DIY Journals @ the library

•  Journal Pages
• Cover and Back of Journal (cardboard pieces)
• Construction paper
• Hot glue gun
• Rubber Cement
• Duct Tape
• Decorating Supplies
• Binder Clips (not required but helpful)

For a little extra challenge this summer, our bulletin board was an interactive competition between boys and girls. 

Every time a reading log was turned in, participants came to the desk and placed a sticker on the current weeks section. 

Here the how...

The lined paper was made on poster board. This year, our program was 7 weeks long so there were seven lines. 

Each lined section had a duplicate blank piece of poster board cut out just smaller than it's section.

Can you see the duplicate sheet in this picture?

Each week, we'd have the duplicate, blank pieces sitting on the desk, attached to clipboards. 

Each gender had their own clipboard so they knew which piece to put a sticker on. At the end of the week, I'd attach the newly stickered piece to the main lined poster board posted on the bulletin board. 

Because I failed to get a picture of the bulletin board in its entirety, this was to the far left. 

My thought was to keep track of how many books were read each week and update thermometer to reflect that. 

That was a stupid idea. It was a pain and too much effort during the midst of all the summer craziness. After the first couple weeks, I started randomly raising the level just to show that we were still reading. No accurate groundwork or counting. 😬 It's not my proudest moment. 

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For our fourth "I Survived" book club meeting we talked about the Joplin Tornado. This program was broken down into 3 parts: Book discussion, snacks and an activity.

 Discussion 

 Of all the discussions we've had this was the most involved. Our library isn't located in Tornado Alley, but tornadoes aren't all that uncommon where we live so most of the group were familiar with these storms.

As always, at the beginning of our discussion we each picked a favorite part of the book and shared it with the group. Other topics points we hit were how tornadoes form, their features, the destruction
they cause and tornado safety. Aside from general tornadoes, of course we talked about the Joplin tornado.

One of the grandmothers in our group even had a boss who had grown up in Joplin and she shared a bit of his family's experience!

If you remember from the story, Dex's parents were at a graduation for the local high school students when the tornado hit. The graduation wasn't held at the high school but instead at the Leggett and Platt arena on Missouri Southern State University campus and was actually used as an emergency shelter in real life. For some reason, the minor fact involving Dex's parents to have foundations in truth caught my attention. From Graduation to Terror and JHS Class of 2011 Reflects On Graduation, Future were two memorable articles I read.

Emergency Kit Relay Activity
Instead of a craft (and because the only good themed craft I could find was Tornado in a Bottle, which I did NOT want to do) we played a relay game!

Emergency Kits are so important to have and in this game, teams are building their own kits to prepare themselves against future disasters in a relay style game.

During our discussion we made sure to talk about Emergency Kits briefly! 

Cards with images representing various items were printed off and spread across a table face up. Most of the items were very useful to a traumatic event and some of them weren't.

HOW TO PLAY

Divide into 2 or 3 teams - we did Boys vs Girls with about 7 on each team.

The way our room was set up was we had a table on one end where all the Item Cards were spread out face up and players stood at the other end of the room.

Each team had to stand single file behind a chair which marked as their boundary limit. No one could go past that chair until a member of their team had returned with an Item Card. Teams placed their Item Card on the seat of the chair once they came back. 

This continued on relay-style until all the Item Cards were chosen. 

Each item had been given a point value so to choose the winning team, groups tallied up their score while I gave each point value out loud. 

Here's a link to the Item Cards and the Point Value Sheet I made. Feel free to use them! The pictures for the Item Cards are straight off Google Images so one or two have watermarks... 😣

Item Cards

Point Value Sheet

Graph Map Activity

 This is an activity that we didn't have time to do but I'll share it with you anyway! This activity is about reaching safety using an X,Y grid and directions.

In the Lauren Tarshis's books, having a sense of direction is very crucial to survival. In I Survived: The Joplin Tornado, Dex has to find his way from Peter's Garage to his home. That would be HARD when all the landmarks you've ever known were gone. 

One of the themes of this series is getting away from danger and in an emergency, we might have to rely on how to read a map to get us out of a dangerous situation. 

This Graph Map Activity was inspired by the Disaster Route Lesson on  Stem Read which is a very handy little website. 

In this activity we would discuss cardinal direction, compass rose and use directions to travel across an X,Y grid to safety.

To tie it into the Joplin Tornado, I was able to superimpose an X,Y grid with this picture of the Joplin Tornado's path of destruction.

Because this map had schools distinctively marked on the map, those were able to be transferred onto our Map Activity Sheet.

My goal was, using the graph map to travel from one of the schools in the tornado's path to the safe school. The thought was we could do one as a group and then form teams of two and each person could take turns giving each other directions.

Well, that's all I have to share about this Book Club meeting. Overall, it was my favorite and your group will LOVE the Emergency Kit Relay Game if you do it!

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For our third "I Survived" book club meeting we talked about the San Francisco Earthquake. This program was broken down into 3 parts: book discussion, snack and activity.

 If I'm being perfectly honest, this was not my favorite "I Survived" book and I'm afraid that might have played a part in our discussion. This book just didn't capture me like Thomas's heroism in I Survived: The Battle of Gettysburg or Ben's journey of survival in I Survived: The Japanese Tsunami. But this isn't a book review so I'll keep my opinions to myself 😉

After discussing our favorite parts and asking questions about the book, we covered a couple different talking points.  These included the science behind an earthquake and impacts of the San Francisco earthquake and what made this event so unique. 

This group actually found the resulting fire that broke out in the city very interesting - especially the part where several buildings were blown up with dynamite in attempts to stall the fires. I even read that people in towns 50 miles away said the fire gave off so much light, they could read a newspaper at midnight.

Themed snacks were a little harder to come up with for this book club meeting than the others had been, but we managed. /div>

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Ever design an interactive Bulletin Board and then later say, WHAT WAS I THINKING?!

 

That was this bulletin board. 

For the Pyeonchang Winter Olympics, I wanted a Bulletin Board that reflected the festivities and excitement of the various sports. 

For this board, each winter sport was represented and my thought process was that as each country placed in a specific sport, it would get a medal. 

It would be updated frequently and anyone who came into the library could see at a glance, "Oh look how many medals the Netherlands have in Speed Skating!" 

Who knew there were so many medals given out!!

BULLETIN BOARD UP KEEP

At least once a week the board was updated to reflect current medals. 

This included continuously printing off flags for various countries and cutting out medals. A LOT of medals. 

This board required a good bit of maintenance - definitely something that wouldn't have been possible in the summer.  

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I Survived: The Japanese Tsunami, 2011 by Lauren Tarshis 

For our second "I Survived" book club meeting we talked about the Japanese Tsunamis. This program was broken up into 3 parts: Book Discussion, Snack and Activity.

Discussion

Everything about this book was interesting and there was SO MUCH to talk about! Everyone in the group had read the book, so we started talking about our favorite parts of the book right away. 

We actually covered alot of talking points in our discussion. This included talking about how a tsunami happens, Japanese history of tsunami's, tsunami's in America and the factors that made this event so unique (earthquake, tsunami and Fukushima).

One thing the kids found particularly neat was the "Sai-Shou-Maru", a fishermans boat that was cast out to sea and traveled over 4000 miles to Long Beach, Washington!  Here's the link to one of the articles.   The library has a great globe that we looked at to find Japan and Washington state to better visualize the distance the boat traveled. 

Snack Time :) 

It only seemed fitting to have Japanese snacks! Fortune Cookies, Pocky sticks (which are just like chocolate covered biscuit sticks), seaweed, green tea and coconut water. 

I even brought my Hello Kitty coffee pot in to make the hot water for our green tea 😄 

Another option for snacks was candy sushi, which is made with fruit roll up and other gummy candies. If we hadn't of planned a messy and more time-intensive activity we might have done that, instead. 

 Tsunami + Lego Re-enactment

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I Survived: The Battle of Gettysburg by Lauren Tarshis 

If you've never heard of the I Survived series by Lauren Tarshis and you work with elementary ages then I can only assume you've been living under a rock for the past year or so. These books are nearly on par with Diary of a Wimpy Kid and Geronimo Stilton in our library - we can barely keep them on the shelf! Very popular. 

This realistic fiction series takes historical events such as wars and natural disasters and puts a child right in the midst of it. It's almost similar to the American Girl series in that respect however, one thing I like about this series is they are more gender neutral - making them a perfect series to base a book club around. This was my thought process when I choose this series for our 2018 school aged book club. 

I Survived: The Battle of Gettysburg was the first on our list.

For this book club meeting , we broke it up into up into 3 parts: Discussion, Craft and Snacks.

Discussion

While trying to prepare for this program, I watched Youtube videos, documentaries and read several books trying to figure out what we could spend an afternoon talking about. Of course we would talk about the book, but I also wanted to talk about the war and what the daily life of a Civil War soldier would have been like. But yall, I became SO overwhelmed! There was just too much information and I hit a mental wall. 

Thankfully my dad, an Army National Guard veteran was able to come out and talk about the Civil War! 

As a collector (and with approval!), he was able to bring several neat things to show the kids including: an 1862 musket with a bayonet, an 1856 coin, and 1863 coin - which was VERY cool since that was when our book was set - and some bullets that were dug up at Shiloh. 

My coworker, whose husband was a very enthusiastic reenactor several years back even let us borrow a coat that he would wear during reenactments. This was an authentic replica of an infantry soldiers coat.

The program lasted about an hour.  We started out discussing our favorite parts of the book,  talked about the Civil War (THANKS DAD!), made candles for our craft and had a snack.

Supplies: 1 lb Beeswax

                Candle Wicks

                Pencils

                Candy Melter

                Containers of water

This craft is repetition at it's finest!

We wrapped the candle wicks around the pencil securely and took turns dipping them into the hot wax. Once a wick had been dipped into the wax, it had to be dipped into the water. Our aim was to dip each wick 25 times (we might have lost count several times).

Eventually a candle forms. Surprisingly this wasn't as messy a craft as I had thought it would be. Instead, the bulk of the mess was just getting the dried wax off the candy melter and other containers.

Snacks for this program were cornbread and molasses cookies.

Overall, this program was a lot of fun! Although, I don't think it would have been the same without having our special guest speaker 😀 Next month is I Survived: The Japanese Tsunami... hope it lives up to this one!!

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