SRP 2013: Dig into Reading!

Hello, hello, everyone - long time no talk! As I assume is true for children's librarians everywhere, we have been intensely busy ever since the first week of June and the kick-off of this year's summer reading program. It's a good busy though! We're at 1400 signups and counting, and we've had excellent turnout for our Wacky Wednesday program, which I am once again running with the help of the lovely Miss Jan. We're now finishing up our second week of programming, which means I am already behind on updates, hah. Story of my life.

To start with though, I thought I'd do a post on some of our awesome decorations - I'm so thrilled with how everything turned out, and we had a LOT of fun with this year's theme!

Overall, we went with an Egyptian theme for our children's room. I'll say that the room as a whole probably isn't quite as decked out as previous years (for example, those years that we've hung colored paper from the ceiling to make patrons feel like they're walking into the ocean, or standing under a night sky), but we have a few really cool individual pieces that I'd like to share!

 Miss Beth took on the sphinx, which is currently guarding the entrance to our room. He's made of cardboard, and then he got spruced up with some gold paint and sand.

Here's my King Tut! I seriously think he's the best thing I've ever created, ever. He turned out almost exactly like I wanted him to (probably because I spent way too much time on him). I found a how-to guide in this video, and then put my own spin on it. I'll be putting up a second post detailing exactly how to make this guy, so keep an eye out for that if you're interested!

I also made a mostly life-size mummy! I used the tutorial found here at Miss Stitch a Wish. My brother was kind enough to volunteer as my guinea pig.

As you can tell, he was really happy and excited about it.

Miss Beth turned one of our columns into an Egyptian cat, complete with a beautiful jeweled collar...

...and Miss Jan crafted an obelisk for the opposite side of our entrance! (You can actually see the corner of the sphinx's headdress peeking out from behind the door.)

We also had our summer reading program participants put their name on a camel, and then we stuck said camels up all over the room. (And yes, we had to cut every camel out individually. It took forever, and they are EVERYWHERE.)

See? EVERYWHERE. They border the entire room. (Here's a fun game, feel free to go back and check the other pictures I posted and see how many times you can spot camels. Haha, just kidding, that's not that fun of a game.)

We also made a pyramid - sort of, I'm aware it looks more like a house, but our space was rather limited. Inside we have a table set up with some Egyptian stencils as well as some texture rubbing plates. The kids have really enjoyed it so far! (If you look in the background, please note that there are MORE CAMELS.)

Here is Miss Jan's bulletin board, which comes with awesome 3D pyramids and some truly adorable camels!

And that about wraps it up for the Egyptian portion of the decorations! We also have some really great stack ends made by Miss Kim, but my pictures of those turned out awfully blurry, so I'll try to retake some of them later. HOWEVER, that is not the end of this post, oh no, because we have a few really great non-Egyptian decorations, too!

We got an ant farm! I promise, there are totally ants in there, but they tend to hang out in the lower left corner, or else up at the top, where you can't see them very well. It only took them a couple days to dig those tunnels though, which was really cool to watch!

The ant farm is in a display case Miss Jan put together, which comes complete with books, an outline of a nest, and a few ants making off with a picnic lunch.

Miss Jan also made this awesome dinosaur bulletin board, which I think turned out GREAT.

Sigh, this is blurry as well (I don't know what was up with my camera), but here's a bulletin board I put together. This was actually my spring bulletin board (an oh-so-original "Spring into Reading!"), but I ran out of time to do the one I wanted for summer, so we just switched out the wording. There are also some worms that we have people pin on when they come in to story time, which helps fill in some of the blank space.

And I do believe that's all from me! I'll be posting my King Tut-orial (haha, I'm totally going to make that joke again, JUST SO YOU KNOW) soon, and I'll be following it up with some Wacky Wednesday posts. I'd love to hear what all of you have done to deck out your libraries, so please feel free to link me in the comments!