Terrific Trick-or-Treaters!

The dress up fun begins early at the library! And marching to the music in the costume parade uses our gross motor skills, taps into the musical, kinesthetic part of our learning. Plus... it's fun!

Friendly Bats

Bat, Bat, come under my hat

and I'll give you a piece of bacon.

And when I bake, I'll give you a cake

if I am not mistaken.

At this time of the year, Halloween vampires and horror movies reinforce our cultural dislike for bats. This is sad and ironic, as these small flying mammals are extremely beneficial to us. I was fortunate to watch the awesome exodus of a colony of Mexican free-tail bats out of Carlsbad Caverns (New Mexico) at dusk last summer. About 300,000 bats spiral out of the mouth of the cave then head off to spend the night eating insects. It can take up to half an hour for them to exit the cave! Insect-eating bats can eat up to half their body weight in mosquitoes and other pests. Other bats play an essential role in pollination or seed dispersal.

Come on into the library and find out more about friendly bats!

Terrific Toddlers do some cracking good counting!

I love to do this counting rhyme every week at T4! Here you go Mimi!

Potato Counting Rhyme

One potato, two potato, three potato, four! (count with your fingers)
Well, I made a batch of hot potatoes (bend forward and stir as in a big pot)
Dropped 'em on the floor!! (look shocked, and put hands on face in surprise)

Five potato, six potato, seven potato, eight! (count with your fingers)
So I stomped 'em into mashed potatoes (stomp the potatoes!)
And plopped 'em on a plate (hands out like plopping potatoes on a plate!)

Nine potato, ten potato, (count with your fingers)
Can't believe my eyes! (cover and uncover eyes in surprise)
The children ate 'em up and now they want some french fries!!!
1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10
French fries! (jump up and reach over head to sky on 10)


Miss Heather made a video of it for us, just in case you wish to see it in action!

It's our Terrific Sculptors!

Today we had stories and rhymes about dogs, and we had a sculpture of a dog, too!

It's a guy holding a balloon!

It's a cable car! Way to go!

Mmmm, ice cream. "Good job," Joshua told himself!

Today we had fun with the letter D.

One of our young artists wished to be the photographer, not the photographee. Good job, Tellie!

Play Dough at the library

Play dough is a lot of fun! Not only is it fun to play with, it is lots of fun to make, too. You can make a really great toy at home with your kids and secretly teach them! Smaller children can dump in the ingredients and mix with their hands, using their gross motor skills. Older children can practice measuring skills. They can use their fine motor skills to manipulate and shape the dough. Maybe you will bring out the cookie cutters and can talk about shapes. Maybe you will use food coloring to tint the dough. Maybe you will use more than one color so that they can mix the colored doughs to see what color they end up with! I bet you’ll come up with even more ideas!

Here’s how you can make some at home.

Play Dough Ingredients:
3 cups flour
1.5 cups salt
1/4 cup vegetable oil
1 cup water

Optional stuff to color it:
Kool-Aid or other drink mix
food coloring

If you have a standing mixer with a dough hook, I recommend using it for this project. Otherwise, make sure someone is standing by with an emergency arm massage. The dough is very stiff!

Put the flour and salt into the bowl and turn the mixer on low. If you will be using Kool-Aid drink mix, add it with the dry ingredients. With the mixer running, add the vegetable oil, then the water in a stream. Let it run for about a minute. You want the dough to come together in one ball. If it looks dry - kinda clumpy or sandy and won't smooth out- add more water and a tiny splash of oil. If you overdo it on the wet stuff, add more flour a spoonful at a time until it looks right.

The salt adds structure but doesn't seem to melt. I would have thought that it would, but you can still feel the edges of the salt inside the dough. When you knead the dough with your hands, you can feel how plasticy and moldable it is. I was expecting that I would have to do lots of experimenting and overbought on the flour. I was expecting it to feel like bread dough. But it was way more like commercial play dough than I would have thought. Play-Doh probably has more stabilisers in it and all, but this is pretty awesome.

The advantage to commercial Play-Doh are the colors. They are much brighter, and they even sell "Sprinkle," "Sparkle," and "Sand" cans. You can color the play dough you make at home with unsweetened drink mix, aka "Kool-Aid" or drops of food coloring. I mixed a packet of Cherry flavored off brand drink mix (really, it was less than half the price). Well, it is barely pink. Barely. The cool thing is that now it smells like Cherry flavor.

The Grape drink mix made a terrible grey color, not like purple at all. I ended up opening up the drink mix packets and wetting the powder a tiny bit to see what color it would turn. Once I found the red ones, I dumped them all in! You can see from the picture how it turned out.

For Mystery Dough:
Make a batch of plain colored dough. Divide the dough and hide the drops of food coloring in the middle and pinch everything closed. Give it to the children in a plastic bag and let them knead it to mix the colors. For this type of coloring, drops work better than the drink mix powder.

I hope that you get to make this at home! If you have any questions, leave a comment! If you have done this before with your kids, leave a comment!

Time for some Terrific Tales!

Whoo hoo! T4 is back!

Besides telling Terrific Tales to our Twos and Threes, we like to slide in some early literacy skills. So we like to have name tags for the kids that we keep at the library and that the children find before every storytime.

Which brings me to one more thing that they didn't cover in library school: What exactly makes a great toddler name tag? And let me tell you, I totally sweated this one. I could not find any ideas, not even one! Come on now, Internet! Isn't this what you are for? Anyway, we came up with an idea which I present to you, our dear reader.


Step 1) With one 8.5x11 piece of lightweight cardstock, fold lengthwise.

Step 2) Cut this sheet horizontally into 4 equal pieces (see photo below).













Step 3) Let the toddlers use the glue stick to glue the folded paper together. They can look at the texture. They can feel that it is sticky. They can experience how a glue stick works and use their fine motor skills.

Step 4) Let the toddlers decorate the glued-together piece of cardstock with stickers and markers. We happened to get a big donation of color coding dots from someone's office cleanout. They are great! We also use tons of those fun foam alphabet stickers (thank you, Inventor of Fun Foam, whoever you may be!) and I admit to pulling out the inside cutaway pieces and putting them in the sticker tray.

Here's another tip: We put the art materials in desk trays that we bought from the office store. All the bits and bobs fit so nicely in the compartments!
















Step 5) After the toddlers have decorated the glued-together cardstock as they wish, it's time for their name. Adults, now you write their name on a sticker label. Talk to them as you are writing about how their name is spelled. Write the letters. Say the name of the letters. When you're done, give them the sticker to place on the name tag.

Step 6) Use your hole punch to make a wide enough opening to fit the clip. We bought these clips at the office supply store and they are not expensive. You don't have to worry about having something around the children's necks.

Before each storytime, we clip the name tags to our easel (which we've equipped with our pretend clothesline) and the children go and find their name tags. Below is one of our friends making her name tag :)

Terrific Tales for Twos 'n Threes is coming soon!