Story Crafternoon is a program our library offers to elementary aged kids, who have gotten too old for our preschool story time. This program typically involves a story and a craft or activity. With Easter coming up, I really wanted to do something involving peeps and found a cute program called "Protect Your Peeps". There wasn't very much description of the program at all but overall, the impression I got was it had something to do with floating
peeps on a raft. So that's what we did! Rafts were built using large Popsicle sticks and duck tape.
The idea was to see how many peeps your raft could hold, without sinking or peeps falling off into the water. ... And surprisingly enough, we had no problems with drowning peeps or sinking rafts.
We used two clear plastic tubs and filled them halfway with water to float our rafts.
I did have trouble finding a good storybook to relate to the activity though, so instead I opted to tell the story of John Wesley Powell, the first man to sail down the Colorado River.
In the Children's department, we did have an easy-ish book Down Colorado by Deborah Kogan Ray, but since it was longer than the kids are used to, I wasn't sure about reading it. Telling the story worked out great though!
For those of you who are unfamiliar with the story... John Wesley Powell was a nature enthusiast and
loved exploring outdoors. He lost his arm at the battle of Shiloh during the Civil War. Afterwards he began to teach and made many trips out west with his students, where he began to form a plan on how he would explore the Grand Canyon and the Colorado River (which no one had ever mapped before). With a few boats and men, he set out to map the river. The river consisted of many dangerous rapids and waterfalls and as their journey progressed, some of the men left the party.
On the 96th day they came upon what looked to be most dangerous rapid they had seen! Three of the men were certain that if they were to attempt to proceed down the rapid they would all die. These men decided to turn around and leave as John Wesley Powell and the remaining crew continued on. It turned out that the rapid was not nearly as terrible as they had thought and within minutes had safely passed.
Three days later, Powell and the crew reached the end of the river. So if those three men had stayed just a little longer, they could have made history but instead, they backed out when things got rough.
This book does have a nice map in the back that tracks and dates their travels down the river, which was a good reference to show the kids.