YouthScope@Handley Regional Library!

NaNoWriMo is coming!

2011-10-12T16:17:00.002-04:00

We are participating in 2011.
Join us and write a novel in a month.

Leave a comment on our blog: http://nanowrimobl2011.blogspot.com/

Books & Blocks: Pirates!!

2011-03-14T17:17:00.004-04:00

Today was one of our Books & Blocks days! We learned about pirates and built amazing ships! Take a look at our gang of awesome builders! One of our ships was a mighty ship made just for the perfect pirate, the other is a "Sea Queen" ship built for the bravest of pirate girls. Our last picture shows an average pirate ship, sailing through the sea of books. We had such a wonderful time! Thanks to all who participated in this extravagant event!

Teen Read Week!!!

2010-10-18T17:37:00.003-04:00

Do you know what week it is? Teen Read Week!! It's the 17th through the 23rd. In honor of this special week, why don't you grab a book and start reading! Can't find a book you like? Choose one off the sidebar! More than likely your local library will have it.

Announcement! One Summer, Three Books!

2010-05-14T15:19:00.003-04:00

It's official! The 2010 One Summer Three Books selections ave be revealed! We are excited about each of them!
They are...
Swimmy by Leo Lionni
The Black Pearl by Scott O'Dell
Flush by Carl Hiaasen

One Summer Three Books!

2010-05-12T15:05:00.012-04:00

The titles of this year's One Summer, Three Books have been revealed! First, I want to talk about this year's themes. For the elementary-age children, this summer's theme is "Make a Splash: READ!" and the young adults' theme is "Make Waves @ Your Library." Obviously, this summer is based around water. There's a great line-up of activities for all ages, it's going to be a lot of fun so don't forget to check the events calendar often!

Now on to the books, there are three different titles for three different age groups:

For primary aged children (pre-k to 2nd grade), we have Swimmy by Leo Lionni (cover)

For elemtary children (3rd to 6th grade), there's The Black Pearl by Scott O'Dell (cover)

The young adults' (middle to highschool) book is Flush by Carl Hiaasen (cover)]

Each book looks really good, especially for their designated age group. I've read Flush and I loved it. Don't forget to look out for all the great activities the library has to offer this summer!

--Fernando Forero
Youth Volunteer

Homeschooling showcase

2010-04-28T14:32:00.034-04:00

Recently the library had its 2nd annual homeschooling showcase, it turned out great! The theme this year was "Imagination: Tapping into Your Students' Creativity" and there was plenty of creativity in the many displays by home schooled students. The displays showed just how impressive these homeschoolers are. Two stood out to me the most, these wood carvings by Joshua Hinkle:

and this other display made with beads of some very familiar images:

Of course, these are just two of the many great displays we had. Also, there were displays by organizations with information for homeschoolers as well as people wanting to know about homeschooling. Vendors had many useful tables too. There were displays for art schools, girl scouts, and even the Civil Air Patrol:

For a full list of the vendors, see bottom of post.

This showcase was also a great opportunity for homeschooling parents to network with each other. I know it's definitely helpful for the parents of home schooled students to get advice, tips, and suggestions from one another. Seeing another's technique always helps improve your own.
On Saturday there were performances by many talented home schooled students. Some sang, some played instruments, and some demonstrated their martial arts skills:

This is something I love about homeschooling, there are so many things you can learn and dedicate yourself to. Every home school event I have ever been to has had a talent show of some sort. Almost everyone has something to show at these events, and they're always very impressive. Many people and organizations also had presentations with a lot of information and opportunities to homeschoolers. See a list of all the presenters at the bottom with the vendors.

I really enjoy events like this. A homeschooled student myself, I moved here from a place with a larger population of homeschoolers, so it's great that there are showcases like this one that give people so much information about homeschooling. There really are so many advantages of homeschooling, and this event displayed them. If you missed it this year, be sure to come next time!

-Fernando Forero, youth volunteer

Thanks to all the vendors that participated:

American Cancer Society
American Red Cross
Blue Mountain Martial Arts
Civil Air Patrol
Clarke County Parks and Rec
Classical Conversations
Frederick County Farm Bureau
Frederick County Parks and Rec
Friends of Shenandoah
Girl Scouts
Green Apple Driving School
Home Educator's Association of Virginia
Home School Legal Defense Association
Homespun Schoolhouse of Agape
Homeworks by Precept
Humane Society of Warren County
Independent School of Winchester
Laurelwood Books
Little Gym of Winchester
Lord Fairfax Area Food Bank
Lord Fairfax Community College
Museum of Shenandoah Valley
Northern Virginia 4-H
Old Courthouse Museum
On the Road Driving School
Opus Oaks
Organization of Virginia Homeschoolers
SAIL & Jr. SAIL
Samuels Public Library
Shenandoah Conservatory Arts Academy
Shenandoah Valley Discovery Museum
Sportsplex
Teens Opposing Poverty
Tiger Tai Kwon Do
Warren County Heritage
Warren County Parks and Rec
Winchester Youth Development Center
The Young Marines

Thanks to all the presenters:

Al and Linda Linder
Heather Burton
Doug Johnson
Faith Berends
Donna Hughes
Clark Groves
Israel Groves
Briana Nei
Angel Chorale
Keith Fillpu
John-David Sayle
Boyce's Martial Arts
Angela Pyle
Marlisa Eyre

Become a Youth Volunteer!

2010-04-14T14:39:00.010-04:00

Our library can always use more youth volunteers! It's great to have extra people shelving books, setting up programs, and very importantly, helping out with our puppet shows! In these shows, the youth entice children with songs and stories. They plan out their parts, get the puppets ready, and put on great shows that everyone loves to see. The youth really enjoy putting on these plays, why not sign up and be in one too? For all the info, click on Become a Youth Volunteer! in the title.

Join now! A volunteer myself, I love helping here at the library. Here's a few shots of other teens working on puppet shows and other activities:

TEEN READ WEEK!!

2009-10-12T17:14:00.003-04:00

It's Teen Read Week!! The week of October 18-24 is the week to read! Try reading some of these series I have been told, or say myself, are excellent!

Uglies by Scott Westerfeld
Vampire Kisses by Ellen Schrieber
The Series of Unfortuate Events by Lemony Snicket
Twilight by Stephenie Meyer
Face on the Milk Carton by Caroline B. Cooney

Wright 3 Middle-schooler's Activity!

2009-08-12T10:25:00.070-04:00

One Summer Three Books Program

Our program for middle schoolers today was about the book The Wright Three by Blue Balliett. The sequel to Chasing Vermeer.

In the book; Calder, Tommy, and Petra (who call themselves The Wright Three) learn that the famous Robie House is soon to be demolished. When their class takes a field trip to the house, the Wright Three find out that there are many mysteries concering the house that no one is aware of. Then they relize that they have to save this house!

We discussed our two main questions:

What is art? The kids decided it is a way of visually expressing yourself.

Is a house a piece of art? To answer this, we looked at different design elements and architecual styles. Though we talked mainly about the Prairie Style: the architectual style used in the Robie House. (For more info on the Robie house, see the bottom of the article.)

We discussed Fibonacci's Code, a sequence of numbers that appears very often in nature (1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, etc. just add the last to numbers.) and used in the prairie style.

Then we looked at the architectual style in the ceiling of the library. We looked also looked for hidden pictures and numbers from Fibanocci's Code in the ceiling. Do you see any?

So, now that we had decided that a house is a piece of art, the kids were given different kinds of crackers to design windows with hidden pictures in them, just like in The Wright 3!

Click for more information on:

Blue Balliet
The Robie House
Fibonacci's Code
The Prairie Style
Chicago Universty

-Fernando Forero
Youth Volunteer

Library Programs Rock!

2008-08-10T19:51:00.011-04:00

We've had a great summer of reading! It's been all about catching the Reading Bug! Here are descriptions and pictures from the first programs.

We started the summer with a Rally for Reading on a stormy Saturday in May. Peter McCory, The One-Man Band, had everyone singing and dancing.
http://www.petermccory.com/
We even played some of his instruments! There was face painting, food, storybook readers, origami paper-folding and books to pick up and purchase from the Winchester Book Gallery.

It was the first time to register for the Summer Reading Club.

We began library programs two weeks later with Jerry Schneider teaching us about bugs in our backyard. We took some of his butterfly and dragonfly stencils and created one-of-a-kind t-shirts.

We had a great time exploring the library grounds while looking for grasses to add to our shirts. We wanted to make sure the butterflies and dragonflies were resting on something.

We started with a t-shirt, stuffed it with newspaper, added the stencils and grasses and twigs and waited for our parents or other adults to spray our shirts with red or blue dye.

The sun helped to dry the shirt.

We had some great shirts at the end! Look at mine!

Handley Puppeteers on Broadway (Virginia, that is)

2008-08-04T19:23:00.013-04:00

Friday, July 18th we loaded up our tour bus (the new name for the library's old gray van) and became a convoy of 4 vans of youth puppeteers headed south to Broadway, VA. It was a hot day and the Village Library of Broadway had cleared out some room in a building called the "cannery." We set up our stage and enjoyed a lunch provided by the staff of the Village Library. We had just enough time to talk through some of the logistics of working in a small space when the children and adults started to arrive. We set up our stage and got ready for the opening number.

We're singing "Happy to be Here" in this picture. The puppet leads are Omar, Priscilla and Herb. The banner on front of the stage was made by some of our artistic puppeteers.

Children were sitting and perched everywhere. Each song we did was better than the one before. Our program included songs that the puppets sang and stories told by our librarian Miss Donna. We were getting ready for the next song while the stories were being told. Our program called "Bug Beautiful" was put together from songs we had been practicing and presenting all summer.

This next song was selected by Matt. "Mr. Sun" was created by several of us. I think Kierstan drew the sunglasses on his face. In this song "Mr. Sun" is held by puppeteer, Beth. The puppets on the back row have a special dance move during the song. The butterfly on the front row sings the lead.

We had a lot of fun with the song "Splish, Splash." We even had a bubble machine! The kids really liked the bubbles. They danced around to the music and tried to catch the bubbles. The bubbles really traveled far into the room in this building because there was an air conditioning unit in the window behind the stage. The air pushed the bubbles into the room and over the heads of most of the audience.

The lead on this song is the little guy puppet in the center of the front row.

The bubbles were coming out thick at this point.

After the "Chigger Song" and the "Itsy Bitsy Spider" we go on a bear hunt. Everyone screamed when the bear came out and started to tear down the stage to get to Miss Donna.

We had everyone up and dancing on "Silly Willy" and then we ended with "Ten in Bed" with a reminder to not "let the bed bugs bite!"

Here we are at the library sign.

We are joined by the Village Library librarian, Barbara Andes in this next picture. She is the one in the blue shirt.

We had a great time at this library. We can now say we have performed on Broadway!

Puppeteers Go on the Road

2008-07-27T20:16:00.003-04:00

Tomorrow some members of the puppet team will present the program, "Bug Beautiful" at two of our libraries in the system: Clarke County Library and Handley Library. Everyone is excited! We spiffy-ed up our banner on Wednesday afternoon and made new props on Saturday. This puppet show will be great! On Tuesday, we present two puppet shows at the Bowman Library in Stephens City, VA. This is our home library. We present puppet shows each Wednesday and Saturday morning along with Miss Donna, the librarian, who shares stories and reads books to the preschool kids.
This special all-puppet program includes "Happy to Be Here," "Mr. Sun," "Five Little Ladybugs," "We're Going on a Bear Hunt," "Grandma's Feather Bed," "Having Fun at the Beach," "The Chigger Song," "The Mosquito," and "Ten in Bed."
A similar program was presented at the Village Library in Broadway, VA on Friday, July 18th. We had a great time and gleefully told everyone that our puppet troupe was going "on Broadway!" A photo of the team even made the local paper! We were excited!
We'll be sharing the photos soon! Come back to see more!

Getting Started

2008-07-27T19:46:00.006-04:00

Welcome!
We had to choose a starting date and here it is! We've had dreams about a blog, we've had meetings about a blog, we've had discussions about a blog and all of it pointed to just getting started. Thanks to all of the youth that have made it possible to get one going. We have collected stories, pictures, recommendations and writings. They are the best! Look for some great pictures that have been taken just this summer. We have a great TAB (Teen Advisory Board) group and our youth volunteers cannot be surpassed! You'll see! Watch for the photos!