December Meeting: Stop Motion Animation with OSnap!

Everyone seemed to have enjoyed reading The Ninja Librarians: The Accidental Keyhand, by Jen Swann Downey. Most of us would jump at the chance to be a Lybrarian, although there was some (valid) skepticism about the non-existent effects of changing events in the past. Savi and Mr. Kornberger were favorite characters, owing much of that favoritism to their swordplay skills...

Speaking of which, Eli and Avery remembered to bring fun sword props for our short movies, and although we ended up not being able to shoot live-action, their swords featured prominently in the two short stop action videos we made.

After splitting into two groups of three and sketching rough story boards for the scenes from the book that they wanted to portray, I gave each group a short intro to OSnap!, a free stop motion animation app available for iOS devices. OSnap! enables the user to easily take hundreds of pictures very quickly that are then seamlessly put together to create a stop motion video. There are numerous features to help keep the pictures aligned (onionskin is my favorite, which overlays the previous picture taken on to the current view so everything can be aligned) and to edit and adjust the pictures included in the video as well as the speed (frames per second). Several Bookshoppers had played around with stop motion before, and they commented that this app was so much easier than other tools they had used. Check out the finished videos below!

You Are Not Alone Savi

By Avery, Gabriel, and Stefan

 

 Lego Jousting

By Christopher, Eli, and Isaac

(The selected audio, a popular musical track, didn't export due to licensing restrictions, so please play your own soundtrack to accompany the video.)

Clearly, we had lots of swordplay fun and were able to create some pretty cool short videos to bring scenes from The Ninja Librarian to life.

For January, we are reading Secret Hero Society: Study Hall of Justice, a graphic novel by Derek Fridolfs, and we will be meeting on the SECOND Monday of the month, January 9th, to create our own graphic novels with a yet to be determined comic creation tool. Copies of the book can be picked up at the Children's Room desk. Have a wonderful holiday season!

November Meeting: Canva Marketing Materials

I take full responsibility for the fact that several Bookshop members found our spooky October book, The Screaming Staircase, by Jonathan Stroud, a little too creepy and decided not to read it. Those members who did read it seemed to enjoy it, and we had some good discussion about what we would do if we were in a ghost-hunting agency. A few kids got super excited to learn that Lockwood & Co. is a series with the fourth book just published this fall!

Luckily, our project for the meeting was very flexible in terms of content, so everyone was able to create cool marketing materials using Canva, whether or not they read the book. Some Bookshoppers chose to create trifold brochures, some created more traditional posters, and one made a business card. Several of their creations are displayed below:

 Christopher

Stefan

Avery

Eli

Gabriel

Isaac

We are reading The Ninja Librarians: The Accidental Keyhand by Jenn Swann Downey for our November book, and we will be meeting on the SECOND Monday of the month, December 12th, to tap into our own inner ninja librarians and hopefully create a short movie. Copies of the book can be picked up at the Children's Room desk.

September Meeting: Silent Lego Challenge

We had a fun meeting on Monday catching up and eating lots of pizza. Many of the Bookshoppers shared favorite parts from exciting summer travel adventures. We also played a little warm-up game called This or That before moving on to our main activity.

Since there wasn't an official book to read for the meeting, I asked the group to work together to come up with a Bookshop logo out of Legos. The catch was that they could have ten minutes to talk and plan, and then they would have to do the actual building without talking. They came up with a concept pretty quickly, but there was some confusion about how to create a book out of Legos.

Once the box of Legos was opened, they did a great job of not talking to each other, using paper and pencils to write down any questions or brainstorming ideas. There was a fair amount of humming and borderline talking noises though...

Some pictures of the process along with the final product are below.

We will NOT be meeting in October (our September meeting would normally be the first Monday in October, but that falls on Rosh Hashanah so it was moved up a week), so our next meeting will be Monday, November 7. In the spirit of Halloween, we will be reading The Screaming Staircase by Jonathan Stroud. It's the first in the somewhat spooky series, Lockwood & Co., about three kids who run a ghost fighting agency in London. We will be using a free online brochure-making program, Canva, to create brochures to advertise new business for the agency. Copies of the book can be picked up at the Children's Room desk.

First Meeting of the 2016-17 Year

Hello Bookshoppers!

Our first meeting of the 2016-17 school year will be a week from today: Monday, September 26, 5:30-7:00. If you or your parent has not contacted me yet to formally register for the program this year, please email me at emeyer@cambridgema.gov to save your spot.

I hope you had a wonderful summer, and I can't wait to hear about all of the wonderful books you read!

June Meeting: Free Choice Books and Legos

Our last meeting of the year went by way too quickly! We had so many great books to share, lots of delicious cupcakes to decorate, and fun book-inspired Lego scenes to create.

After stuffing ourselves with pizza and cupcakes, we each shared a little teaser booktalk about the book we had read. We had a wonderful and diverse selection of books represented, from nonfiction to fantasy to realistic fiction to sci-fi! Then, we moved over to the Lego table and attempted to re-create a scene, image, or plot point from the book using Legos. This turned out to be harder than it sounds, especially considering the limited Lego people and blocks available, but the Bookshoppers came up with some awesome literary creations. There are pictures below, but they will also be on display at the Main Library on the third floor until Monday morning, June 27, so stop by to check it out!



Getting the creative juices flowing...




Isaac: N.E.R.D.S.: National Espionage, Rescue, and Defense Society by Michael Buckley




Eli: Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell




Chris: Tesla's Attic by Neal Shusterman




Avery: The Complete Dog Breed Book by DK Publishing





Gabriel: Wonder by R. J. Palacio




Shayla: The Red Queen by Victoria Aveyard




Our book-inspired Lego display in the Children's Room



The June meeting was our last Bookshop meeting for this year. Have a wonderful summer, and we'll be back in September. Happy reading!

May Meeting: Scratch and PicoBoards

We had a blast at Monday's meeting talking about all of the fantastical places Milo visits in The Phantom Tollbooth and then taking a stab at creating our own using Scratch. Two members of the MIT Media Lab's Scratch team attended the meeting and brought PicoBoards for us to try out. These little sensor boards allowed us to create coded interactions based on a button, a slider, a light sensor, and a sound sensor in addition to what is typically available within Scratch.

We got so invested in our work that we ran out of time, so I wasn't able to get videos of everyone's Scratch projects. I did get some pictures of the process (but not of Isaac who created a very cool hybrid cat-dog that spun around, among many other things), but you'll just have to take my word for it that the Bookshoppers came up with some awesome Milo-inspired projects by the end of our meeting.

Hard at work

Avery: fat man/thin man/tall man/short man controlled by the slider and the button

Chris: game where you use the slider to help Milo collect As and avoid Zs and bombs

Eli: game involving the slider and this sinister skeleton guy eventually changing colors and dissolving into a whirlpool effect

Stefan: slider controls Milo in his car zooming back and forth

Get excited for our last meeting of the school year on Monday, June 20th! Bring a book to share!

April Meeting: Glogster Spy Club Posters

Monday's meeting flew by with lots of excitement about upcoming books (The Cursed Child!!!) and movies (Rogue One!!!). Everyone seemed to have enjoyed Liar and Spy, and we had a lively discussion about who was the liar and who was the spy. We also looked at some books about Georges Seurat and his incredible pointillism art technique since that was a theme throughout the book. 

After a delicious birthday blondie treat (happy belated birthday and thank you, Avery!), we started exploring Glogster, our new online tool of choice. Because Georges and Safer's whole friendship began with a mysterious spy club poster, we decided to create our own spy club posters. Some of them are still works in progress, but they would definitely get my attention and pique my curiosity!

Avery's Glog:


Chris's Glog:


Eli's Glog:


Gabe's Glog:


Isaac's Glog:


Shayla's Glog:


Stefan's Glog:


Our next meeting will be on Monday, May 23, from 5:30-7:00. PLEASE NOTE: this is not the last Monday of the month since the last Monday of May is Memorial Day and the library will be closed. We are reading The Phantom Tollbooth, by Norton Juster, and our top-secret special Scratch activity will be led by staff from the MIT Media Lab!

March Meeting: Audacity Audio and War Slogan Posters

We had a small but enthusiastic group at Monday's meeting. We talked about everything from aliens landing next door, to the awesome manga series, Library Wars, to who saved whose life in our March book, The War that Saved My Life by Kimberly Brubaker Bradley. (Consensus was reached that they sort of all saved each other in one way or another.)

We then launched into our first activity for the evening: writing a letter from one character in the book to another. We were pretty impressed by the animals in the book, since both Butter the horse and Bovril the cat played pretty big roles in Ada and Jamie's lives in the country. Thus, several Bookshop members chose to embrace magical realism and write letters from the point of view of one of the animals. The one member who chose to write from a human perspective tackled a British accent with impressive success. After finishing the hard part of writing, we rehearsed a bit before recording ourselves live using Audacity, a free Open Source software tool. The entertaining results are below. Enjoy!

While taking turns to record, we took inspiration from some vintage WWII British War Slogan posters and created some of our own posters.

February Meeting: Animoto Book Trailers

We had a fabulous meeting on Monday with a spirited discussion about Fuzzy Mud by Louis Sachar. The group gave the book another unanimous thumbs up, although the thought of an exponentially growing biological disease like Sachar's "fuzzy mud" was pretty terrifying to most of us. We all wished that the book had been longer with more character development and plot build-up and suspense. That said, the book's inherent suspense and creepiness lent itself very nicely to the book trailer medium, as you can see in the awesome examples below.

To create our book trailers, we used Animoto, a free online tool that allows you to quickly and easily match short snippets of text with images and music in a variety of different slideshow styles. Some of the features require payment, but we were able to obtain an educational account through the library, which enabled us to access most of the features. After a bit of a learning curve (and some frustrating browser issues), everyone was happily trolling the internet for cool pictures of sinister mud and evil bullies to include in their projects.

Enjoy our finished products below*, all of which will surely pique your curiosity and make you want to run over to the library to grab a copy of the book!





Josie's Book Trailer:



Stefan's Book Trailer:


Isaac and Gabriel's Book Trailer:



Christopher's Book Trailer:


Eli's Book Trailer:


Emily's Book Trailer:



*We ran out of time before the students were able to include their image and music credits.

January Meeting: LittleBits Tinkering

After a long break, we met this week to talk about Escape from Mr. Lemoncello's Library by Chris Grabenstein. It was a unanimous group favorite, with everyone very excited about the new book, Mr. Lemoncello's Library Olympics, just published this month! Some highlights from the library (and that we wish we had here at the CPL) include: the librarian and tiger holograms, the video dome, and the electromagnetic hover ladder to reach high bookshelves.

Having eaten our fill of pizza and engaged in playful discussion about what an awful person Charles Chiltington was and what we all would have done if faced with a similar challenge to escape the library, we turned to the LittleBits and channeled Mr. Lemoncello's inventive mind. LittleBits are magnetized electronic building blocks that can be used to create everything from a simple circuit that powers a small motor (or light, buzzer, fan, etc.) to a remote-controlled car and beyond. In short, they're AWESOME. A few pictures and one short video below give a little insight into the creations that we made. Most of them focused on how to alert Mr. Lemoncello if Charles Chiltington entered the library (i.e. LOTS of buzzing and blinking lights). One of the circuits involved a mat that when stepped on by a patron, triggered a welcome sign light to come on. And yet another imitated a book scanner using a roller LittleBit and a pipe cleaner, among other materials. We've got some very inventive minds in Bookshop!

Our next meeting will be on Monday, February 29, from 5:30-7:00. We are reading Fuzzy Mud by Louis Sachar and will be making book trailers using the free online tool, Animoto. Stop by the children's room desk to pick up a copy of the book if you didn't take one at our last meeting!

Next Bookshop Meeting Reminder: MONDAY, JANUARY 25

Happy New Year! With the holidays behind us, I wanted to post a reminder to pick up your copy of Escape from Mr. Lemoncello's Library at the children's room desk if you haven't already. Get ready to get lost in puzzles and codes and a library even more amazing than the CPL (if you can believe it). See you in three weeks, when we will attempt to create our own unique, automated, Lemoncello-inspired inventions using LittleBits!