Zoom Away

Zoom Away, by Tim Wynne-Jones and illustrated by Eric Beddows, was our featured book this week for our Page Presents: Learn with Stories, Music,  Art story-time class.  My best laid schemes ganged agley, since I had planned to coach the kids on “reading” pictures by projecting enlarged images.  With my new puppet who greatly resembles Zoom, I had planned to read parts of the story and get Zoom to narrate other parts.  But we couldn’t get the projector to play nice with either of our available computers.  Curses!  I hope we can get some equipment that works, since I’m planning to feature Zoom Upstream in a few weeks.

But Mr. Matt’s Minute was great as always!  This week my boss (Celtic harpist) and I (flutist) played a jig and a sea chantey, and Matt had the kids jigging and then hauling away on a rope with gusto!  Everyone loved having live music too.

Fortunately, this week’s craft, a spyglass, went over well with the kids.  I had some very nice large sheets of flat black paper left over from the origami pirate hats, and this made for a very sophisticated and elegant looking spyglass—so much nicer than the construction paper I had originally planned!  Gold metallic wrapping paper made very brassy looking fittings for the spyglass.  “Thar she blows!”