Thursday, October 18, 2012

Spooky Story Campfire Center

Hi friends!

Erin Drew (@erinlibrary on Twitter) just shared a GREAT library center for October! She is an elementary school librarian in Rhode Island, blogging at Ms. Drew in the Library. I received permission to share her center here.

She tweeted a photo of her Spooky Story Campfire Center.


It looks like her campfire is made of cardboard, colored and fitted together with slots.

At this center, students take turns reading aloud from books of spooky short stories, like In a Dark, Dark Room and Half Minute Horrors. (Note to self: Find that book. We don't have it. Our students would clamor for it!)

Here's her sign for the campfire center.


You can see that this center is not just for creepy fun, but there are important learning objectives for this activity. It's not complicated to set up.

I like it that the instructions include: "Avoid this center if I don't like scary stories." Yes, that would be me.

Once you make your cardboard campfire, you can bring it out every once in a while, throughout the year. I think this center will be perfect in our library near the reading tent!

I love this library center! Thanks so much for sharing it, Erin Drew!

If you love this center, too, please leave Erin some feedback either on her blog or in the comments here.

And, by the way, if you've created a great library center, please contact me with the information or link to your blog. I'd love to share it with everyone here! Together, we're all better!


5 comments:

  1. I like! IF you wanted you could put some of the "Halloween" lights (the ones that look like Christmas lights but are orange) you can find in craft stores right now. Then it would light up!

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    1. Ms. O, great addition! Orange twinkling lights would add extra campfire fun to this center!

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  2. PS I still need to come by your school. Cause I am not explaining something right. Centers don't get used.

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    1. Maybe next week? After Tuesday? I'll be out Monday, and counting book fair money on Tuesday. Our book fair volunteers' kids have been using the library centers while their moms are working the cash registers. Win-win!

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    2. I'll look at our schedule. I can't remember and my goodness ... the upper grades aren't following it anyway. EVERY OTHER WEEK as a class checkout and then on small group or individual passes the rest of the time concept seems too complicated, I guess. Keep showing up when we're completely not expecting them. EEEK! :/
      Maybe it's our space (HA!). And all the ramming of legs into tables one ends up doing to get anywhere? And all the other people that end up meeting in the library (small tutoring groups, mostly, as well as parent registrations)? We start to feel crowded?
      No, it's probably me and how I explain things.

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