Love in Library Land

This week in the Crestmont library, we celebrated Valentine's ALL week long!!! Maybe I should have done this activity the week before Valentine's Day to add to the holiday build-up, but I march to the beat of my own drummer. And, for the record - the kids on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday didn't care that it wasn't Valentine's Day anymore. They were just as excited.

Anyway, the point of this post was not to justify post-Valentine's Day activities but instead to share with you what we did this week!

We watched Somebody Loves You, Mr. Hatch by Eileen Spinelli. I say watched because you can see some of your favorite books come to life on StorylineOnline.net . The website has a limited selection of popular books read by famous actors (Haylie Duff, James Earl Jones, Betty White, Al Gore, etc.) and is brought to you F-R-E-E thanks to the Screen Actors' Guild!

The story is a fairly simple one - a predictable and lonely old man, Mr. Hatch, finds a mysterious box of chocolates on his doorstep and a note that says "Somebody loves you!". He tries to figure out who sent him the chocolates, but he is so overcome at the idea that someone loves him that he starts to do all sorts of crazy things! He wears a crazy tie, he helps his neighbors, he chooses ham instead of a turkey wing for lunch, he bakes brownies! His excitement lasts for a few weeks until one day the mail-man comes by and says.... oops. He delivered the chocolates to the wrong house. Mr. Hatch goes back to his predictable and lonely life. That is, until his neighbors and friends hear of the incident and decide to throw him a surprise party where they celebrate how much they love Mr. Hatch!

It's a cute little story, and kids K-2 can appreciate and understand it. After reading/hearing the story, we discussed the beginning, middle, and end of the story and we talked about how we can show people we love them EVERY day - not just Valentine's Day! Then..... activity time!! Here's what we did:

The plan was to make our own box of "chocolates" for Mr. Hatch! I used two pieces of red cardboard to create a giant heart (taped down the back middle). For the "lace," I cut paper doilies in half and taped them around the edges. The students put their thumb-print in the shape of a heart inside a cupcake liner. 

So adorable! This was one of those activities that required me to go around to each individual child. I helped them stamp their thumb with ink, press their thumb in the right shape, and gave them a baby wipe to clean their finger. 

The one at the top is my thumb-print... you see below that not everyone's turns out perfect, and we (of course) talked about how that is okay!

For some reason, I can't get the picture of the completed box of "chocolates" to upload... I will keep working on it, but I can promise it's adorable!

While they waited for me to come around, they wrote a note to Mr. Hatch and drew him a picture. I put these up on display in the hallway in the shape of a GIANT heart! (The picture won't upload, sorry!) These were really cute - and I plan to have Mr. Hatch "write back" this week and I'll share that with the kids! They will love that. 

I just couldn't leave this one out. This is one of my favorite kiddos... who, as you can tell, has quite a personality. He was not happy at the moment, therefore.... this angry-face picture. :) 

We had a great week in the library! I hope to post more pictures of what we've been doing soon!!!