Children's Update: Manvel

This month 82 children and 57 adults attended our preschool storytime programs. We started the month with stories from Mother Goose, then we spent the rest of the month celebrating the holidays. We read stories and sang songs about reindeer, Santa Claus, and Christmas, and we finished out the month, and the year, with New Year's stories. For crafts we made the Three Little Kittens' lost mittens, Rudolph the Red-Puff-Ball-Nosed Reindeer, a Santa Claus puppet, Christmas trees, and a great New Year's party hat.

At Teen Read we discussed new books that have been released, as well as new movies we'd seen. Everyone had seen "The Twilight Saga: New Moon" and was really excited to talk about it. Attendance was down due to the holidays, but we hope that it will rise again in January. For our teen activity this month, we played Name That Holiday Tune. We only had two teens come. They enjoyed snacks and had a great time trying to guess the holiday songs. Both did very well, but we could only have one winner, and he got a candy cane full of Hershey's Kisses.

This month for Pajama Night Storytime, we had three children and two adults come listen to several different versions of 'Twas the Night Before Christmas. The program concluded with the original story by Clement Clarke Moore. Afterward, we enjoyed cookies and apple juice.

Our Kids' Craft Time this month was attended by seven children and two adults. We made star ornaments out of craft sticks, rhinestones and glitter glue. While the glue was drying, we put together bags of "Magic Reindeer Food" to sprinkle on their lawns Christmas Eve so Santa's reindeer could find their houses. Everyone had a great time.

In January, we will be hosting our (hopefully) First Annual Paper Football Tournament for teens. We'll also be having our regular Teen Read programs. We'll be making snow globes during our Kids' Craft Time, and Pajama Night Storytime will be "Midnight Snack Attack!"

We welcome our new shelver, Clare, to the branch. Clare started December 14 and is doing a wonderful job.

Geri, children's librarian