Dot Day and The First Cub Club!

  

We are officially in the 5th week of school and the library has been BUSY! not only that, but the students and staff never cease to not only amaze me, but also inspire me.  As always this blog is full of lots of ideas and LOTS of pictures!
This year I wanted to really work on building relationships with students and staff to help find them those books that they were just going to enjoy so much.. and if they didn't enjoy it to at least know that I am there for them to try again! You can find what I did at the beginning of the year here. Guys, I had over 700 book talks.. and I have also had conversations with lots of kiddos how I either did a great job at recommending a book, or how I failed. I am ok with both of these as I am learning more about what students like and they know I am listening.

At the end of last year I wrote a blog about my ALL the ideas I had for this year.  You can find my "brain dump" here. One of my big things I wanted to increase this year was parent involvement, and I have already done several things to hopefully increase parent involvement.   I had a booth at open house and also our Popsicle's with the Principal.. and on Dot Day we had our first Cub Club!

One of my FAVORITE days is International Dot Day.  You can find last years blog about all that I did (and it has links to all the other blogs that I have written about for Dot Day) Dot Day is based on the book by Peter Reynolds that reminds us of the importance for making a mark and seeing where it takes you.  In elementary land we did SO many activities, but in middle school land it is a little different.  I LOVE middle schoolers, but sometimes they give me the side eye when I do things.. but I go with it and still offer it. Today we celebrated Dot Day in a TON of different ways!

Dot Day
Last week I invited staff to come to the library with a pair of canvas shoes to paint dots on.  I have such a supportive staff that played along and the shoes looked amazing!

This was created in Canva and shared with Staff

Although Dot Day is celebrated on September 15th we chose to celebrate on Monday September 16th.

This was shared with students through announcements, Google Classroom, and in the library

 Our Digital Learning Coach created this Flipgrid challenge. We only had one student participate, but I did see several working on it throughout the week (remember.. middle schoolers are a little different!)  We did have lots more decorated dots this year for our bulletin board

Interactive Bulletin Board

Before school on Monday morning I had a super simple activity set up.  It was bookmarks with the stampers being the erasers of pencils. Students were invited to choose a word for the year. I found the Word of the Year printable here.

My LIFE class had a ton of fun with the Quiver app making their dots come to life!

I LOVED all the different activities and I loved that the staff and students are always willing to do different things. However, my favorite part of the day (and the one I was MOST nervous about!) was our first Cub Club!  As I said.. one of my goals is to have more parent involvement and more community.  Thanks to the creative naming by our very own Dean Richmond the Cub Club is a toddler storytime for kiddos that are from 2 year old to 5 year old.  The theme first this first Cub Club was of course Dot Day!

Flyer that was posted on Social Media and also shared with our parents

First station kids made their own Dot Day headband

There was singing involved! Max made his first appearance of the year

Dot collage station

Dogs Colorful Day

Here was my agenda:
-while arriving create dot headbands
-Hello Song
-Read the Dot Book
-Shake Our Sillies out song
-Polka Dot Pants
-Polka Dot Pants song (we didn't get to this)
-Dogs Colorful Day (and did a felt matching activity)
-Goodbye Song
-Attendees create their own Dot picture and color dog and add dots
-check out books

To ensure it worked I had several 8th grade students stationed at various spots in the school to help parents/kids get to the library (the library is upstairs at the back of the building)

I only had 4 kids the first time (okay.. 3 of them were staff kids.. but 1 was a community member!) I have also already heard from other community members that they hope to make the next one (which is already scheduled for October 30th!)

Things I will do different:
-work more on how to get books/look at books
-more active books
-when singing/songs I am going to have egg shakers or other instruments that kids can hold

Overall I was SUPER pleased with it! Do you celebrate Dot Day? What did you do? Do you have a toddler time in your library? Do you have any tips or tricks?