Mel's Desk

Nothing like finally feeling you’re ready to start the new year 68 days after it begins!

Well, I knew when I took my new job that I would be in for a really steep learning curve, and I could see see right away how much time it was taking just to keep relatively on top of all the new things.

What I didn’t really expect was how long things would stay that way:

Only one post in November!

Also only one post in February!

Between keeping my head above water at work and doing what I needed to to keep the Bells afloat, there hasn’t been much time for anything else: professional reading, dreaming up new storytimes, watching my blog feeds, or blogging much at all.

Don’t get me wrong–I’m not beating myself up for not being more active–that’s just how things shook out.

But I’ve missed being here so much!

And while everyone kept telling me, “It’s going to get better! Hang in there!” and I pretty much sort of believed them, as of the end of February I have turned two serious corners and now I really do. Whew.

For one thing, I have wrapped up my active leadership of the Bell Awards and have handed things off to two amazingly smart, thoughtful, energetic new co-chairs, and for the second thing, for the first time since we launched the team I have a full staff AND I made it through my first round of year-end performance reviews!

My daily work is already starting to fit back in that 8-hour-a-day box that it used to, and for the first time in I-actually-don’t-know-how-many-years, I am not in charge of a professional committee.

Thank you, Anna, for my new sticky notes!

I still don’t know what a regular blogging schedule will look like, and I don’t know exactly what I’ll be writing about (some of the same stuff, to be sure! But also new things as a result of my new scope), but I can’t wait to figure it out.

Thanks for sticking around!

Hi all! Welcome to the Flannel Friday Fourth Anniversary Guest Post Palooza!

I am thrilled and delighted to host Gayle, who sent in her guest post from New Zealand! Here is her Flannel Friday contribution:

This story has been created from the book ‘Kindergarten Magic’ by Kathy MacMillan and Christine Kirker.

For this story you get between 5- 8 boxes to nest inside each other and the smallest box contains the red heart cut out of felt or paper. They said to wrap the boxes however as I wanted to be able to reuse the prop I decided to decorate with stickers and ribbons. I also just used different sized shoe boxes and jewellery box is the smallest.

To start with the story, I sit with the box on my knee and I ask the children what have I got here and then what do you think could be inside, children start saying doll, car, plane, train, transformer etc. then I start reading the little story and slowly open each box, or ask a child to come up and open the box.

Story goes along the lines of….

When I was little, my mother gave me a present. She said to me, this is a very special present, one that has been passed down for many years in my family. “Is it a bike?” I asked “No!” she said. “Your great grandmother didn’t have a bike, and she still had fun every day.” I thought some more. “Is it a remote control aeroplane?” I asked. “No!” said my mum, “Your grandmother didn’t have a remote controlled aeroplane, and she still had fun every day.” I thought some more. “Is it a video game?” I asked “No,” said my mother, “I didn’t have video games when I was a little girl, and I still had fun every day.” What do you think it could be? Wow, those are all great suggestions. Let’s open the present and see. (Open each box in succession, building the suspense. When you finally reach the last box, open it slowly and reveal the heart.) “That is the best gift anyone can give you, and it’s something that has been passed down in our family for generations,” said my mother. Do you know what it is? Love!

Since I work in a Christian Kindergarten, my heart has a picture of Joseph, Mary and Jesus and I say: “The love we get from Jesus.”

My laminated heart of Joseph, Mary, and Jesus fits into the smallest box

My 8 individual boxes with stickers and ribbons (hopefully looking like gifts).

The boxes all nestled in together.

Yahoo! Thank you Gayle for joining our Flannel Friday celebrations!

Holy cow, it has been a great year for the Bells! The 2015 Selection Committee did an amazing job reading and reading and reading and talking and talking and talking about picture books, children’s development, literacy extension activities, early literacy skills and practices and then more picture books. I owe them a million thanks for trucking along even when I was severely distracted and overwhelmed as a new supervisor.

We’re proud to announce the 2015 titles! Head on over to the CLEL website to find out what they are, and to download all five activity and information sheets!

I am sitting at my gate way early for my flight, just the way I like it, writing this post on my phone and waiting to see if I recognize any Colorado librarians also on the way to ALA Midwinter!

I am lucky to be going and happy to be serving on the ECRR Oversight Committee. I’ll also be at the Flannel Friday meet up on Saturday!

ALSO I will be at the Saturday and
Sunday Guerrilla Storytimes, and I will be attending as many early literacy sessions as possible.

I hope to spend some time on the exhibits floor talking with publishers about the upcoming CLEL Bell Awards announcement February 5 and of course am so psyched about my very first in-person ALA Awards Announcements on Monday morning.

Personally, I will be asking for as much new supervisor advice as possible, so if you have a good example (or a terrible warning) I would love to hear it.

So come find me or tell me where to find you; I want to see as many people as possible!

FYI I have 4 kinds of cookies in my bags and my goal is to give them all away.

Believe it or not! Flannel Friday is turning FOUR this spring! What started out as a few bloggers and tweeters with some flannelboard ideas has turned into a wonderful community and a week-in, week-out celebration of storytime.

Sharon at Rain Makes Applesauce had the great idea to mark our anniversary in a new way this year. On March 4th, we will hosting a Guest Post Palooza!

If you’ve ever wanted to share one your favorite flannel boards, or any storytime activity idea, but don’t have a blog, whoo-hoo! this is your opportunity. We will pair you up with an established Flannel Friday blogger who will share your idea as a guest post written by you! We know the FF world is MUCH BIGGER than just the FFers who blog. We would love to celebrate this year with as many FF voices as possible!

So we’re looking for Flannel Friday readers & doers who would like to write up their ideas, and we’re looking for Flannel Friday bloggers to serve as hosts for the guest posts.

We hope this will be a fun way for each of us to get to know someone new in the FF community, to hear from even more awesome storytime folks, and to test-drive writing a blog post if you’re curious about how it works!

If you’re interested, go ahead and fill out this Google form. Sharon or Mollie will contact you with a match.

Do you want to talk about it first? Just leave a comment here!

As always, there’s more info on our website too.

So, it’s already five days into the new year and I haven’t posted in a month and I missed the Storytime Underground Resolved to Rock Resolution Roundup but I pinky swear I’ve been thinking a LOT about resolutions and intentions and goals and plans and next steps. A LOT a lot.

In the last 10 years I have set and met a gratifying number of professional goals and for awhile now I have been waiting to see what bubbles up as something I’d like to aim for next. It’s turned out to be tricky to think about though, since 2013 felt hard due to an interesting mix of personal and professional challenges, and then 2014 showed up and was harder, like, boss-level hard, and as a result I’m eyeing 2015 a little warily: I could really use a save point and am not sure where the next one is.

However I do find the process of considering and setting goals to be clarifying so I want to get something on the books for the year. And I think I’m going to make just one (complicated) resolution: To stay on top of things.

Now, meeting lots of professional goals has meant juggling lots of professional commitments and looking back, possibly (probably) (OK definitely) too many at once. And when there isn’t enough time to do all the things, then there’s always something that isn’t getting done, and not getting done, and NOT getting done, and then when you do get back to it, it’s now this gigantic pile instead of a tidy little to-do list. Bleh.

So I’ve been flexing my “saying no” muscles and finally starting to see the results, which looks like a little more time and space on my calendar and in my head. And how I’d like to use that time and space is by not setting stuff aside.

Staying on top of the routine tasks, keeping on top of the to-do-list making so I don’t panic about what’s not on it, thinking ahead and being proactive instead of reactive with planning…There are 9 million different ways this could look, but I hope it looks like less anxiety about opening my email, more blog posts here, being able to plan farther ahead, having some time to think more deeply about storytime and training staff.

Cross your fingers for me! And good luck with your year!!!

Here are some pine trees straight from the Colorado mountains!

A winter version with pine cones:

And a Christmas version with a star and lights:

What can you do with these trees?

Well, when I started brainstorming for this post I remembered my strawberries. What I like about that set is all the talking I can do about different shapes and sizes (and colors!). That’s why I gave every tree its own look for this set, too, to help prompt conversations.

So one easy peasy thing you could do is put the five trees on the board and just ask the children what tree like best…do they like the very tall tree? Do they like the tree with prickly branches? How about the one with pine cones? If you are working with a specific Christmas theme, your question could be, “Which one would you like to cut down for your Christmas tree?” You can work in some open-ended questions such as, “What would you use to cut down the tree?” “How would you carry it home?” “Who lives in a tree in the forest?”

You could also do the “What’s Missing?” game (like I describe here) using Miss Mary Liberry’s “No Peeking” song, put five trees on the board, take one away, and see if the kids can tell you which one is not there.

If you are feeling ambitious, you could make several copies of each type of tree, and hand one out to each child in storytime. You could say, “Let’s plant a forest! If you have a very tall tree, come up and put it on the board! Great! If you have a tree with snow on the branches, come up and find a place for it.” …and so forth. I bet the resulting forest would look fabulous!

If you like counting rhymes instead, I found this one and this one.

No patterns today–I just free cut different shapes as I went along. If you’d like a pattern, let me know and I will scan the shapes separately & share that.

I am hosting the Holiday Extravaganza Round Up today! Find out about all things Flannel Friday at our website.

Thanks everyone!

Here we go!

I get to host the FF Holiday Extravaganza!

Leave a message in the comments with your link & I will gather them and add them to the Round Up tomorrow; I won’t publish the comments but I will see your entries.

Just for fun this week we are celebrating the holidays, so I’m looking forward to seeing some festive posts. Obviously we don’t all take the same approach to acknowledging or incorporating holidays—or not–into our library storytimes and programming.

So just as with any of our themed Flannel Friday weeks in the past, if you have a holiday-related Flannel Friday post, awesome! If you have a seasonal wintery (or summery–hi Southern Hemisphere!) post, super! If you have a regular anything goes Flannel Friday post, excellent!

Thanks in advance! Check back tomorrow!

It’s been a difficult week for thanksgiving.

The injustices of this world are so acute, so present, and so painful that–even shielded as I am from most of them–it has been a struggle to open my heart and be wholly thankful for that which is good and for my many blessings.

Not least of those blessings: Being so fortunate to be part of a profession and calling that absolutely makes this world a better place, so fortunate to work and learn and struggle with passionate, engaged, and determined people who are constantly looking for new and better ways to serve the needs of those around us.

I’m so grateful for you.

“We are not to simply bandage the wounds of victims beneath the wheels of injustice, we are to drive a spoke into the wheel itself.” –Bonhoeffer