Library Halloween Party!

In a Dark, Dark Room accompanied by a BOOkmark craft 

This Saturday, I am hosting our library's Halloween party for kiddos, family, and friends.  Halloween is only my FAVORITE so I am pretty excited about it.  We will have a Spooky Storytime, Creepy Craft, and trick or treating all day (I am mostly excited about this part-- there is nothing cuter than little munchkins in costume)!

Books we will read:

Brown Bat, Brown Bat Flannel

• In a Dark, Dark Wood by David A. Carter (pop-up book)
• Five Little Pumpkins by Iris Van Rynbach
• If You're a Monster and You Know It by Rebecca and Ed Emberley

Two Little Ghosties Flannel

Flannel Fun:

Brown Bat, Brown Bat, What Do You See?

(I see a yellow moon, a white ghost. a red leaf, an orange pumpkin, a green apple, and a black cat looking at me!)

Two Little Ghosties (based on Two Little Dickybirds)

Two little ghosties, looking at you!
One named "Peeka", the other named "Boo!"
Fly away Peeka, fly away Boo!
Come back Peeka, come back Boo!

For our craft, we are going to make BOOkmarks. (See what I did there?!)

Preparation for this craft was too easy.  I cut some card stock into strips, cut lengths of various ribbons, and bought a Value Pack of Halloween foam stickers from Michael's (on sale, of course!).  We tend to get a wide range of ages at our storytimes so I needed something that would be simple enough for tiny hands (cutting and pasting usually doesn't work, but stickers are great), that wasn't too "baby-ish" for the older kids.  I think this will fit the bill.

Happy Haunting, little ghosties!

A Book a Day...

I must credit this pin with the idea for this display.  When I came across it, I just had to recreate it for an October/ Halloween display!

Halloween is my very favorite holiday of the year, mostly because of Halloween decor.  Okay, and candy.  And amazing/creative/hilarious costumes. And tiny babies dressed as pumpkins, dinosaurs, and ladybugs.  Animals in clothing, too.  Anyways.  I already put up the Halloween decorations at my house obscenely early, and now that it's October, library decorations are finally appropriate!

To make this display I created characters out of some of my favorite monster books-  Grover from The Monster at the End of this Book by Jon Stone, and Big Green Monster from Go Away, Big Green Monster! by Ed Emberley were made by cutting and pasting construction paper.

Wild Thing of Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak and the perhaps lesser-known (but childhood favorite of mine) Nightmare from There's a Nightmare in my Closet by Mercer Mayer were hand drawn using the library's finest sharpies and fat crayons.

I plan on displaying monster books for the month of October.  All of our Halloween books are already almost all checked out so we are going to have to get creative!

Have a spooky October, and don't forget!  A book a day keeps the monsters away!

Have You Seen This Wizard?

A very intimidating "Azkaban Face"

Banned Books Week 2015 is September 27th through October 3rd.  There's nothing in the world that is more fun than celebrating your intellectual freedom!  Besides maybe going to Harry Potter World, but I wouldn't know because I've never been (*aggressive sigh*).

For Banned Books Week, one of the events our committee put together is a Harry Potter movie marathon and party complete with games, crafts, and a photo booth.  Sadly, I am scheduled to work at my own branch and cannot attend the party but that doesn't mean I didn't get in on the FUN OF PREPARATION.






I made this photo booth (inspiration here) with a little banned books twist (the sign I'm holding, which has Sirius Black's prisoner identification number says "wanted for reading banned books").  I made the display out of poster board, a good old cardboard box, and a copious amount of shipping tape.

J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series is (collectively) the-most-banned-book of the 21st century, according to the American Library Association.  Witchcraft and wizardry, oh my!  Kids are always so surprised when I tell them that Harry Potter is a frequently challenged book.  They are extremely puzzled as to why someone wouldn't want them to read it.  Me too, little muggles, me too.