Library goodness

Twice in the last two weeks, I've gotten to break out the sidewalk chalk and rope kids at the library in for spontaneous sidewalk decoration.  I even got to write it up on the events calendar afterward as "Sidewalk Chalk Literacy Activity".  Thanks to that one slide in training at the Early Literacy Training that showed sidewalk chalk outside the library as one way of adding to the "literacy richness" (<- yes, this is a real phrase, apparently, though not one I would have ever come up with... institutional grammar is amusing) of the library environment.  We got "welcome"  and "read" written in three languages (English, Spanish, Somali) and maybe next time I'll see if I can rope in a volunteer kid who writes/speaks Amharic.  And there were flowers/shapes/alphabets/little cartoon people drawn as well.  All of which pleased me.  I stocked up on $1 buckets of chalk at Walgreens, so I'm all set for a good bit of the summer.  The kids teased me a lot about how they shouldn't write anything "gang related", which was their phrase... I had just said it had to be positive, and preferably library or book related but not necessarily.  I think people must accuse them of having gang related activity a lot, for it to be the first thing on their minds when playing with chalk.  Kinda sad that.  But the drawing was fun.  We took a few pictures the first time, and they'll go up on our library branch's page.  Yay for modern tech like picture-taking cell phones combined with un-tech like sidewalk chalk.