Summer Reading Week 3

This week I had 19 events with a total attendance of 460. Numbers are a little down this week for two reasons. I didn't have one of my day camp groups and the local folk school is having a kids camp this week.

Here's a breakdown of the week:

• 5 community story times
• 4 community school age events
• 1 day camp story time
• 6 day camp school age events
• 1 movie
• 1 special event (2nd Peter Rabbit Party)
• 1 teen event (Mad Hatter Tea Party)

This week the story time theme was Digging Up Dinosaurs. The school age event theme was Dig Into the Past--Dinosaurs. Links are to my wiki for full agendas. Both went really well although I stumbled a bit with some of the dino names. Favorite books of the week were Dinosaurs Galore by Giles Andreae and Prehistoric Actual Size by Steve Jenkins. For the school age groups, we made pasta dino skeletons and raced dinosaurs. I got this ideas from the 2009 CSLP manual. It was a sea serpent race, but I couldn't find sea serpents back then so I used dinosaurs. Basically you put small plastic dinosaurs in an ice cube tray and fill it with water. The dinos will not be all the way covered. You then make your race track by propping a cookie sheet on a chair. Great fun!

The 2nd Peter Rabbit Party went much better than the first. I tweaked the agenda and made a new felt set. One of the games confused the youngest kids so I may be changing that up before next week. I promise a post on the Peter Rabbit Party will be forthcoming. THe agenda that the link takes you to is very rough. I haven't had a chance to revise it.

The Mad Hatter Tea Party was great fun! We had 8 tweens/teens which is a good turnout. A few came in costume (it wasn't required.) We had the dormouse, the White Rabbit, Tweedledee, and Tweedledum. I came as the Cheshire Cat (pictures will be forthcoming!) I can usually guarantee 5 will show up. Although I really need about 2 hours to prep for an event like that and I only had 1 hour and 15 minutes. I like to decorate the meeting room and fix the food. Both require time. A post about the event will be coming soon I promise. I wrote my very 1st scavenger hunt for the tea party and the teens seemed to like it. We also had a few more teens sign up for the reading contest during the tea party. I'm hoping our next teen event (a movie night) will have a even bigger attendance.

Next week, I have 24 events including the last two Peter Rabbit Parties.