October Meeting: Introductions and Tinkercad

We had a fabulous first meeting of the school year, with six returning members and three new members in attendance. After chatting and eating pizza for a bit, we did a quick icebreaker activity to learn more about each other. We learned that some Bookshoppers are participating in Bookshop because they like reading and doing makerspace-type activities, while others are here because their parents signed them up (points for honesty!). Some members are looking forward most to the books we'll be reading this year in Bookshop, while others are most excited about doing fun games in our meetings and hopefully eating lots of sugar and marshmallows. Outside of Bookshop, we learned that one member's favorite books of all time are the Tokyo Ghoul manga series, and we've also got some sports lovers: two baseball players and a basketball player. Thanks for sharing, crew!

After briefly going over what to expect for the year, we voted on our December book and moved right into our activity for the meeting: adapting a library card holder in Tinkercad to be printed on the library's 3D printer. Each Bookshopper was able to personalize and adapt the library card holder sample below by adding different text and/or shapes.

Once finished with that, they were able to try creating a 3D object from scratch. Below are images of the final, printed library card holders they created as well as some of the fun other things they designed in Tinkercad.

By Naseem

By Sean

By Gabriel

Our next meeting will be on Monday, November 5th, and we are reading The First Rule of Punk by Celia C. Pérez. Malú, the main character, is a talented artist so we will use her zine creations in the book to inspire our own zines. See you next month!

June Meeting: Booktalks and Food Scenes

We had a blast and got all sugared up at our final meeting of the school year this past Monday. Each Bookshopper had brought a book to share to give us all some ideas of good things to read over the summer, and it was a great mix of books; titles and more included later in this post.

After booktalking each book, we had a little series of friendly Minute to Win It competitions. First up: Cookie Face. Each person had one minute to try to get a cookie from their forehead to their mouth without using their hands. See the pictures below for some of the hilarity. Three Bookshoppers were successful, but it is HARD.

Next up: Marshmallow Toss. Each competitor had one minute to get as many marshmallows in a cup as they could, only throwing one at a time and sitting a set distance away. The high score was an impressive 12 marshmallows!

Last but not least: Suck It Up. Everyone had one minute to move 25 M&Ms from one plate to another plate using only a straw. Five Bookshoppers did it successfully, one in under 30 seconds!

Then we moved on to our main activity: using delicious treats to create scenes from the books we shared. Everyone got very creative with frosting, graham crackers, marshmallows, chocolate chips, gummy bears, skittles, and pretzels. Pictures of the process are below.

And the final products!

Avery: Dog from The Complete Dog Breed Book by DK

Christopher: Siege of Leningrad from Symphony for the City of the Dead by M.T. Anderson

Gabriel: Rafting down the river from The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain

Arsalan: Mr. Snake from The Bad Guys by Aaron Blabey

Yao: Priyanka from Pashmina by Nidhi Chanani

Isaac: Rafting underground in The City of Ember by Jeanne DuPrau and Dallas Middaugh

Carson: Shelter, rover, and Mars dust from The Martian by Andy Weir

Hima: Skull from Addison Cooke and the Treasure of the Incas by Jonathan W. Stokes

Amy: Boat and flood from The Book of Dust: The Belle Sauvage by Philip Pullman

After sharing (and maybe eating a little bit) from the creations, everyone filled out a quick survey to give me feedback about the program this year and then got to pick out a free book to take home and keep.

It was a fabulous last meeting, and we will definitely miss Carson and Christopher next year as they move on to high school. Keep in touch over the summer, and if you'll be going into 6th, 7th, or 8th grade in the fall, don't forget to visit the us, reading blog to write reviews about all of the awesome books you're reading over the summer. Each review means a chance to win a Porter Square Books gift card, a Kindle Fire, and/or an Audio Listening Pack that includes a waterproof Bluetooth speaker, headphones, and a headphone splitter.

Have a wonderful summer, and I'll be in touch in late August with information about next year's Bookshop program.

April Meeting: Animaker PSA Videos

We had a slightly smaller but still very animated group for this month's meeting. Most of us seemed to have enjoyed It Ain't So Awful, Falafel by Firoozeh Dumas. No one had been familiar with the Iranian hostage crisis so we watched a brief History Channel clip to get some more context for the prejudice and hatred that Cindy experiences in the book. We talked a little bit about what's it like to be a new student in middle school and new to America.

Then, I showed a few sample PSA videos made using Animaker, the free, online, animated video creator that we would be using to make our own PSAs, preferably something that might have helped Cindy adjust to her new school. In spite of a few technology hiccups and time constraints that prevented some from completely finishing, the Bookshoppers created some very unique videos, as you'll see below!

Our next meeting will be on Monday, June 4th, and it will be our last meeting of this school year. We will be taking a break in July and August and will start up again at the end of September. For our last meeting, we didn't pick a book because I asked everyone to read one book and bring it to the meeting with them to booktalk it to the group. This will provide us with lots of great book ideas to read over the summer! Our activity is a surprise, but it will involve food so come hungry...

March Meeting: LittleBits Moving Creations

We had a great March meeting, with good discussion about the graphic novel Cardboard by Doug TenNapel and lots of creative experimenting with LittleBits. Not everyone loved the book, and several Bookshoppers actually mentioned that they thought they would like it more. A few found it too creepy - cardboard monsters taking over the world feels a little too close to a zombie apocalypse... We talked about how the way TenNapel drew the characters immediately shaped our impressions of them; none of us would have wanted to be friends with Marcus, while Cam seemed awesome.

After talking a little bit about what we might make out of magic cardboard if we ever got some, we got to work on our activity for the evening. Since Cam and his dad made a person out of cardboard, I challenged the group to work alone or in small groups to create something that moved using  LittleBits circuits, cardboard, tape, paper plates, string, and more! Although most Bookshoppers had used LittleBits before, we watched a brief orientation video, and it just so happens that LittleBits had a current challenge up on their website that fit perfectly with our activity and provided more helpful inspiration.

The Bookshoppers got right to work experimenting with different moving pieces and testing out methods of attaching cardboard to make various creations. Trial and error was the name of the game, and it was awesome to see the Bookshoppers share techniques and help each other troubleshoot issues. Below are several pictures and videos documenting the creative process.

Although we ran out of time to formally submit our moving creations online for the LittleBits challenge, check out the impressive final products in the following pictures and videos!

Our next meeting will be on Monday, April 30th. We will be discussing It Ain't So Awful, Falafel by Firoozeh Dumas. See you next month!

February Meeting: Science-Inspired Comics and Storyboard That

Even though we didn't all finish the entire book this month, we had a blast talking through some of the funniest entries in What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions by Randall Munroe. Some group favorites were the comics in response to the question about crying so much you dehydrated yourself and the question about the number of cats needed to bring down a jet, assuming they can meow at the same resonant frequency as the plane. People submitted some VERY interesting scientific questions, and the author answered them with humor, smarts, and a good dose of sarcasm.

Since the comics were hilarious and looked so simple, we tried creating our own science-inspired comics. Some Bookshoppers took inspiration from the hypothetical science questions asked in the book, such as: What if a rainstorm dropped all of its water in a single drop?; and What if every day, every human had a 1% chance of being turned into a turkey, and every turkey had a 1% chance of being turned into a human? Our cartoons are below:

After hand drawing comics, we tried out the free online program Storyboard That, which has tons of different backgrounds and characters and props to help you create your own cartoons. It was super fun to play around with changing each character's clothes, body position, and facial expression so many Bookshoppers didn't get a chance to finish their comics. But it's a free web-based program, so I encouraged them to create an account with their own email addresses and keep playing around with it at home! Some of the Storyboard That scenes are shown below:

Made with Storyboard That

Made with Storyboard That

Made with Storyboard That

Made with Storyboard That

Made with Storyboard That

Made with Storyboard That

Our next meeting will be on Monday, March 26th. We will be discussing Cardboard by Doug TenNapel and using LittleBits to build something together as a group. See you next month!

January Meeting: Canva Book Covers

We had another lively meeting this month discussing When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead. Most Bookshoppers seemed to have enjoyed the book, especially the twist about Marcus and the Laughing Man. While we ate pizza and talked about time travel and if we would have been brave enough to do what Marcus had done, I set up a quick version of The $20,000 Pyramid, which is the game show that Miranda's mother is a contestant on near the end of the book. The group split up in pairs and took turns being the celebrity (giving clues for their partners to guess words and categories). It was a LOT harder than it seemed. 

I was impressed to hear that most of the Bookshop members successfully avoided seeing the cover while reading the book and were surprised by it when I unwrapped one of the books to show them the original cover. A new cover was designed for the paperback edition, but it doesn't seem like that much of an improvement to me. Most of them agreed that they probably wouldn't have picked the book up judging by the hardcover cover (both covers shown below).

Hardcover edition

Paperback edition

                                 















A few people mentioned that they had envisioned a person on the cover, or a letter, or a photograph of a city scene, and this was their chance to create that awesome new cover! We used Canva to design our own book covers; check them out below.

Front cover

Back cover

Front cover

Back cover

Front cover

Back cover

I would definitely be intrigued enough to pick up books with those covers!

Our next meeting will be Monday, February 26th. We will be discussing What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions by Randall Munroe. This is an awesome book to browse through since it's organized by absurd hypothetical questions interspersed with hilarious cartoon depictions of those questions being tested out. We will be drawing cartoons depicting our own absurd questions, both by hand and using the online tool Storyboard That. See you next month!