Early Literacy Center- Mail time! Part 1

We were very fortunate this year to receive a Community Foundation Grant to upgrade our Early Literacy Center. We purchased some big furniture pieces that we'll be rotating out quarterly. This will help keep the area new and exciting for our littlest patrons.

We decided to open our newly renovated area with one of our coolest purchases. A mailbox of course!

Kids love getting mail, and they love pretending to be a mail person even more. After visiting the Eau Clair library and seeing their great early literacy area and reading the great mailbox ideas over at Libraryland I knew we had to jump on the mail train. 

We made mailboxes for some of our favorite characters and wrote each of them a letter. This was my favorite part.

This has been a huge hit in our Play and Learn area. Kids can organize the mail, deliver the mail to their friends, and then mail the letters back in the mailbox. I've seen kids pretend to be a mail person for over 30 minutes. It's pretty awesome.

We've also added a writing component to our area, but I'll talk about that more in part 2!

Hello Again!

Hello dear friend! I am so sorry that this blog has been abandoned over summer. Life has been a little crazy over in La Crosse.

Imagine this... but with children.
 I'm the guy in the yellow coat.

Our summer reading was a smashing success! We went prizeless this year, and you can read about it over on Marge's blog. TL:DR is that it was amazing. Kids loved it and so did the parents. Everyone should go prizeless next year, ok?

Oh, and I GOT MARRIED!

My name is now legally and officially Brooke Newberry. Isn't that the best last name for a children's librarian?! I am changing my name professionaly as well. Since no one knew how to spell or pronounce my maiden name I don't think this will cause too much heartache.


Storytime outlines (I have about 12 of them) will start going up next week, and then we will hopefully return to our regularly scheduled, slightly less sporadic, blogging. Thanks for sticking it out with me friends!