World Read Aloud Day & Princess Party
Beside my regular Yoga Story Time each Wednesday, we also hosted a Princess Party for children in Kindergarten through 2nd Grade last night with lots of frilly fun and games! Yesterday was also “Spread the Word to End the Word” Day as well as World Read Aloud Day. A busy day, indeed!
I didn’t get a chance to plan anything specific for World Read Aloud Day, but we definitely did a lot of reading aloud here in the library! Check out Lit World for more information about World Read Aloud Day and the programs hosted around the world. We had infant and yoga story time and of our course our princess party. Regardless of the type of program, I also include some form of read aloud to show kids that the library can combine reading and fun together!
For our Princess Party, we had about 22 little girls (and a few boys) attend and I think everyone went home very happy! I began by reading Snoring Beauty by Bruce Hale aloud to the group. This is a PERFECT read aloud for young elementary school children and has a lot of adult humor as well! It definitely helps if you can perfect your dragon snore before reading this to a group. After our story we made our own Princess and Prince crowns using pre-cut crowns from Oriental Trading and gemstones that had sticky backs making it very easy for the kids to apply. When we finished working with our beautiful crowns, we played Disney Princess bingo with bingo cards that I made with the Disney princesses on them. This proved to be a little difficult because the kids were quite young – mostly kindergarten and first graders, but we adapted as needed and the kids had a great time! I chose to use the pictures of the Disney princesses, but next time I would also include their names to help parents in identifying each princess.
After all was said and done, we had a great time, but I had a number of parents tell myself and staff members that princesses are really more of a preschool interest rather than elementary school. This shocked me – I still love the princesses and I didn’t think this age group would be too old, but maybe we’ll try a similar program for preschoolers in the future.