Games!!!

OK, now really, this was a bad idea...yes it is good for me to have ideas to give the kids, but really, I am sitting at work playing Lego Star Wars...and I can't stop...
I am not sure that they can really learn anything from the Star Wars page, but man is it fun...

I also looked at the Nick Jr page and there are games that will be educational, though a lot of the games there are on the same level as the A.W.E. computers, but also fun to play.

I also looked at Poptropica, I was not really sure what I was doing there, but it was fun to make my little person run around. My coworker was a bit hesitant to play it for long as it seems you can sometimes interact with other players, however I only encountered default characters who are there to give direction. I may go back on some free time and explore more. There did seem to be educational material there as well, I am not sure if it levels the game by the age you pick, that my require a little more investigation.

I went briefly to Whyville, but that really was populated with real kids and I was not comfortable with that, so I left pretty quickly. I don't think I would recommend that to the kids, just because there is the possibility that there are older people on there looking to try to befriend younger kids. Though I think in this day and age we really have to be pushing kids to think about who they are talking to and Internet safety.

I will continue to play with the sites and explore, it's like the thing on NBC "The more you know..."

Craft on Delicious

I added a link to my delicious bookmarks for a craft I am planning to do with our summer extension kids. It is a papier mache piggy bank, it should be very messy and very fun!  I will post pictures of my prototype after I have made it. I am glad this was one of the parts of the challenge because I could not find my instructions for the bank anywhere and there are a lot of results for papier mache piggy bank...Now I have it at the click of a mouse!

Good Reads and Library Thing

I already have an account with Good Reads, though I typically forget to add books that I have read. I think it can be a good tool to help keep track for those of us who read a lot, and to keep notes of what we thought about the books. I also created an account with library thing and looked around it a bit as well. I need to play around with it a little more, but I can see it as being a good tool as well.  One thing I did not like and this is a very minor thing, when I entered Jane Eyre, the majority of the covers were very Twilight-esque, (you know like dark background with a flower for something) and in my mind that really doesn't fit with the story of the book.

Delicious...and a rant

I signed up for Delicious, and right now don't have many book marks, but I am sure I will come across things that I will want to hold on to. I like the idea that there will be a way to access my favorite sites no matter where I am, because there have been times when I wanted to look  something up but discovered I was on the wrong computer and did not have it bookmarked and of course it was one of those long drawn out addresses that I could never in a million years commit to memory...

On another note, I just need to get out my frustration at having to discard a perfectly good book because of what one patron did to it. I work in a community where one sect of the population sometimes feels the need to censor certain parts of out books before letting their children read them. Typically they will cover it with painter's tape, which we can peel off the book once it is returned and does not harm the book. Well yesterday, as I did my weeding of the 599's, I came across a book about chimps, and a picture was covered. However instead of painter's tape, the picture had a piece of paper glued over it. I managed to get the paper off without harming the book, however there was still a strip of glue, I got most off, but then when the book was closed the pages stuck together, nearly tearing the page every time the book was opened again. This book was in wonderful shape otherwise, and yes there was another copy in out collection and several in the system, however it feel like I am throwing away money by having to discard this book.
OK, rant done, time to move on...

What I have learned and observed thus far...

So yeah, just realized I have not really talked about the things I have done so far.
This is my very first blog, I had thought about starting one often over the past year or so, but never thought I had a good enough or catchy enough idea to make it interesting. So this challenge was the push I needed to jump into the blogging world!
Starting the blog was very easy, I think I had a harder time coming up with what I wanted to call it. I also found posting the pictures to be very easy, it works very much like Facebook. I like how you have more options in the placement of the photos and also in the size they will be.
I used Picnik to do the captions on the photo on Logan and Mia. One thing I did not like about that was I wanted to use one of the photo effects on 2 parts of the photo but I couldn't get it to work, I will have to play with it a little more, but overall, it is very user friendly.

OOOO look who can play with photo editing!

One of my favorite photos of my nephew and niece, I might have been said (and thought) when my sister snapped the picture...

The Boss

Some mighty big boots to fill...

This is my favorite little girl in the whole world, my niece Mia Jayne...