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 […]
Family Storytime: Starting School!
Published on :Today’s storytime celebrated school, which kids in our local public schools have already started, and kids in our private schools are starting soon! We started with the song “Clap Your Hands” and then read the book Llama Llama Misses Mama by Anna Dewdney. In the book, our little llama is […]
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 […]
Creative Writing for Beginning Readers: Bookworm Books!
Published on :This month’s Creative Writing for Beginning Readers class took inspiration from the book Violet and Victor Write the Best-Ever Bookworm Book by Alice Kuipers and illustrated by Bethany Murguia. It’s a very cute book about a boy and a girl who make up a story about a bookworm who slips […]
Kids’ Writing Workshop with Kirk Scroggs!
Published on :Last Friday our Kids’ Writing Workshop welcomed author Kirk Scroggs, who wrote the Wiley & Grampa’s Creature Features series, the Snoop Troop series and the Tales of a Sixth-Grade Muppet series. He gave us a presentation about his books and characters, and then we did activities where we took a […]