🌠🪐 National Astronaut Day

Each year on May 5 we celebrate National Astronaut Day to commemorate Astronaut Alan Shepard, Jr.'s space flight aboard the Freedom 7 space capsule. The 15-minute flight paved the way for future exploration and astronauts' travels into space. You can read more about National Astronaut Day on this website. 

Students could choose to visit the library today to celebrate National Astronaut Day in a small way. We began with two children's book read alouds: Garcia & Colette Go Exploring and Penguinaut!

Students gathered around for a good, old-fashioned, elementary school-style read aloud, where we also talked about the characters and illustrations. Then it was time to make!

Using ideas from different websites, students could make their own space shuttle from a template or a penguin.

From A Little Pinch of Perfect

From Huppie Mamma

Students had time to design, color, and make either (or both, if they wished) craft and take it with them today. They could choose a space shuttle template to cut and assemble, or a plate with orange paper to make their penguins. 

And then students had time to be creative!

📚 Using Nonfiction Children's Books

Often during our advisory offerings, students can select a library activity that includes a combination of print or electronic books, videos, and articles or websites related to a timely topic. Recently, students could sign up for AO's related to the children's books Snowflake Bentley and A Tower of Giraffes.

In each session, students listened to read-alouds of the books to start the sessions, paying attention to the sidebars in Snowflake Bentley and to the illustration style in A Tower of Giraffes. Students then accessed the Google Draw one-pager related to each book.

Access the one-pager HERE

Access the one-pager HERE

Taking inspiration from choice boards, one-pagers usually include video links, articles, or links to official sites when applicable. Students then have time to read about and watch related content as they choose. Other timely one-pagers that included children's picture books included topics such as these:

• National Reptile Awareness Day (blog post) that incorporated several different fiction children's books featuring a variety of reptiles
• Roller coasters (blog post) that included Marla Frazee's book Roller Coaster
• Chocolate (one-pager) that included the Who Was? biography of Milton Hershey
• Mo Willems's Pigeon (one-pager) featuring several Pigeon books

With many more weeks of school to come, children's book one-pagers are sure to continue as AO offerings. Stay tuned!

Who Knew?! 🐸🐢🦎

Today we celebrate National Reptile Awareness Day--who knew? :) To have a little fun with this "holiday," students could choose to visit the library during advisory today for a variety of activities related to the day.

Thanks to friend and colleague Lacey_Librarian, several children's books featuring reptiles were available for students to look at and read.

We picture walked our way through all of them, and we looked specifically at Art & Max by David Wiesner. Students could later look through any of the books should they choose to do so.

Also, students had access to a Google Draw one-pager with links and videos related to reptiles. 

You can access the one-pager HERE.

If you're looking for a book with reptiles, our MackinVIA catalog offers some nonfiction titles, and here in the library we have a few fiction titles with reptiles, including dragons! Why not stop by to see what's available? Happy Reptile Awareness Day!