Watercolors!

We have a once a month series at my library for school age children, where they work on different projects based on a theme. Our Spring series focused on STEAM themes. So far we have done volcanoes, squishy circuits, Rube-Goldberg machines and recently we made watercolor paintings. Each kid got one sheet on watercolor paper and a black crayon. They then used a random assortment of circular objects to trace overlapping circles on their paper. Next, I let them choose several watercolor pencils and they filled in the "painting". They then used clean brushes and water to "paint" the pencil markings they made. It's actually very cool to see the sharp lines the pencils make turn into soft watercolors.

Pets!

To celebrate National Pet Day, the theme for Monday's storytime was Pets! The books for toddler and preschool time were slightly different, so here is what we did:

Toddler:
What Pet to Get? by Emma Dodd
 
 Puddle Pug by Kim Norman

Preschool:
Max the Brave by Ed Vere

What Pet to Get? by Emma Dodd
 
Children Make Terrible Pets by Peter Brown



We played with a flannel board titled "Five Little Birds"; we practiced counting and colors. Typically with these types of flannel boards, I will hand them out to the children and then have them place them on the board when they hear their color, ex. "If you have the green one, the green one, the green one, if you have the green one, please put it on the board." We finished with a dog ear headband craft (just like this one from About Home). Our educational element was a dog "run"; you connect paper tubes on the wall using tape and have the kids place a ball at the top of the run and watch it fall to the bottom. In this case, it was "give the ball to the dog."