As the school year winds down and we reach our final stretch of library classes, your early childhooders are applying their skills as an audience and their interests as library visitors like practiced professionals.

In the Fours, kids have mastered the parts of the book (cover, back cover, pages, spine), are focusing on story content and particularly enjoy “silly” books like Tom Cat (by Woods) and Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus (by Willems).

In EK, the students have just experienced “silent” books — books that tell their stories through pictures alone — like Red Book (by Lehman) and Magpie Magic (by Wilson) and are taking full advantage of their well-earned free reading time to choose their own books and share them with friends.

In Kindergarten, the students are well on their way to a degree in Librarianship, able as they are to differentiate between fiction and non-fiction and begin tracking down books by searching out the section with the author’s last name.  We just had a great time with Imagine a Day (by Thomson), a gorgeous book filled with optical illusions.

We’ve still got a few classes left, but by now, the kids are practically running things themselves (practically).