read Silly Sally, and played with bubbles for a bit. It was lots of fun!

The funny thing is, I wouldn't call the little girl shy but she doesn't speak up when there are other children at storytime. It's like she sits back and just let's them take over. She figured out the letter of the day on her own, sang Itsy Bitsy Spider for me, and clapped out the syllables during our shaky egg song!

I wonder how much she does when the other kids are around and I just don't notice because there are so many of them. I'm going to make it a point to really look at what my kids are doing and comment on their accomplishments. I need to be better at that.

Back to the Past

Let’s reflect on some past programs. Back in Summer 2013 I presented a program called “Discover Ancient Egypt.” This is one of the programs where I just planned too darn much! It worked out in the end, but this is where I started to realize that 2 hour programs might be the way to go.

 

The cartouche on the side reads “library.”

We started with a simple coloring activity. I usually start pretty small since I seem to get latecomers and walk-ins during the first 10-15 minutes of a program. We had these leftover Egyptian collars from another program. They were already cut out, hole punched, and glued together. We just had to color and add yarn.

Then the kids spent some time making their own hieroglyphic door hangers. They each received their own hieroglyphic alphabet sheet and a paper door hanger (which I punched out using Ellison Dies). Great in theory… but less so in practice. Half the children were too concerned about their art skills to participate, while the other half thought it was funny to write mildly rude/inappropriate things on their door hangers. (The latter was a real surprise to me! I didn't realize that kids that young did stuff like that!)

After that we went into a small science experiment. I passed out simple science logs (which I apparently didn't save), we put together our samples and filled in our initial observations. Our experiment was to see what mummified an apple the best: salt or sand. I found small sauce cups for the experiment, so each child was able to safely create and transport their two samples plus a “control” with nothing but an apple bit in it. (I’m sure their parents loved me for that!)  I really loved hearing some of the hypotheses being tossed around. My favorite was the child who reasoned that the salt would melt her apple because salt melts ice. Clever! I would have liked to hear her thoughts when she dumped out the salt and found the apple was still there.

And here’s where things got tight. I had two more activities planned, but only time for one. I decided to let the kids vote and found that they were split. One child piped in asking if we could split up into groups and do both… which is exactly what we tried. It worked pretty well, except balancing the two groups was tricky.

One group made paper pyramids, coated them in glue, and covered them in sand. I had cut out all the pyramid templates beforehand, so I thought they could fold and glue on their own. I was wrong. They needed a bit of guidance and more than two examples; but they got it eventually!

The other groups learned how to play Seega. I made my own boards and found a ton of buttons in our craft closet for them to use. I also printed out a copy of the game/instructions for them to take home. They picked up on it super fast and seemed to really love it! But they wanted to take home the game boards I made, and I didn't have enough of those for everyone.

Overall I think the kids enjoyed discussing and learning about Egypt in a hands-on way. I had one brutally honest child who informed me that the program was lame because he learned all of it in school last year (however, I'd like to point out that he still participated in everything) but a little girl rallied to my defense and told him (with all the sass a pre-teen can muster), “Well I didn't learn all this last year and I liked it!” Gotta love when your kids back you up!

 

And this is me.... best hat ever!

If I could redo this program, I would give myself 2 hours rather than 1, and I would rethink the door hangers. I don't think they were altogether a bad idea, but I think I would try to find hieroglyphic stamps and possible have pre-approved slogans.

Let's Start at the Very Beginning

Let's talk a little about who I am and what I do.

I've worked in libraries my whole life. When I was little I would spend my summers helping my step-mother at the branch library she ran in upstate New York. I helped with everything I could! Circulation, cataloging, shelving, even a few programs. I have fond memories of putting together my first ever storytime at that library. (We read The Little Mouse. the Red Ripe Strawberry, and the Big Hungry Bear. Still a favorite of mine!)

Such a sweet story.

I started working in the Virginia Beach Public Library about 6 years ago. I started out as a Clerk/Library Aide where a few coworkers took me under their wing. I was given a few small opportunities to help out with programs, just enough to get my foot in the door. When I became a part time Information Specialist I, I slowly began nudging the door open, asking for more and more program opportunities. My biggest achievement was WWSOC (the Windsor Woods Summer Otaku Club). We only got 6 meetings during two short summer months, but the popularity grew every year.

Here she is! The MEO Central Library in all her glory!

Now I work as a full time Information Specialist II at the Meyera E. Oberndorf Central Library. I've done storytimes for ages ranging from 6 months to 5 years, as well as programs for children, teens, and families. I love my job! I can't wait to share it with you all! I hope to review some of my past programs and storytimes as well as keeping you posted on current and upcoming events.

The "Means" to My "End"

Well, here we are once again. I failed horribly at my last big blogging venture. It went well for a few months, but between work, school, and general life... I dropped the ball. One reason I think things went so badly last time 'round is because my blog didn't really have a purpose. So here we are again; a brand new blog with its very own purpose!

My purpose: to share program ideas and information with my fellow librarians.

The other day my friend/colleague, Susan, and I were discussing how much we use blog posts from other librarians (not to mention their Pinterest boards) for programming inspiration and advice, and we started thinking... why not give back? I can't tell you how many times I've looked to Storytime Katie's blog just trying to find more storytime titles that go with my latest letter of the day and come away with a new song or activity to try out. And then there are any number of librarian blogs that I have stumbled onto via Pinterest only to find useful information and reviews of their own programs. I can't thank you all enough. I hope I can give back a fraction of the information and guidance you all have given me.