Kindergarten/1st grade Librarian Class Visit

Newspaper clipping of Grandpa Simpson shaking his fist.
Headline reads "Old Man Yells at Cloud".

In November, a K-1 split teacher at a local parochial school wanted a tour of the North community branch library, which is about a half-mile away and therefore walking distance for the small class.

Except, you know, when the high is 17 degrees.

After the class rescheduled twice and cancelled at basically the last minute once, we probably could have just said, "hey, we'll see you in the Spring." But truthfully, this wasn't one of our "regular field trip patron" classes and I really wanted to seize the momentum, not letting them forget about us. So, with the promise that they would in fact schedule a tour in the Spring, I went about concocting an engaging visit that would get a bunch of kindergarten and first graders sufficiently pumped about the library without them actually getting to go to the library, where many of them had never been before. They didn't even have a library at school!

No One Cares How Prepared You Are: A Guest Post By Kelsey

The Aftermath: a Still Life

Today's guest post comes from my lovely new coworker, Kelsey Johnson-Kaiser, about the time when she had just started but I dragged her to help me with something I had never done before: Boy Scout Camp! It was... interesting. I still can't believe we pulled it off. Here's Kelsey with the details, and, of course, me with the GIFs:

Back in August, when I was just three weeks in at my new job with the library, we were tasked with leading an all day program at a nearby Boy Scout camp. It was a tall order – seven groups of twenty-five boys, forty minutes per group, and a bunch of science experiments using candy – but we were ready for the challenge. Or so we thought.