Sorry I haven’t posted much in the last two weeks. We’ve been on storytime break, so naturally things were busy. One of the things we did do was a program called Cat and Dog Takeover. We weren’t sure how many we were going to get because in the weeks leading up to it, no one showed any interest. At all. Those times are nerve wracking, you know?
But, this program was very popular. We had quite a gang!
We started with my co-worker reading Dog’s Colorful Day by Emma Dodd. Then, I explained the activities available and we let them loose.
- Make Dog Colorful
In this activity, the children were given a printout of Dog and a baggie of pompoms. They cut Dog out and then glued the pompoms onto the corresponding color spot. We filled in the black spot before we printed them.
Just for the record, 1 inch gray pompoms no longer exist. You cannot purchase them for love or money. After scouring the internet for the elusive poms and searching in every craft store in our area, we broke down and made our own from gray yarn I scavenged from home. This is not optimal, but we made it work and no child complained.
- Make a Cat or Dog Headband
These are just construction paper headbands to which children attached either dog or cat ears. Easy peasy, but greatly enjoyed.
- Dog’s Colorful Day flannel board
Kids always love getting to play with the flannelboard.
- Clifford and his doghouse
Kids love crawling in and out of the doghouse and giving Clifford big hugs. Let me tell you, there are some wonderful Kodak moments going on here!
Our Superhero program taught us that we need to have an everyone-does-it-together-and-then-the-program-is-done activity. Otherwise, kids piddledink around and it’s hard to get the room cleaned up and the librarians back on the desk. For this program, we did a scavenger hunt.
- Famous Cats and Dogs Scavenger Hunt
Eight pictures of famous literary cats and dogs were located all over the children’s area. Everyone had a blast scouring the stacks to find the pictures. We had a handout with the pictures with lines beside them for kiddos to check off with golf pencils as they found them. Then, they brought them back to me in the meeting room, I gave them a dog and cat bookmark, everyone gathered their things and they were off. This was a GREAT ending.
The Librarian Is on The Loose 