I love small towns. While I’ve never lived in one (I would say the relatively small New Jersey suburb I grew up in *probably* does not count, ha), my mom grew up in a Minnesota small town (Long Prairie, for those of you Minnesotans out there) and I love visiting them. Especially ones where a friend is the library director of a beautiful Carnegie library.  Yesterday, I drove to Ritzville, WA in eastern Washington, a primarily farming town relatively close to Moses Lake, Spokane, and the Tri-Cities to meet my friend Kylie Fullmer, who became the library director of their gorgeous library this past November and to do a storytime this morning. (Check out the Ritzville Journal newspaper blurb announcing the storytime!)

I did the Water, Water Everywhere: A Liquid Adventure storytime this morning for about 8-9 kids and their parents, and the storytime confirmed that this is my calling. I love everything about getting kids excited about reading through fun and silly activities. I’ll have to add a picture later that Kylie took of me actually doing the storytime, but I read three books to the preK through early elementary school kids, all of which were interactive in some way. Each of the kids got to use one of our many props and puppets, ranging from 3 clownfish puppets (yes, that is the Finding Nemo fish), a manta ray puppet, a (plastic) lobster, a bucket full of (plastic) fish, a few alligator puppets, a shark puppet, sailor caps, and fish hats, to mention a few. We read the stories There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Shell, Very Boring Alligator, and Over in the Ocean on the Coral Reef (which is a song, and it has the lyrics and musical notation in the back, although we just read it as an ocean counting book). I also had prepared a water tornado using two soda bottles, which they absolutely loved and all got a chance to try. (Do it at home! It’s super easy…all I ended up doing was duck-taping the two bottles with no caps on together. I wouldn’t leave it turned on its side, but it works perfectly well and no drilling needed). The other thing they loved was mixing oil and water together. I put food coloring and glitter in the water and then added oil and shook up the bottle. They loved watching it separate and guessing the color it would turn. Afterward, I gave out books, which worked out really well, although we’re still working out some kinks in our record-keeping of book giveaways.  I so appreciate the Ritzville Public Library (in particular, Kylie Fullmer for advertising and supporting) for hosting the Literacy Lab. While my mom had presented story programs elsewhere, this was my inaugural event and it went off beautifully.

Something to note for the future: figure out how to loosen the safety straps of our rolling book carts! 20 minutes before the program was set to start, I was pulling all the materials needed and decided to pull out the book cart. But ha! Could I figure out how to get them loosened? No, even when a friendly man stopped to help (another reason I love small towns). As it turned out, I just put books in a box, which worked for the better anyway, since we ended up going to the basement for the storytime and there is no elevator for a *very heavy* book cart.