Category: Announcements

In Case You Missed It!

incaseyoumisseditpng

Welcome to the semi-regular installment of “In Case You Missed It!”

This week is a little bit light since Firefox crashed while I was going through my starred posts in Google Reader and I lost half of what I wanted to link! Posts span the last two weeks, since ALA Midwinter got in the way of making this a weekly feature. Since it’s a long couple of weeks, I separated posts out by topic instead of post date. Let me know which way works better!

    On Librarianship

  • Melissa writes about touchstones and what little momentos can get you through the day when it’s rough! On my desk, I have a postcard that one of my dear ILOAs e-sent me, my Scaredy Squirrel puppet (the first book I read kids at my library was “Scaredy Squirrel”), a crayon art piece that my teens and I made, and drawings from my storytime kids who interrupted storytime to give me.
  • Anne has her follow-up results post about Ethical Problems #2 — the answers are FASCINATING to read! I didn’t get a chance to answer since I was at Midwinter, but a lot of my answers would have needed clarification; ethical questions are so tricky!
  • Abby wrote a great post about why joining ALA matters and why she’s renewing her ALA membership. As someone who has really gotten a great return on her own investment into ALA, I absolutely agree with Abby!
  • Live bloggers once again invaded the ALSC Blog for Midwinter, offering their insights into tons of programming, events, and meetings!

    On Books

  • YOUTH MEDIA AWARDS. Do I need to say anything more?
  • Marge breaks down her ten truths about award reactions! This list is GOLD and was picked up in AL Direct!

    On Programming

  • Abby talked about STEM programming with her “Mad Science at the Library” program for grades 3rd-6th. Basically, her blog post made me jump up and down with space nerd geekery. I really want to try this for my kids at some point!
  • Amy shares the results of her programming style survey! I love learning that I’m not alone in how I plan my programs.
  • Marge is still rocking her 1000 Books Before Kindergarten program. Her post has a great round-up of links all about the program’s inception and her library’s specific events and materials.

    On Early Literacy/Childhood

  • Mollie wrote a brilliant post about early literacy and speech development! The breadth of knowledge shared blows me away and I can’t wait to start implementing some of what I learned in storytime practices and passing it along to my storytime families!
  • Melissa also has another Early Literacy Storytime Idea — Pointing to a Word! If you are struggling for ways to teach your parents in storytime, look no further than Melissa’s tips.
  • Beth gave two wonderful lists about Early Childhood blogs *outside* of the library world! I definitely added quite a few to my Google Reader account! Here’s the links to List 1 and List 2.

    On Flannel Friday

  • Sarah has the Mushy Gushy Valentine Round-Up from two weeks ago — make sure to get your ideas bookmarked and done before Valentine’s Day!
  • Anne has this week’s round-up which includes a survey in preparation for Flannel Friday’s second anniversary!! Please go add your information if you’ve ever participated in Flannel Friday!
  • Sharon has a Flannel Friday Announcement, all about preparation for Flannel Friday’s second anniversary!! If you don’t have a blog, I am willing to host guest posts for this special occasion!

See you next week!

ALA Midwinter!

alamidwinter

Just a heads-up that I was at ALA Midwinter this week and am working on getting caught up from all I missed! Regular posting will start again tomorrow with an entry to Flannel Friday!

If you’re visiting from the Preschool Services Discussion Group, I will have the photos of my storytime rules up next week on Tuesday!

ABC Storytime Resource Post

I’m very appreciative of the blogs and websites that I drew inspiration from for my ABC Storytime Series:

Everyone at Totally Tots
Pam’s blog MotherReader
Jaymi’s blog Explore to Learn

Most of what I needed help with was coming up with ideas for the letters. If I took any fingerplays, songs, or rhymes, I did note it in the write-ups.

And finally, a listing of all the letters:

Letter A
Letter B
Letter C
Letter D
Letter E
Letter F
Letter G
Letter H
Letter I
Letter J
Letter K
Letter L
Letter M
Letter N
Letter O
Letter P
Letter Q
Letter R
Letter S
Letter T
Letter U
Letter V
Letter W
Letter X
Letter Y
Letter Z

Thank you all for sticking with me throughout this! I hope that the storytimes gave you some good ideas — I know that the kids and I loved them! Stay tuned, I’m planning on posting pictures of all of the Letter Puzzles, even if I can’t upload them!

Announcing Growing Readers!

growingreaderspng

Starting in November, Tuesdays on the blog will be “Growing Readers” day! My library received a grant from Target to begin an after-school storytime program for children learning to read. We’ll be sharing lots of different kinds of early literacy activities, as well as stories, songs, and rhymes.

Next week, I’ll do a brief outline for how the story portion of the program runs. After that, each week will be a new literacy activity. At each program so far, we’ve done five table activities — so I should have lots of material to work with and post about.

I hope that this new feature will get you excited about early literacy and incorporating it into a new program or into an existing program!

ALA Annual!

The blog has been very quiet this week since I was at ALA Annual in Anaheim! Regularly scheduled posting will begin again tomorrow, just in time for Flannel Friday!

Exciting Flannel Friday Announcement!

I am pleased to post this announcement, along with many other amazing bloggers this morning. Flannel Friday is one of my favorite parts of the week and I’m happy to see how much it keeps growing!

Exciting news for Flannel Friday!

Introducing the Flannel Friday website!

As you know, Anne at So Tomorrow has been an amazing manager and archiver of Flannel Friday information for the past year. Anne and her husband are expecting their first baby in June (congratulations Anne!) so we wanted to give her a break from Flannel Friday during her maternity leave. So this spring, Anne and Mel from Mel’s Desk and a small group of old and new Flannel Friday-ers worked to create a new web home for Flannel Friday.

Here’s the link! http://flannelfridaystorytime.blogspot.com

The new site will be the home of the Round Up Schedule, the archives, FAQs about Flannel Friday, information about how to get involved with Flannel Friday, and links to help new members get started with social networking and blogging. There will also be a link to the week’s Round Up, but the Round Up will continue to be hosted on individual blogs. We’ll just point to each Round Up from the site.

Refining the Round Up Procedure

The Flannel Friday community has grown continuously over the year, with new bloggers, new Round Up Hosts, and new members every week on Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter. We are building an amazing community and are grateful to each and every one of you for your participation and enthusiasm. As the group has grown, you’ve probably noticed that so have the Round Ups! We’ve seen an inevitable increase in missed links and general confusion as the Round Ups are compiled. We thought that the launch of the new site was a great opportunity to take a page from other round ups in the blogosphere and establish one single method for building the Round Up each week.

This information will be in the FAQs on the new site, but here’s our new strategy in a nutshell:

Every week the Round Up Host will publish a “placeholder” post for the Round Up on the host blog at 10pm EST on Thursday.
Each blogger who wants to participate in the Round Up will make a comment to the Round Up post with the link back to their Flannel Friday post by 10pm EST on Friday.
This will be the only place to post links for the Round Up! This way the Host won’t have to worry about checking Facebook or Twitter as well.
If a blogger can’t make the 10pm EST deadline on Friday, we’ll ask that the post be held for the next week’s Round Up.
The Round Up Host will gather links from the Round Up post comments throughout the day, and publish the Round Up at the end of the day.

We hope this will make the Round Ups easier to create and easier to contribute to! We’ll look forward to your feedback over the next few weeks. Sharon / @ReadingChick at Rain Makes Applesauce has the Round Up this week, 5/11, so she’s going to try out the new procedure with us and see how it goes!

If you have questions or comments, don’t hesitate to share them via the new Flannel Friday email: flannelboardfriday [at] gmail.com.

Thanks for all you do to to make Flannel Friday more than a blog event–but a great community too. Here’s to the next great year of Flannel Friday!

Small Announcement!

Hi, everyone!

Just a quick post to let you know that I upgraded to a domain name yesterday! You can now reach this blog at http://storytimekatie.com. If you wanted to update your bookmarks, now would be the time!

(WordPress is handling forwarding though, so if don’t feel like updating your bookmarks, I completely understand! You’ll still reach the blog just fine.)

Please let me know if you see anything wonky. Or if the RSS feeds suddenly stop posting things. And I’ll be back tomorrow with another Flannel Friday!

Storytime Break

I am currently on a storytime break until December! I do have two 3-7 year-olds programs this month, so you’ll see those posts after I do the programs. Also, I’m working on backdating my storytimes from before I started the blog, and also better organizing my songs, rhymes, and flannelboards.

I also have a planned post all about the fall flannelboards I made and didn’t make any posts about (since that’s what I’m getting the most search hits for), and also a step-by-step look at how I go about making my flannelboards.

But while I’m not posting…I’ll leave you with a picture of my brand-new storytime closet. When our library flooded over the summer, we had to re-do our entire programming area, and it was decided that we needed a closet just for storytime. And with our Target Early Literacy Grant, we were also able to purchase materials to fill it up. I am so excited about it!

And of our new steel bookcase, with our storytime collection of books: