Ten Valentine's Day Activities for Beginning Readers

One of my favorite holidays to celebrate in library programs is Valentine’s Day, especially with elementary students. Today’s “Ten Things” post focuses on Valentine’s Day themed activities to share with beginning readers.

• Read It’s Valentine’s Day by Jack Prelutsky.
  The poems in this book are short, funny, clever, and easy to read. They celebrate the fun of Valentine’s Day without being too sappy, and they focus on the day-to-day events that are important in the lives of early elementary kids.  
• Make a Valentine word cloud.
  Ask kids which words they associate with Valentine’s Day and make a list on a posterboard heart. If they’re slow to open up, start the list for them, then watch as their brains begin to make connections. Soon, they’ll be shouting out everything from “Ew, kissing!” to “I have a boyfriend!”
• Write conversation hearts.
  Provide a sheet of blank hearts and have the kids write messages to their friends, family members, even their pets. For added fun, provide some actual candy hearts to eat while they write.
• Do a choral reading of Will You Be My Valentine? 
  Provide each child with a copy of this wonderful printable easy reader created by Kathy Romano and Christina Murphy. Read it aloud as a group, using the illustrations as clues to help decode each animal’s name. Have the kids add to the story using their own favorite animals.
• Draw a Valentine portrait.
  Ask the kids to choose who would they like to be their Valentine, and have them draw a picture of that person. Help them write a few sentences describing their Valentine. 
• Write messages in Valentine cards.
  There’s always room for making good old-fashioned Valentines! Provide lots of art materials, if that’s your style, or simply provide plain paper and colored pencils. Be on hand to help kids spell the names of their friends, or to help kids brainstorm what they’d like to say to the people they love. 
• Read Valentines from fictional characters.
  Write up a set of Valentine cards addressed to well-known characters from their friends. Have the kids guess who each one is from. (Some suggestions for fictional pairs who might exchange cards can be found here.)
• Match rhyming words - one on each half of a heart.
  Create a set of hearts in Word or Publisher. Print rhyming words onto both halves of each heart, then cut them apart and laminate. Have the kids try to match up the broken hearts by finding matching rhymes. 
• Make a love list.
  Kids can practice writing with this simple list activity from Apples and ABCs, which provides an opportunity for the child to write the names of everyone he loves. (I originally found the idea via Pinterest.)
• Play Bag of Verbs (Hearts Edition).
  One of my favorite activities to do with beginning readers is “Bag of Verbs.” This is just a brown paper bag filled with action words. Kids each have a turn to draw from the bag, and everyone acts out each motion. To make it more festive for the holiday, simply print your verbs on paper hearts, or write them on foam hearts with a Sharpie.

LibraryAdventure.com: Ten Passive Library Programs for Tweens

Having trouble getting attendance for your tween programs? Try one of the ten passive program ideas I'm sharing today at The Library Adventure.

Flannel Friday: Old King Cole

When you spend all day with a baby, you also spend a lot of time with kids' music, books, and toys. One day, while feeding my daughter and listening to Sharon, Lois, and Bram, I heard their version of Old King Cole for the first time. The first verse is the traditional rhyme that most of us know, where the king calls for his three fiddlers.  The second and third verses, however, change the instrument from a fiddle to a clarinet, and then to a trumpet. I have used other similar adaptations of nursery rhymes in story times in the past, and I immediately thought that Old King Cole would make a nice addition to that list. Specifically, I like that it  provides an opportunity to introduce musical vocabulary into story time and to teach kids that there are words for instruments, as well as specific titles for the people who play those instruments.

To mimic what I would do on an actual flannel board, I created just a single slide in Google Drive, where the pipe and bowl and the various instruments fade in and out to show how they would be added to and removed from the flannel board. Below are the presentation, my script for sharing this flannel board with preschoolers, and links for all the clipart I used.

(Click the right arrow to advance the presentation.)

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Sing: 
(Hear the Sharon, Lois, and Bram version of the song here.)
Old King Cole was a merry old soul 
and a merry old soul was he!
He called for his pipe, 
and he called for his bowl,
and he called for his fiddlers three.

Add pipe and bowl to the flannel board as they are named, but do not yet add the fiddles.

Say:
Hmmm... what is a fiddle? A violin! Right! And if we have three fiddlers, how many fiddles do we need? That's right! Three! Help me count them, okay?

Add fiddles to flannel board, counting aloud with the children. 

How would you play a fiddle? Let's pretend to play our fiddles as we sing the second part of the song.

Pretend to play a violin.

Sing: 
Every fiddler had a fine fiddle,
And a very fine fiddle had he;
Oh there's none so rare, as can compare
With King Cole and his fiddlers three.

Repeat full rhyme twice more, substituting fiddles with clarinets and trumpets.

Say:
Now it's your turn. Which instrument would you like to sing about next?

Possible choices are included at the end of the Google Drive presentation - oboe, saxophone, flute, and harp.

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You can download the clipart images I used from the following links:

• King
• Pipe
• Bowl
• Fiddle
• Clarinet
• Trumpet
• Oboe
• Harp
• Saxophone
• Flute

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This week, Flannel Friday is hosted by Kathryn at Fun with Friends at Storytime. For more on Flannel Friday, visit the official website.

At the Children's Desk: A Day of Questions, Volume II

In the weeks before I left my job, my duties away from the reference desk began to dwindle, and I started really focusing my attention on answering questions. There were several days in September and early October where I was on the desk more often than I was not, and on those days, I took notes, keeping track of every question I was asked, and by whom. Today's post focuses on the questions I handled during the last shift of the day on Thursday, September 19. I mostly let the questions speak for themselves because they're more interesting - and funnier - that way, but I have included some notes in brackets where necessary.

3:30 p.m. - 5:30 p.m.

• Senior Citizen Woman: Do you have a post-it note? Do you have Scotch tape? Do you have a pen? Is this book [just sitting on the desk] available?
•  Staff Member: Can you find out how old the person on computer 2 is? 
• Teacher: You were a CYBILS judge, too? Where do you blog? Do you have a graphic novel collection? 
• Same Senior Citizen Woman:  I need to rewrite my note. I guess this is the paper? And this is the tape? Did you hear about that library in Fairfax that threw away all those books? 
• Middle Schooler: I came up with an adjective at school today that seemed really obvious at the time, but now I can't remember what it was. It starts with D, and it means horrible. (And I need it to do my homework.)  [Answer: Dreadful] 
• Same Senior Citizen Woman: What is this library, four or five years old now? 
• Same Middle Schooler: Do you know where Miss [name of coworker] is? Is she going to be on the desk? 
• Child: Can I borrow a pencil? 
• Adult: How do you get to use a computer?

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5:30 p.m. - LIBRARY CLOSES

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To see a full day of questions, check out Day of Questions Volume I.