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Found Friday!

Just realized I scheduled but never never clicked PUBLISH for my last Found Friday post! AHHH.

Happy 4th of July! And happy first Found Friday!
Found_Friday
Cari at Library Learners, Carolyn at Risking Failure, and I are trying out Found Fridays this summer. Each Friday, we'll share a few center ideas we've tried, read about, or seen and would like to try. We are all hoping this will not only motivate us to blog a bit more over the summer but also share new ideas with you and each other!

I'm on vacation in Chicago this week and happened upon the Target Family Fun Festival in Millennium Park. There was music, games, and activities for a variety of ages and when I did a quick walk-through, I saw a bunch of activities that could translate well into library centers! I apologize for the poor quality of pictures - I was trying very hard to be respectful of families who were engaged in their activities and I was using my phone.

Giant Tic Tac Toe and Giant Checkers:
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The kids who were at these stations were very engaged and moving around. I picture these as great centers for some of the more active kiddos who need to get up and move after our lesson. Checkers and tic tac toe take strategy and critical thinking, and these giant games could be played with teams. Giant games could also translate to many other games - Scrabble/Words with Friends, Connect 4, even a giant call number sort. Of course, this is ideal in a space that's large, which I fortunately have now but haven't had in the past. If you don't have the floor space, maybe some large empty wall space could also be utilized. The checkers looked like these (unavailable) ones from Amazon. I've seen giant letters at craft stores that you could certainly use for the tic tac toe game. I also saw a tutorial for these giant dominoes on Pinterest...very cool!

Another great activity I saw was this giant bin of blocks.
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They were all the same size, which made it different than using a bin of building blocks.
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The kids who were there both days I walked through were making all kinds of different things and using the blocks in tons of different ways.
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I envision this as a makerspace type library center. Kids could free build or be given tasks each week. They could have to build different types of structures. I'd probably have my students take a picture and have some sort of ongoing gallery of creations on our school library blog. They could make different letters in younger grades, different shapes, patterns, only use a certain number of blocks...the possibilities are really endless! Kids could even decorate them because they're the shape of book spines.

My dad is very handy and I'm hoping he will help me make a small bin of blocks like these for next year *wink* *wink*.

I'd love to hear if you've used any giant floor games or blocks in your library!