Next week happens to be Banned Books Week, held nationwide in libraries and bookstores every year on the last week of September to remind people that restricting and censoring books that you might find “offensive” actually harms people because it restricts people’s freedom to read whatever they want. All that follows is a less-informed, […]
Curiosity Machine: Magnet Structures!
Published on :Everybody knows magnets are FUN, but did you know scientists use magnets when making certain kinds of polymers? Did you know that magnets can help chemists to sort out the tangled mess of molecules that most polymers consist of? Today’s Curiosity Machine class focused on Making a Self-Assembling Structure […]
Mother Daughter Book Club: The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle
Published on :This month our Mother Daughter Book Club read The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle by Avi. We met tonight to discuss Charlotte’s persecution and trial, and the many claims made by men throughout the book that she is an “unnatural” woman for having picked up sailing so quickly. If you […]
Creative Writing for Beginning Readers: School Stories
Published on :Yesterday children between the ages of 5 and 8 got practice putting together stories using creative tools we gave them. First, we discussed a famous quote by John Le Carré: The cat sat on the mat is not a story. The cat sat on the other cat’s mat is a […]
Lucha Libros Kickoff
Published on :We had lots of fun at our Lucha Libros Information Night yesterday! Kids made masks, wore capes, and took lucha libre photos. Then they lined up to get their official lucha libre name (usually something very silly making very little syntactical sense in Spanish–but fun anyway!) and got their copies […]
Kids’ Writing Workshop: Writing Style and Voice
Published on :On Friday, our Kids’ Writing Workshop discussed the elements that give a writer his or her unique “voice.” Voice is a difficult thing to define, but we read a capable definition of it in this article by Dave Hood: Developing Your Writing Voice. Hood writes that voice is composed of […]
Scratch for Experienced Users: FlappyBat!
Published on :On Friday August 14th we made videogames using Scratch. Our games were based on the infamous “Flappy Bird” videogame that brought its creators notoriety and established them in the halls of memorable bad game design forever 🙂 We followed a tutorial I created and chose new sprites for our flappy […]
Playing records with no electricity!
Published on :Monday’s hands-on science program, “The Science Behind Recording Music,” challenged tweens to come up with several iterations of a gramophone that could play the sound stored on a vinyl record with only their hands to power it. First tweens learned about the history of sound recording and its great inventors, then we […]
Craig Newton’s Really Big Music Show
Published on :On August 8th, 2015 we had a special guest, Craig Newton, put on a music show for families in our Donald Wright Auditorium! He brought a ton of instruments and demonstrated them all to the kids, teaching them about how musical instruments work, as well as giving them exercises in […]
Meet the kids’ grand prize winner for Central Library!
Published on :The Central Library’s Children’s Summer Reading Challenge winner is Diego, a kindergartener who completed his whole reading game board and then was randomly selected to take home our squishable Porter the Polar Bear. Here he is with his prize: And here’s Angela Arzu, manager of Youth Services, congratulating him and presenting him […]