Storytime Review

Smile a lot, it makes you Happy!

This week for our storytime classes we began with a song of If You're Happy and You Know it followed by an activity where we looked at pictures of different faces and decided what emotion they were feeling. My favorites were a picture of a little girl who had obviously smelled something very bad and had her nose all wrinkled up and a young boy hands clasped together with his face pointing up with a look of pure joy. Even the youngest children could figure out the expressions with this simple activity.

We read Taking a Bath with the Dog and Other Things that Make Me Happy by Scott Menchin, May there Always be Sunshine by Jim Gill, The Feel Good book by Todd Parr, Think Happy! and Smile a Lot! by Nancy Carlson and Smile! by Leigh Hodgkinson.

The best activity of the week was the bubble blowing machine. I turned it on and just let the kids pop the bubbles. We experimented with popping them different ways. We poked them with our fingers, grabbed them and squashed them with our fists, clapped them between our palms and tried to bite them. Which is harder than it looks because if you breath out before you bite the bubble blows away from your mouth. We also tried letting them fall to the ground and stomping on them, which wasn't too successful because most kids couldn't wait for it to fall all the way to the ground before popping it.

We created a clown paper sack puppet at the end and decorated it with crayons, pompoms and colored craft foam shapes. I found it humorous that several moms said that either they thought clowns were creepy or somebody else did. So they did not think that clowns went along with a lesson about begin happy at all.

Next Week: Bunnies

Michele, Children's Librarian

The Geography of Bliss

Off on another trek to various exotic places via a book, my most popular mode of travel. Reading The Geography of Bliss by Eric Weiner, I felt a bit like I was back traveling with the author of Eat, Pray, Love. Both authors are traveling the world looking for something. I was a little surprised at the places Mr. Weiner went looking for bliss. They aren't the first countries that come to mind when you think of happiness. How about Netherlands, Bhutan, Iceland, Qatar, India, Great Britain? Maybe Switzerland or Thailand, definitely not Moldova, he went there to counteract all that bliss. Moldova, apparently, is the least happy nation on the planet. He even went to Miami but after reading his view on Miami, I don't want to go there (living in paradise can get old).

There are a lot of books out there about our search for happiness. In our library, some titles are The Secret, The happiness hypothesis, Stumbling on happiness, The art of happiness at work, The art of happiness, How we choose to be happy, and Secrets for success and happiness. Mr. Weiner believes that Americans expect to be happy. "No other nation's founding document so prominently celebrates happiness", yet the United States is only the world's twenty-third happiest nation. Where do we find happiness then? Mr. Weiner believes our happiness is completely and utterly intertwined with other people: family and friends and neighbors..." Happiness is not a noun or verb. It's a conjunction. Connective tissue".

Susan