A QUIET Field Trip

Today I took my kiddos to a nearby library for our afternoon activity. I was a little nervous because I wasn't sure how well they would do with the whole quiet thing - they tend to be a rather noisy threesome! :D However, before we left school, I sat them down and had a little discussion about this field trip.

They were given 2 rules:

1) You must use quiet voices.

2) You must use walking feet.

When we arrived, we headed straight for the children's corner. They discovered this big blue pillow-type chair in the back corner, and it was quickly claimed by all! To start us off, I let them each pick a book to read together. Since there are shelves and shelves of books, I wasn't sure how long the decision-making process would be, but surprisingly, for the most part, they were satisfied with the first book they laid their hands on!

I LOVE reading children's books! It was a special treat for me today as I read these NEW books to the children. There are so many hysterical, nonsense stories out there that are just fun to read. Last year, when I watched one of my students after school, I would take her practically every week to this library, and we would just read and read and read! Not only was it a time filler, but it was also lots of fun. :)

Can you tell they were enjoying the pillow?! :)

They were totally chillin' out as they listened to their teacher read.

After I finished reading the stories to them, it was then time to browse around. I told them they could either just look at books or have an adult read them a book. (There were 3 adults for 3 children! :D)

Abbi claimed the big blue pillow chair...

Joshua claimed the rocking chair...

And Stephen claimed his Daddy's lap!

My mom and I just sat on the couch and chatted while they entertained themselves by quietly looking at books. It was pretty amazing to me how well-behaved they were, but I wasn't going to complain!! In fact, there was a lady there who came over to me after we had finished our story time, and the first words out of her mouth were, "I'm a born-again Christian too!" I was like....how in the world did she know??? She was a homeschool mom and she gave me some "tips" on things she learned while teaching her kids how to read. I just thought it was pretty neat that she could tell the difference in us!

Once they had finished browsing and each of them had picked 3 books to take back to school, we closed out our field trip with another story time. This time they each choose a carpet square to sit on.

This was the only time I really had to remind them to use their quiet voices. One of the books required interaction as they pointed to different colors on each page. It got a bit noisy there for awhile as they tried to point and name all the things that were of a particular color!

When we got back to school, they all took their armload of books, and put them on the bookshelf.

So now we have 9 new books to read during story time for the next couple of weeks! I can't wait to read them, especially the one book entitled Old Mr. Mackle Hackle. I just had to laugh when it was added to the stack!