This is Librarians of Littles. I'm Patrick Adams.
And I am Caroline Legere.
And we are Librarians that work with pre-K and young elementary students.
Between us we have about 14, 15 years of experience in the library.
And over about 32 years of experience in education.
And today we're going to share some snow-themed picture books.
Our first book is titled Blizzard. It is written and illustrated by John Rocco.
It's published by Disney Hyperion and it was published in 2014.
Some awards and lists that this book made it to include the best book of the year Wall Street Journal,
Boston Globe Best Book of the Year, Kirkist Best Book of the Year,
Amazon Best Book of the Year, Junior Library Guild Selection,
Finalist for the Irma Black Award, Bank Street Best Book List,
and Black Eyed Susan Book Award nominee.
John Rocco was the author and illustrator of this book.
He is a No. 1 New York Times best-selling author and illustrator.
He's the recipient of a Caldecott honor for his book Blackout
and a recipient of the Sebert honor for his book How We Got to the Moon.
He is also the illustrator of the covers for Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson,
and the Olympians, Magnus Chase, and the Gods of Asgard, and the Apollo Trials.
Rocco has also worked in the entertainment industry as an art educator.
He worked for DreamWorks as the pre-production art director for Shrek.
He worked for Walt Disney Imagineering, designing Attractions for Epcot,
and was art director for Disney Quest, which is a virtual reality theme park in downtown Disney.
He and his wife co-founded Children's Book Creators for Conservation,
which is a collection of children's authors and illustrators
who support conservation efforts and partners with other organizations to support those efforts.
He is also the founder of Bookmakers Dozen, a group of 13 talented children's illustrators
with the goal of getting art and books into the hands of children.
Some of his other books include How We Got to the Moon, Blackout, Wolf, Wolf, How to Train a Train,
Moon Powder, Hurricane, Super Hairdue, and The Barber of Doom.
So this book was based on the true experiences of John Rocco living through the Blizzard of 1978,
when a blizzard leaves over three feet of snow across New England,
a boy and his family enjoy the weather while waiting for snow plows to clear the roads.
As the days pass and no plows are in sight, the boy decides to make a long trek to the store
for essentials like eggs, milk, and chocolate bars.
Personally, I thought this one was really great.
I love that it's based on his real experiences.
I think that makes it a lot more relatable to the kids.
The pictures are really vibrant and engaging, and there's one page where both of the pages
kind of fold out to make one of those extra long illustrations,
and I thought that was a really good kind of introduction to maps,
because it's still like a picture of the whole neighborhood, but it's kind of a bird's eye view,
and that one could be a really good way to kind of introduce maps and kind of the idea of that,
because that can be kind of an abstract concept for our younger learners.
Absolutely. I definitely connected with this book growing up in New England.
I grew up in New Hampshire and in the Massachusetts area,
so snow days were always something that we got to have throughout the year,
and I thought this book was really great.
I love the idea that the boy thinks that he has to kind of save his family by going on this trek,
and it kind of implies that his biggest worry is that they don't have milk to mix with the hot cocoa kind of thing.
It's not like, oh my gosh, we're going to starve because we don't have food,
but it's just like the child's perspective of we have to mix water with our hot cocoa mix.
This is the end of the world kind of thing,
which I think is super relatable for the kids where they're just like, what?
So that was really cool, and yet the four-page spread with the map was amazing.
My students, I taught this book earlier this year when we here in Texas got a couple snow days,
so afterwards we were talking about how we got just the right amount of snow,
where we got a couple days off but didn't lose power and didn't have to worry about dangerous roads.
And so the kids could relate to it, but the idea of over three feet, almost four feet of snow was mind-boggling to them.
So I actually, with my kindergarten students, because I read this with Pre-K, Kinderverse,
with my kindergarten students, I pulled out a yardstick and kind of let everybody stand up next to the yardstick
so they could get an idea of how much snow that was,
and it was mind-blowing to them because it's coming up to their chins, if not higher for a lot of those kids.
Because three feet of snow, we don't really... Here in Texas for sure, we're never going to see that much snow at any given time,
but just to see that and let that kind of be a concrete visual for them, they thought it was pretty interesting.
And then the idea of strapping tennis shoes to his feet to help him get across the top of the snow, they all thought that was hysterical.
I also made sure I definitely had to introduce some vocabulary words, because even from the start, a lot of my students didn't know what a blizzard was,
so I had to make sure that they understood what a blizzard was.
Snow plows was another one that some of them knew, but a couple didn't.
And then for the really young kids, for the pre-K kids, an igloo.
Also, I pulled up a picture of an igloo to show them, because some of them weren't exactly sure what that was, so a little bit of pre-teaching for it,
but my kids really enjoyed the story. They thought it was very interesting and engaging.
They loved seeing all of his side activities on that four page spread, because if you follow all of his footsteps, he stops at one point and climbs a tree.
He helps build a snowman. He stops to engage in a snowball fight.
So the kids loved all those ideas of things that they could relate to, because we had just had snow, so they did a bunch of those things also.
So it was a really fun story for my students, and they loved it.
So I would say, rating-wise, I would give this, I think, four out of five, maybe a four and a half out of five,
because there was a little bit of pre-teaching that I needed to do with the kids, just so that they understood.
But it's a great story that illustrations are engaging. The students were able to keep their attention,
and they were curious what was going to happen next in the story, so I think it earns that higher score.
I agree. I think four or four and a half would be accurate for this one.
I really enjoyed how the text was simple enough on the whole for the kids to really understand it,
but it did have those good vocabulary words. You're right, there was a lot of pre-teaching that needed to happen,
especially here in North Texas, where we don't have snow plows ever or blizzards or anything like that.
So yeah, really good story overall.
And I'm still just so amazed by the artwork, and it just kind of brings you back to those houses covered in snow,
and just that magical kind of feel that snow brings, and the pictures kind of brought that to life also.
Yeah, really great illustrations.
Yeah, all right.
So, a maker space activity to go along with this. Throughout the book, the boy is reading an Arctic Survival Guide,
and he mentions multiple times throughout the story igloos.
And so, like I said, some of my students didn't know what an igloo was, so we showed them some pictures,
and then I was using the kiva planks, which are just wooden planks,
and we had the students build their own igloos using the kiva planks.
And I liked this because the students get to use their own creativity to build their igloo however they choose.
Some of them were very boxy and simplistic, and then I had some students that tried to make them more rounded
and kind of build them out and up, and kind of build them just like an actual igloo, which was pretty cool to see.
Four and five year olds trying to construct these things.
And it was just kind of interesting to see the different strategies that the students had as they were trying to put this together.
So, I really love that idea with the igloo building and everything, especially since in the book there was a lot of, like,
they do talk about igloos a lot, and you could see the kids tunneling underneath the snow and everything.
Another thing that I've done, I haven't done it this year, but there were two or three years where we asked for students and teachers
to bring in empty plastic milk jugs, ideally either white or like the see-through ones,
and we hot glued all of them together to make a massive igloo that the kids could read inside for like an extra little storytime nook in there.
It took a lot of work. I don't remember how many hundreds of jugs, but if you have a school of like 300 kids and everybody brings one jug,
that's enough for an igloo. But you could either, when I've done it in the past, it was the teachers that kind of came together and kind of helped do it,
but you could, I mean, with old enough kids, you could probably have a teacher working the hot glue gun and have the kids help you kind of place everything.
I like that idea.
I think it was really cool building that way. So that was a lot of fun for our kids when we've done that before. It's a lot of work, but I think it's worth it.
Yeah, I bet that would be a really cool kind of magical thing for the kids to be able to go in and climb inside and take the time to be able to read a little bit in there.
That would be really cool to try if you have some extra space in your library where you could kind of put that for a little while.
Yeah, it does take up a lot of space. I did have to move some shelves for that, but it was worth it.
Yeah, absolutely.
We have some really good pictures of classes reading together in our little igloo.
Absolutely. Just think of all the memories that would make for some of those kids. That would be amazing. I'm sure that's something that they'll remember for a while.
Yeah, I think so.
All right. And then now we're at the portion of the podcast where we give a library of Littles management tip or trick.
And today I thought we'd kind of discuss scheduling. Your scheduling is a little bit different than mine since you're at a campus where all you see is pre-k.
And so you get to see your kids a little bit more often than I get to see my pre-k students.
So why don't you tell us a little bit about how your schedule works, like how many times a week you see the students, how long and kind of how you set up those lessons.
Yeah. So I see all the students on my campus are three, four and five years old.
And they come to the library at least twice a week, sometimes three times a week.
The first time I see them, for my kids that are developmentally four years old, for the first time I see them, we only read books.
It's about a 30 minute, it's 30 minutes altogether that they come into the library, but that's including our transition time.
So by the time they come in, get settled, we sing our storytime song.
It's about 20 minutes of actually reading books and then we need to get up and line up and kind of transition out.
So like if I was doing like, for example, we're talking about snow books this week.
So I would read two or three books about snow, kind of get my questioning in there when I'm reading to them, because those kids like to talk a lot.
And it's a good time for us to go into detail with some of our higher level thinking questions and kind of really think about the text.
And then the second time that they come see me, that's when I have all my makerspace activities out.
And I'll show them the books that we read and I'll remind them, I'll ask them, do you remember what we read about last time and what was in the books?
And then I show them the activities that I have planned for them.
And that's when I would kind of introduce the Kiva blocks with, and how we would build igloos or show them the library reading nook where we've got the igloo built for them that they can go and read inside of or any other activities that we've got.
And I like having it set up that way for my kids who are a little bit more verbal, because we can talk about the books a lot more and kind of go deeper into our discussion the first time.
And then the second time they can go deeper into their play and like really experience it because we've only got 30 minutes at a time.
So by the time they come in and get settled and everything, that's kind of a good amount of time for them to really explore, get into their play, and figure out kind of what they're going to play with and how they're going to build on all that on their learning.
And for my students who are developmentally two and three years old, because we do have a lot of special ed, we have a significant special education population on our campus.
So for our students who are developmentally two or three years old, and maybe can't sit as long for story time, I read them two books.
I do kind of point out some of the vocabulary words and some of the things that I'm concepts that I'm trying to teach them.
And then I show them their activities and then they go play mostly because they don't have the attention span that they need to sit for the full 20 minutes for story time.
Which, yeah, that's amazing that you're able to do that and get to work with all of the students on my campus being an elementary campus that serves pre K through fifth grade.
We only have two pre K classes, and I am in the full rotation so I'm seeing students all day long so I actually only see each pre K class once a week.
And I give up my planning period to do that. And they come to the library for it's supposed to be about 25 minutes by the time they come in and sit down.
And, you know, if they're running late because trying to get them in line sometimes can be challenging.
Usually I get about 20 minutes with the students so on the weeks when they're not checking out books.
I will usually read one story with them like we read Blizzard and that took a good majority of the time took about 15 minutes after we got them in and sitting down and kind of discuss some of the words and
introduce those vocabulary words and then read the story. And then once we are done with the story at that point they've been sitting for long enough that they need to move around and so I try to find a pre school movement type song that will get the kids up and moving
to the library. And if I can, I try to relate it back to the book that we're reading at the time so finding one about snow so I think when I did this one, we did a simple songs
like the Pocke song but you know we'll look for a Ku Ku Kangaroo song or Danny go or one of those Jack Hartman's anything that we can get the kids up and moving to so they can get some of that energy out because expecting them to sit for too long just doesn't
work for anybody. And then by the time the song's over it's usually time for them to leave the following week when they come in already a shorter book. And after we've done that, I'll usually have two or three songs prepped and ready to go so that while
they're dancing, the teachers will send a few students at a time to go pick out library books and check out at that point. And then they just return back to the carpet so they can continue dancing while the others check out their books and then by the time we're done with that it's time for them to go
again. It's a whirlwind time for the students when they come into the library from the pre K classes. Absolutely. But it's a fun time. Absolutely we have a blast. The kids love it and I know I'm giving up
my planning to do it when I see them but it's so worth it because otherwise those kids wouldn't get any time in the library which is so sad to me so I love getting to see those kids. I'm also very fortunate that the way my campus works, we have a
maker space. I want to call her teacher. She does all the work of a teacher. It's an aid position but there is a maker space room that's next door to the library. There's an adjoining door. And in the past that room has been kind of like the computer lab technology
and the classroom where they get to do robots and stuff like that. It's now become more of a maker space area since I kind of transitioned into this campus and so the aid there we tend to work together and so there will be a lot of times where I'll do a lesson and she'll do an
activity that kind of works with it because I don't get very much time to work with these students, the pre K students to do maker space activities when I only see them for such a short period of time but we get to work together and collaborate which is nice because then something that I'm doing she can work with
in there as well. That's great that you have a partner that you can work with like that. It is. I'm very fortunate. A lot of other librarians in my district.
I don't know if they have that. I know a lot of campuses instead of using that aid as a maker space teacher. A lot of them will use it as like a computer lab where it's just like sitting and typing and that kind of stuff which while important I don't think at the younger ages.
It's necessarily the most suitable for them and the most important for them. I think being able to get their hands on things and manipulate and that kind of stuff is so much more important at the younger ages than having them in front of a screen practicing typing and whatnot.
But each campus kind of does their own thing and so I'm just lucky that my campus does see the importance of maker space and kind of giving those at every kid all of the students pre K through fifth grade get opportunities to do maker space and work with robots and that kind of stuff which is always fun.
So you want to start us off with book number two.
Yeah. The second book we're going to talk about today is called Flubby Does Not Like Snow. It is from Penguin Workshop, an imprint of Penguin Random House. It was published in 2023.
The author and illustrator is J.E. Morris and she has won quite a few awards including the Theodore Seuss Geisel Honor for Flubby is not a good pet. She has a couple of books that were junior library guild gold standard selections for other Flubby books.
So that is a six book series. This book is the latest in that series.
So our author Jennifer E. Morris has a bachelor's in computer science from the University of Pittsburgh and a master's of computer science from Stevens Institute of Technology.
She's an award winning children's book author and illustrator. She's written 16 children books and her art has also been featured in different children's magazines in greeting cards and in educational materials.
She also volunteers with the first Lego League or FLL. It's a robotics competition for elementary and middle grade students and she was an FLL coach for many years.
Some of the other books that she's written are May I Please Have a Cookie, Please Write Back, Ducks Run a Muck, Sharing Is Unbearable, Fish Are Not Afraid of Doctors, and of course the whole Flubby series.
This is the sixth book in that series.
And this book is an emergent reader. When it snows Flubby and his owner plan to go outside, but Flubby finds it is very cold and when it snows Flubby needs to wear the correct clothing to stay warm.
With this book, being that it is the sixth installment in this series, you kind of, if you read it like all the books right in a row, you kind of find that Flubby does not like pretty much everything.
And it starts with the whole series is meant to be pretty funny. This one is, I do like the simple text a whole lot. It's very predictable.
I like that Flubby keeps going, trying to go outside and then coming back inside to come get another piece of clothing in order to stay warm until Flubby finally figures out what to wear.
I think it's a pretty good lesson for teaching our youngest readers what to wear to kind of stay warm outside because there are so many young children that do not dress appropriately for any weather.
That's just a very abstract concept when they have to go outside. They just don't understand that it takes them a really long time to learn that they need to dress appropriately for the weather and how it feels outside.
It isn't the same as how it feels inside. So this is a really good book for teaching that.
It's not as funny as some of the other books in this series, but it's still cute. I think if I was going to rate it as far as an emergent reader goes with teaching a student to read independently,
I would probably give it a 5 out of 5 for just like a guided reading lesson or a shared reading for a read aloud. I would probably say a 3 out of 5.
It's still got decent pictures and it is kind of funny watching Flubby go back, run outside, find that it's terrible outside in the cold without being dressed appropriately and then coming back inside, but it's not like super funny.
I agree with you. I was definitely looking at this book, which to be fair, I had never read any of the Flubby books. This was the first of the Flubby books that I had looked at, and then I went back and looked at the other ones.
And I think that these are a very cute series about this cat that I agree with you. I think they would be wonderful.
And I think these are the kind of books that I would love to recommend to my kindergarten and first grade teachers for those students that are still working on emergent reading.
There's not too much text to kind of overwhelm the students. There are pictures that are pretty much exactly showing what the text is saying, which helps them with that predictability and using those images to help them assume what the words are if they're struggling to read them.
The repeated text of Flubby going back inside and then trying to come back out is always going to be helpful for those students that are learning how to read.
So I think that for that purpose, absolutely five out of five, it's excellent for that. I agree with you. As a read aloud, it's probably not the most engaging for a large audience at once.
It's got amazing pictures and the story is not bad. It's just that I don't know that it's engaging enough if there's enough happening in the story to keep a group of pre-K students and their attention for an extended period of time.
So I think you're right, about a three and a half for if you're doing it as a read aloud, but for those emerging readers, definitely this is the kind of book that we want for our students. And my plan is to go back and make sure that I do get all of these books because they'll be very useful to my kindergarten and first grade teachers for sure.
Yeah, yeah, that was really well said about, you know, the predictability of the text. Well done.
Thank you.
For a maker space activity, I have painting with ice. I've done this with almost every year in the library since I became a librarian. This is my fifth year in the library and I've, yeah, every single year I do this activity.
It's a little bit messy, so you have to be okay with a little bit of a mess, but it's a lot of fun. So I get ice trays and I fill them with just straight up temper paint. I don't do anything special to it. It's just a really thick, kind of gross temper paint that you do normal crafts with.
You fill the ice trays with the temper paint and put a single popsicle stick in each cube. The temper paint is thick enough that you can just stick it in there and it'll stay the popsicle stick typically stays upright without you doing anything.
I leave it in the freezer overnight and then about 10 minutes before a class comes in, I go and pull it out of the freezer and bring it into the library. And then we paint with it. So the popsicle stick itself serves as a handle.
I pull it out about 10 minutes before they come in because once you get it out of the freezer, it's way too frozen and it won't do anything at all. But if you wait about 10 minutes and then put the paint to the paper, like it makes some really cool drawings and it's pretty much, it really looks like you're drawing with markers, like a paint marker or something.
I always model it first so that the kids think of it as paint and not as a popsicle. It's such a bright color and it always ends up looking a little bit lumpy because the temper paint is so thick.
So it doesn't, as an adult, it definitely looks like a popsicle, I think, but I don't think the kids associate it with that because I think most of the kids are used to seeing like longer popsicles. I've never had a kid eat it, but I do always model the painting.
It's always a concern for everybody who comes in the library and understandably so, but that's part of why I model it first so the kids can see me painting with it and then I let them paint. But yeah, nobody in the library has ever eaten it.
That's always the biggest concern is don't eat the paint kids. But it's really, as long as you do it at the right time, it doesn't get too terribly messy, although I do keep wipes nearby for it.
And sometimes I do, I usually do, make sure that I have like some yellow, red, and blue so that the kids can kind of just paint with primary colors and then we'll kind of notice where the colors overlap and they make different colors.
I really like this idea. I've never tried this before and now I'm kind of curious to see what I can come up with to have the kids do that we can pull this out.
It's not for the faint of heart. No, but of course, in my library, I could do a book about I could definitely do something with this but then the fun thing for me would be to then hand it off to the makerspace teacher to be the one that actually has to implement it.
So I love this idea. I really do. I would never have thought of this before you told me about this. So I love this idea. I want to try it with, if not pre-k with my kindergarten students just to kind of see the chaos that ensues.
But I think it would be so fun and I think that would be a really cool learning experience for the kids to see those colors overlapping and making new colors and just introducing some of those concepts also, which would be very, very cool.
And I love the idea that it's ice and so it's frozen and so that connects with the book of being cold. Absolutely. I love that idea. I want to try it now. I need to go find some tempura paint.
It's a lot of fun. It really is like one of the kids favorite activities of like the whole year and it's really one of mine too.
Yeah. I mean, yeah, just making sure that you have everything prepped in advance. I can't see why you wouldn't do this. Prepping doesn't take that long really. No, it's just getting it and then making sure you have space in a freezer somewhere so that you can pull them out. Very cool.
Yeah. I love that idea. Thank you, dear listeners, for listening to this episode of Librarians of Littles. We hope you've enjoyed it and gained some ideas of possible books and activities to do in your library.
Come back next week. New episodes are posted every week on Wednesday and we hope that you enjoy.
Thank you for listening to this episode of Librarians of Littles. We hope that you enjoyed it. Check back each Wednesday for a new episode.
Librarians of Littles is a podcast produced and hosted by Patrick Adams and Caroline Ligier. Editor Patrick Adams. Our theme song is performed by J.D. Adams.
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And you can send us your emails at Librarianoflittlespod at gmail.com.