Story Times to End Soon

Just a heads-up: April 30 will be our final story time until July. We’ll be busy in the interim with all the first grade field trips, and, of course, getting ready for a fabulous summer.

We do invite you to come to our Preschool Dance Party at 10 a.m. on Monday, May 20. (It’s kind of like story time without the books, and is always a lot of fun.) We’re also excited about magician Stephen Ingraham’s program at 2 p.m. on Saturday, May 11. Neither program requires registration.

Irish Dancing on March 9

Cead Mile Failte (A hundred thousand welcomes) to the Boland School of Irish Dance! They will be performing traditional Irish stepdancing at 2 p.m. on Saturday, March 9.

February Break Lego Block Party

We had a great time at the Lego Block Party on February 23. Click on More Photos to see the fun.

Invention Convention 2013

Feeling creative? Here’s a great opportunity to show off your own invention.

“Finger Lakes Invention Convention 2013 is designed to encourage scientific problem solving as well as to promote creative thinking in elementary and middle school age students. It is even more important to stress that thinking of a solution for a problem can also be fun and intriguing. Designing a new invention or a new process can be a valuable and enjoyable way to develop skills of problem solving that can be used for years to come.

“Visit the website www.flicsterny.com for information about the invention process and to download the Student Invention Entry/Disclosure Form. This form must be filled out and submitted in order to enter the Invention Convention by the deadline date of March 30, 2013.”

So Ready, Set, Invent!

2012 in review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2012 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

600 people reached the top of Mt. Everest in 2012. This blog got about 8,700 views in 2012. If every person who reached the top of Mt. Everest viewed this blog, it would have taken 15 years to get that many views.

Click here to see the complete report.

Bedtime Math

Here’s a fun new way to learn math.  For more interesting problems, check out the website www.bedtimemath.org

 

There are certain weird foods where you really wonder who first got the crazy idea to try eating it.  But somewhere along the line, someone decided to take the gummy stuff out of a tree and chew on it.  Gum is naturally made in trees – it’s the resin or sap from inside the trunk – and as much as 9,000 years ago humans were chewing the gum from birch trees.  Since then it’s become all the rage, with 374 trillion sticks of gum now made every year. They say you “can’t walk and chew gum at the same time,” but given how much gum gets chewed, hopefully they’ve figured out how by now.

Wee ones: If you’ve been chewing a stick of gum for 3 minutes and chew it for another 4 minutes before it loses its flavor, for how many minutes do you chew in total?

Little kids: Bubble gum comes in a bigger, stretchier wad that can be blown out into a bubble. If you try 12 times to blow a bubble and you succeed 1/3 of the time, how many bubbles do you blow?  Bonus: The largest bubble-gum bubble ever blown was 23 inches wide. If your head is 7 inches wide, how much wider than your head was that bubble?

Big kids: Apparently Americans chew an average of 300 sticks of gum per person each year. If you chewed at that rate, how many sticks would you chew each month?  Bonus: The record for continuous gum chewing is 135 sticks over 8 hours.  Assuming he chewed 1 less stick during the final hour than each of the previous 7 hours, how many sticks did he chew each hour?

Answers:

Wee ones: 7 minutes.

Little kids: 4 bubbles. Bonus: 16 inches wider.

Big kids: 25 per month (close to 1 per day).  Bonus: 17 sticks per hour.

Countdown to Noon

We rang in the new year with style (and a lot of giggles) at our Countdown to Noon program on Dec. 31. Who knew that shakers and bubblewrap could make so much noise? Click on More Photos at right to get a glimpse of the fun.