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 […]
Mother Daughter Book Club: A Snicker of Magic
Published on :Tonight’s Mother Daughter Book Club discussed the book A Snicker of Magic by Natalie Lloyd, a magical realism book about a contemporary girl who has an extraordinary ability to see words everywhere that other people don’t see. It’s also about a charming Tennessee town which fell under a curse and […]
Creative Writing for Beginning Readers: Imaginary Friends
Published on :On July 1st, we had a program for early elementary school kids from ages 5-8 years old to encourage them to do creative writing. Miss AnnMarie prepared the materials and Mr. Nick did a wonderful job presenting it. Mr. Nick read two books: The Adventures of Beekle, The Unimaginary Friend […]
Kids’ Writing Workshop: Writing Engaging Beginnings
Published on :This month our workshop focused on that cardinal rule of writing: hook ’em with your first sentence! The activities we did got the kids writing actual first sentences and getting feedback from their peers. Here’s the handout I gave the kids. I’m a big believer in drawing inspiration from current, […]
Summer Reading Kickoff: Read to the Rhythm!
Published on :We had forty participants at our Kickoff program to our Summer Reading Challenge! Families came to our Studio On 4th to dance, make musical instruments and rock out! Here’s a video of some of the highlights of the program: We had a Wii set up for dancing: We made […]