 Hi everybody. My name is Liana Hawkins. If you don't know me already, I am a mom of two kids in the Voriceville Central School District, so at the elementary school. I have a son, Ellison, who is going into fourth grade in the fall, and I have a daughter Lucy, who is going into first grade in the fall. I am also a science educator. I've been working teaching science programming for over 20 years now. I've worked in different museums, a zoo, and I currently teach kindergarten through fifth grade science at a school in Wyman School. So I'm really excited to be joining you virtually today since we can't be together at the library. I'm just so happy to do this program. And this lesson that we're going to do online is part of a larger series that I usually do called Magic and Mischief. And today we're going to focus on the lesson where we create our own magical creatures. So this is such a fun lesson. It combines science with literature, with crafting, or hand sewing, which are three of my favorite things. I absolutely love all three of those things. And you've probably read a really great book with some type of fantastical creature in it. So whether it was a dragon, or a unicorn, or maybe it was a sea monster, or a gnome, there are all kinds of neat imaginary creatures that show up in some really great books that we've been reading. And they're just really fun. The neat thing about these creatures is that they were invented in the minds of a person. So there's no other place that they came from except your imagination, which is great. You probably, the person who invented it probably just looked at a regular animal and then added something special to it. And that's really what we're going to do today. We're going to work to invent and sew our own magical creatures. And you might be looking at my guy here, my girl here, and you might be wondering, you know, she's cool, right? She's no doubt a great fun project to make. But how is this science? Is this even science? And it actually is science. So scientists study magic powers in animals all the time. The thing is they just don't call them magic powers. They use a different word. So in science, we call these magic powers that we see in animals and the living things around us. We call them adaptations. So an adaptation. An adaptation is anything that an animal has on its body or that it does in order to survive in the wild. And so animals adapt all the time. They're full of adaptations. And some of these adaptations are really neat bordering magic power. For example, if you think about the dog, a bloodhound, people have been using bloodhounds to track missing people for years. And that's because a bloodhound's nose has the ability to smell a scent that is 300 hours old. And it can follow that scent for over 130 miles. Sounds like a magic power to me. My nose can't do that. Or if you're into birds, scientists that study peregrine falcons, those are birds of prey and they dive down on the animals that they're hunting. A peregrine falcon can dive down at over 240 miles an hour. So if you think about that, your car on the interstate or the freeway is probably going 60, 65 miles an hour, peregrine falcon, 240 miles an hour. So that's really, really fast. Sounds like a magic power to me. Or there are some great creatures in the ocean called cuttlefish. And a cuttlefish can change, can camouflage, so it can blend into its background. But it not only changes the color of its skin, it also can change the patterning of its skin using some special chromatophores. Sounds like crazy magic power to me. So again, scientists are already studying these magical powers in real animals every day, we just call them adaptations. And an adaptation is a physical characteristic of an animal's body or a behavior that an animal does that helps it to survive in the wild. So as we invent our own magical creatures, we get to choose what their magic power or adaptation is going to be. And then we get to think about how to physically represent that adaptation on our creature. So for this girl, I decided that her adaptation would be that she could see into the future. And she could tell me all about it, all the exciting and wonderful things that are going to happen in the future. And to represent that, I gave her a really gigantic eye that almost takes up her entire face. So this eye is my way of showing that she can see into the future. All right, are you guys ready to get started? I cannot wait to see what you guys invent and what amazing magical creatures you come up with for our lesson. All right, guys, so we're ready to move on to our next step in making our magical creatures. And that is to design our creature. And this is the really fun part because you get to use your imagination and come up with anything that you want that your creature could look like and what their adaptation or magic power could be. And you might need some inspiration, so you could check out the different shapes of patterns that you have available to you. Or you could look at the different colors of fabric and thread and see if they spark any creative ideas about your creature. Once you have the pattern that you want for the body, we're going to start with the body. You want to go ahead and cut it out. And you just want to use those regular paper scissors. So I chose this pattern that almost looks like a mountain top for the head. And the neat thing is you could turn your pattern this way and the face could be over here. You could make these the legs. I chose to make these mountain tops the top of its head. And I thought it would be fun to have almost three different types of eyes up in the corner. And then I found, you know, this little pattern in the set that you got. And I thought I could use those either as like mustache pieces that feed the monster, almost like little mustache arms. And they shovel the food into the mouth. So maybe this creature's adaptation is that he can eat bad guys or bullies. And he uses these special mustache hands to shove those bullies and bad guys in his mouth. And you guys can see after I cut out my paper, I just went ahead and sketched on it in pencil to try out ideas. And there's spots where I erased and tried something new. This is a good idea for you to get a rough example of what you're going to do for your creature. Once you have the body, your next step is to cut out the body from the felt. And you're going to use the two larger pieces of felt, probably because that's the only one that the body is going to fit on. And anytime you're doing any type of sewing and you're working with fabric, in this case, our fabric is called felt. It's just a fabric that doesn't fray at the ends. So we get this nice smooth finish even without having to sew the ends in. When you're working with fabric, you always want to position your paper pattern so that you maximize the amount of space. So for example, if I put my pattern right here in the middle, I'm sort of creating smaller pieces of fabric that I can work with. But if I'm really thoughtful about it and I place my pattern in the corner, I still have this other big half to really do something large with. So think about where you want to put your pattern and you're going to lay two pieces of felt on top of each other. And when we do this, this will allow us to cut two identical pieces because we want one piece for the front of the monster and one piece for the back of the monster. Now to do your cutting, you're going to need those special scissors. So scissors that aren't paper scissors, but that are sharp. So some type of sharp adult scissor, if you need a grown-up to help you, you can do that. These are smaller sized sharps that I have and I just keep them at home. They're good for cutting any kind of fabric. But the thing to remember about these is if you use them to cut paper, it dulls the blade. So I really only use it for fabric. You might also, if you have a sharp pair of kitchen shears, be able to use that. And we want to trace the pattern onto our felt. And you can do this a couple of different ways. You could use a Sharpie marker. I used a Sharpie on this one. Just know that if you do that, it leaves the mark of the Sharpie edge and you will be able to kind of see that. On these guys, I don't mind so much because I think that they're fun. The more colors and patterns they have. If you want it to be less visible, you could use a piece of chalk. The chalk will help you to mark right on the felt so that you can see where the pattern is going to be. So see how I've got this nice little chalk line here? You could do it like that and then cut up two pieces. Or if you're feeling really brave, you can take your straight pins and you just push them into the fabric through both layers and then out. And what this does is this helps you to hold your paper pattern on the fabric and you can just cut right around the paper pattern. Just like that. So for this today, I think I'm going to do chalk tracing. So I've already started. I'm going to try to get a line to go all the way around. But again, there's so many ways to do this. So use whatever you have at home. Sharpie, marker, chalk or just use your pins that you got in the kit to hold that paper pattern in place while you trace around. And you just want to go all the way around with your chalk. And you want to be able to lift it up and see that you've got that pattern there. And then you want to cut it out. So again, since you need a front and a back, you're going to lay your two pieces of felt one right on top of the other. And I usually leave my fabric flat. Not fat. I usually leave my fabric flat while I'm cutting and just try to lift up the piece that I'm working on. That way I really get a good clean cut. And you go ahead and take these rough cuts off the edges. You want to turn your fabric some more. And you're just going to cut out all the way around your monster or your creature, whatever kind of creature it's going to be. And if you wanted a body type that is not available in the patterns, do you think you could make up your own body type? Absolutely. You could just take paper and markers and squiggle out some kind of shape that you think would be good, whether it's like a unicorn shape or just another blobby monster shape, like the ones I have a lot of here. You can come up with any pattern that you think is right for you. And you just want to trim all around the edges. All right. So I've got the body of my monster cut out. And then the nice thing is you can take the edge that has the chalk. You can either rub the chalk off. It'll come off over time. Or you could make this one the inside, the inside of your pattern so it doesn't have those chalk edges. And you might want to go through if you see any like little snags on there. Just smooth it out a little bit. But again, these don't have to be perfect. Kind of the fun is their imperfection. So that is how we cut out the body. And you would repeat that for any of these really fun eyes or teeth or mustaches that you want for your guy. And you would use those smaller pieces of fabric or felt that you got to add some colors to your monster. So go ahead and cut those out and then meet me back here. And we'll move on to the next step. All right, everybody, we're back. And you can see I still have my body cut out. But I went ahead and cut out some of these fun accessory pieces. And you'll notice from my original pattern, my paper pattern, some of the shapes on these guys have changed. So if I take my, I originally had like the idea of these three eyeballs, I switched it up a little. I thought it would be really fun if why would their eyeballs be the same shape as ours for these magical creatures. So I thought maybe these fun peanut almost peanut shaped eyeballs would be good. And I thought in the end I would glue on two little googly eyes in each of the eye holes. So it would look something kind of like this. And then I would still really do that idea of these mustaches that shovel the food right into his mouth, her mouth, his mouth, I haven't decided yet, and the teeth. And I would do maybe like a black line later to do the top that this top line or these tiny dots, these little details are really hard to do with sewing. So go ahead and kind of map out your monster, how you want it. And you want to decide where you're going to start. So I'm going to start with the eyes. And then you want to take these, these little straight pins that you got, and you're only going to use one piece of your felt. So the front part of your body. Because you don't want to, you only need to sew the eyes and the mouth to the front part of the body. So you want to take your straight pin. And again, you're going to do that thing where you push the pin through both layers. And then you're going to kind of bring it back around so that it holds your piece right in place. And you want to do that with all of the things that you're going to be putting on the front of your monster. If you have more little face parts than you have pins, you could pin a few at a time and sew those. And then you could come back and pin others. Another option is if you don't want to pin all of these things and you have like hot glue or Elmer's glue, you could glue them right in place. It will take a little bit longer to dry and your look would be different. But maybe for younger kids, that's an option too. And you could save sewing for just going right around the edge of the monster. This guy, his eye and her necklace were hot glued in place. So it's really up to you. This time I'm going to try to sew it because I got this fun green thread and I thought it would be a nice different accent. So when you're sewing, you want to have maybe 12 inches of thread. The thread that we're using is called embroidery floss. You don't want it to be too long because then it'll get tangled, which means you'll have to keep adding new threads to your needle. But that's okay. So when you're working with your needle, you'll notice there's an opening called the eye. And all you want to do is kind of smooth down the end of your embroidery floss. And you want to push it through the eye of the needle. And you want to pull it so you have a little bit of a tail on this side. And when you're sewing, the yarn is going to really want to come right back out the needle the way that you put it in. So you usually hold your needle kind of pinching on the eye and keeping your yarn in place. For really young kids, or if you're brand new to sewing and you think you need a little help, you could tie a knot on this end around the eye. It just makes it trickier to undo mistakes later. So I'm going to try to just hold that yarn in place with my fingers. And the next step to sewing is we need to put a knot on this far end. And that is so the yarn won't go all the way through the fabric so that something of it will catch. And to get a knot on the end, you want to hold your yarn almost like it's a jump rope. And you want to take the tail end and the needle end and you want to bring them together. So again, there's that jump rope. And you want to hold your tail end on the needle and you're going to wrap once, twice, three times. You could even wrap four times to be safe. And you're going to have all these little loops that go around your yarn. You're going to just take those loops together and you're going to slide them. You'll find that they slide all the way down to the tail end of your yarn. And it will make a knot at the end. So I'm going to cut that off so I can show you that part one more time. So again, you're going to take your needle and you're going to take the tail end and you're going to hold the tail on the needle and you're going to wrap it once, twice, three times, four if you want to. And then you're just going to slide those loops all the way down to the end of your yarn. So you've got your needle threaded and you've got a knot at the end of your yarn and you're ready to start sewing. All right, meet me on the next step, guys. All right, my needle is threaded. There's a knot at the tail end and my accessory pieces, my eyes and mustache and teeth are pinned on there. So I'm ready to start sewing. So for the very first, when you enter your sewing, where you put the needle in first, you want to start at the back of your work. And the reason you want to start at the back is this knot that we made is going to get caught in the fabric as it should and you don't want that knot to show. So if you start on the back, the knot will be on the back and you won't be able to see it. So we're going to start on the reverse side of one of these eyeballs and you're just going to poke your needle through so that you're not too close to the very edge. You maybe have like a quarter of an inch there and you just want to pull your thread all the way through and then see how that knot stops it from continuing through. It's going to hold that thread in place at the back of the work. And then this part is actually fun and easy. We're going to do a basic running stitch and a running stitch is so simple. This is what it looks like in the end. It's just these little, they run these stitches that run along the outside edge of your work. To do it, you have to remember a pattern and that pattern is up, down, up, down, up, down. Pretty sure you guys can get that one. So that first entry was an up. So right now my needle is up and I can remember that that was up because my needle is on the up side of my work versus the downside of my work. So if that was an up, my next move is going to be a down. So you want to go over about the length that you want your stitch to be, maybe quarter inch, maybe half an inch, and then you're going to put your needle through and this time I'm going to pull down and you want to pull it until that thread lies flat. There's my first stitch. There's my first stitch. So since I just did a down, my next stitch is going to be an, might take a little bit of time to figure out where you want it to come through, it's going to be an up and then I'm going to go down again. I'm going to shift that pin a little bit and I'm going to go up and then I'm going to go down. So again that running stitch pattern is pretty basic. It's up, down, up, down, up, down. You can take that pin out when you you've got a few stitches in place, figure out where you want your needle to pop through again and you're going to go up and then we're going to go down and you'll notice these stitches start to run along the edge of your sewing. Again it's called running stitch, up, down, up, down, up. Now sometimes, especially when you're new at sewing, that last stitch I just did was a down and I should, my next stitch should be an up because my yarn is coming out of the back so the next stitch should be up, sending it to the front again. Every now and then you're going to forget and my last stitch was down and if I did another down, let's see what that would look like, I did another down stitch. I'll notice right away that my thread is not continuing on this pattern that it's wrapping around my work, which I don't want and that's really easy to fix. You just unthread your needle and you want to pull that last, pull that last stitch out so that it's on the back of your work again and once you're on the side that you need to be on again you can rethread your needle and I'll say, oh you know I need to be going up so I'm going to do an up stitch and you'll go up into it again and it'll, this is one of those things where the more you do it the better you're going to get at it so try not to get too frustrated at first. There are so many projects that I do where I'm partly through it and I just have to take a break for a long time because I'm frustrated about learning something new or how something is going um so just maybe put it aside for a while and then come back to it. The nice thing about us doing this online is that you can pause and come back anytime that works for you so see these stitches are really starting to hold that eyeball shape in place and you just want to keep going all the way around your eyeball or whatever piece you're sewing on. Keep going in the up, down, up, down, up, down pattern. Another thing that you might do at the beginning is accidentally poke yourself with a needle. That happens to everybody. I try to hold my, let's figure out where I want this guy to come up, try to hold my fabric around the outside edges of the two pieces I'm sewing together so that it doesn't um so that it does not put my hand in the same spot that the needle's gonna go in. So I'm almost all the way around this cool guy's first eyeball. Once you get the hang of it, running stitch is actually pretty quick and if this, if this is easy for you the next step is to really work on what your stitches look like. So when you hand sew, you want your stitches to be as even as possible meaning each stitch is about the same size and length and about the same separation from each other. So I have made it all the way around and the trick to tying off at the end is having your yarn end on the same side that you started. So my knot is on the back side of this and I want my yarn to end on the back side too. And I usually find a spot where I've already sewn into and I push my needle through that stitch and then you'll notice you make a tiny loop there. Once you have that loop you put your needle through that hole and you will tie a knot. And that knot is on the back side of your work so it doesn't even matter if it's a little bumpy like that. And once you've tied your knot you can trim fairly close to your knot. You want to leave a little bit of a tail. There you go you've sewn on your first little accessory using the running stitch. So you want to sew on all of the accessory pieces and again this is not a project you need to rush through take your time or if you know you're getting really impatient with it you can also again go back and glue those pieces on in place but you want to stitch all of your accessories onto your monster or your creature and then meet me back here for the finishing. So you can see from the front of my monster or creature that I've sewn on the different parts that I want in there. So these three eyeballs that are shaped like peanuts these mustache arms and these teeth and this is the wrong side of the work where there's all these knots. And you don't have to worry about this because it's going to be hidden inside the stuffing of the monster. While I have it before we sew it up I want to show you a couple things. I sewed with running stitch the eyes all the way down so they wouldn't move at all but then with these mustache arms I only sewed this tiny part so that this flap could move. So I sewed a circle or an oval here but left the tails open because I thought it kind of gave a little bit to the story about the mustache that would feed the mouth and then for the teeth I only sewed the tops of the teeth on so they can wiggle too. So that's another thing you can think about is where you want your stitches if you want things to lie flat when you sew or if you want a little bit of movement and that's totally up to you. So the next part is sewing our monster together. So you want to take your two pieces so that they line up as closely as possible and this is going to be the edge that you stitch around and you'll take those push pins that you had or not push pin straight pins that you had and you want to again go through both layers of the fabric with that pin and then come back through so that the pin holds those two pieces in place because again when you pick it up and you sew things are going to move around and you don't want your front and back body to get misaligned. You really want them to be as close to perfectly lined up as possible. You can put as many pins in as you want. Try to just think about the different areas that might move or wiggle while you're sewing. So you've pinned the front of your body to the back of your body and you can move your pins out of the way. You're going to need to thread your needle again. So you have a couple of choices of thread colors in your kit. Choose whichever one you think might be nice. I really liked this blue. I thought it would kind of go well with the mustache arms and it would look nice against the outside edge and take your thread and you want to cut again about a foot maybe a little bit longer than that. This looks like about a foot and a half of thread and again the longer your thread the easier it is to get tangled. So again we're going to do that basic step. We're going to take our needle and we're going to kind of pinch down or smush together the fibers of one end of the thread and you want to pull it through the eye of your needle so you have a little bit of a two inch tail. And remember we're going to hold our eye and our thread together so that they don't separate. Then you're going to find that tail end and again you're going to go tail to needle so that you have that jump rope shape. Tail to needle. Hold the end of the tail and let's wrap. We're going to wrap once, twice, three times, four times and again you're just going to gently slide those loops all the way down. They slide so easily all the way down to the end of your yarn or your yarn your thread. Again I'm so used to knitting I keep saying yarn. So you've got your knot there and this knot you want to hide it just like when we started sewing we started with the knot on the back side so you wouldn't see it. This time when we're sewing two pieces together we want to start with our knot in between those two pieces. So instead of going to the bottom of both pieces we're actually going to separate the top and the bottom a little bit and tuck that knot inside inside the piece. And then we're going to smush the top and the bottom back together and once we have that we can begin our running stitch. So again the pattern for running stitch is up, down, up, down all along the outside edge and again here's my monster creature from before and we made that nice stitch that running stitch all around the outside edge. So you're going to hold your thread at the needle at the eye and I just did an up and I know this because my thread comes up the upside instead of the downside of my work so now I'm going to do a down. Now the more things you have especially pins on the front of your monster there's a always a chance that your thread will kind of get stuck on something just pull it through slowly if you need to or unhook it from anything there's my first stitch. So since I'm ended on the downside now I'm going to push it up and you're going to do the same idea this up, down, up, down running stitch all along the outside edge of your monster. Now you can see why I gave you such bright colors of felt and some contrasting colors of thread. I really like it on these monsters when the details stand out and again for these monsters imperfect is great. The more imperfections the more real they look so don't get too hung up on making everything exactly even or exactly right. Anything that you do here adds character to your monster. So there's my running stitch in that blue going all along this outside edge and you just want to again just like you did with all the other pieces you want to do this running stitch all along the outside. At some point this thread that you're using is going to run out we cut about a foot and a half of thread it's going to run out because this outside edge of your monster is really long. See what I mean about it might get snagged on something just gently unwrap it from around that and continue to sew and that's okay. When you get to about the last two inches of this piece of thread go ahead and tie off and then you're going to put a new thread on and continue right where you left off to keep going around the outside edge of your monster and I'll show you that when I get to a spot where my thread runs out. Okay so I've done my running stitch I started in this corner and I've gone down around my creature across the bottom up the top and around this one peak and then I was kind of running out of thread and I didn't have enough thread to finish so what I did I actually already did it and I had a video of it but I wasn't recording I put my thread to the inside in between these two layers I didn't go all the way through the back for this one I just went to the inside and I tied a knot on the inside stitch there and I just tuck that knot in between that way you'll never see it because once my monster's zone closed that knot just like all these knots at the beginning will be hidden in the inside of that fabric and it was actually a good time to stop anyway because as you're sewing your monster you do not want to go all the way around yet because what you need to do is stuff your monster so in your kit you guys got this polyfill fiberfill stuff you can find it in any stuffed animal or maybe you've seen a dog tear apart a toy and this stuffing came out and you want to take your stuffing and you just want to start putting it in that little pocket the opening you want to use that opening to fill your guy your creature with stuffing before you sew it closed because once you sew it closed there's not going to be a way to get that stuffing in so this is always where you can decide how fluffy you want your creature to be if you want an extra fluffy you could put extra stuffing in there if you like medium fluff it's totally up to you whatever you think would add to the personality of your monster creature unicorn dragon whatever you decided to make let me see if I can get some extra stuffing in here so once you have your stuffing pretty much in place you'll notice that the top and the bottom start to gap apart that's because there's stuffing right in there and you still need them to lay flat so that you can sew closed so what you're going to do is line those edges up and take your straight pin and push it all the way through again use that straight pin to hold those two pieces as close to together on the outside lines as you can it's tricky the more stuffing you put in there so if you find that you need to take some stuffing out to get your two edges to line up go ahead and do that but if you can get it let's tuck that knot on the inside if you can get it to shut go ahead and pin your front to your back and then we just need to finish doing the running stitch along that last little edge of our monster and he's all done so we need to get a new piece of thread to finish and you guys are probably pros at threading your needle by now you want to get your thread there's a little bit stuffing everywhere in that jump rope shape smush the fibers in one end of the thread together so that you can pull it through the needle leave yourself a little tail from the other tail the other end of the loop and do tail end of the yarn to the needle nose to nose hold that tail in with your right hand wrap once twice three times four times and slide that knot all the way to the end so there's my knot and I am ready to finish sewing my monster shut so I'm going to try to tuck this knot on the inside again so just going to go through one piece of fabric and then kind of tuck tuck that little knot in there sometimes they're tricky to hide you can always push it in after the fact or you might need to move that push pin just a little bit to get the knot to hide on the inside and again it's not a big deal and then you can start your running stitch so that up down up down to close your guy up and as you get near the pins you're going to need to pull them out and kind of pinch that fabric together let's tuck that knot in a little bit more pinch that fabric together with your fingers closing closing your monster is all or your creature it's always the trickiest part but it's also the most exciting part because you are almost finished with your amazing creature so get that running stitch going again and I'm just going around the last bit of opening for my creature see how he got kind of caught on that tooth there I'm just going to untangle it gently and I'm coming up this side I might pull this pin out so you'll notice that the straight lines and edges once you get going with your running stitch pattern you're up down up down they go pretty smoothly and pretty quickly but if you choose a pattern with lots of spikes or turns or corners and that's where it can be that's where it can take a little more patience and a little more time to finish your guy the way that you want to my daughter Lucy she is designing her creature this is the template that she chose I think he looks like a rockin dude but when she gets up to this part it is going to take more patience so just think about that you could also think about remember how I did some stitches here but left this part open you could stitch straight across in an arch across the top and leave these little triangles flapping in the wind by KR which would be cute anyway I love this little guy that Lucy put together um so let's see I'm on the back side of my work so I need to do an up stitch I'm getting close to the finish and you'll notice there are these little bits of fiberfill that stick out and that's okay we'll get rid of those once our creature is all the way done take that pin out and our guy is our girl or it who knows what this creature is almost done and as you start to finish um at least the sewing part you might start to imagine what your creature sounds like if it talks at all if it lives with a bunch of other creatures like itself or if it lives alone what kinds of things your creature eats what kinds of things eat your creature and maybe if that adaptation helps it to avoid being eaten or to catch catch food I'm thinking with this guy with his mustache hands that feed his mouth he would be a really good hunter and these flaps would help him to catch food oh I'm almost all the way done so when you get right up here to where you started you're again gonna wanna I'm gonna go through you're gonna want to sew back in through one layer of fabric one layer of felt get a little tricky at the end you want to just sew back through one layer and you want to make a loop by going into one stitch let's see if I can open my loop up so you can see it there's a little there's a little loop there I went through one of the inside stitches and made that loop go through the loop and tie the knot and then what I like to do is just take my needle and I push it in to the middle of my creature so the needle is in between the top and the bottom and I just poke it out somewhere pull it through and that pulls your thread so that it's inside your monster and wherever your thread comes out you just kind of gently push down on your creature and you snip and now that thread is hidden so there I'm going to pull off these extra little fluffy bits of fiberfill I've done the sewing for my creature my running stitch is going all the way around you can kind of reposition let me see what's to show her guy you can reposition your filling on the inside and now you can do what Lucy did at the beginning you could do that on your creature you could take glue glue on the eyeballs where you want them you could take a sharpie marker and add details like I might add the line of the mouth here where the teeth are you might add that and then I think in my original drawing let's see I had some little nostrils some little nose bits there and I used a sharpie because it's permanent and it won't rub off the fabric if you have fabric markers you could do that too you just can't use your regular like coloring markers washable markers so there it is there is my creature my last step is to glue these little eyes on in place I think instead of doing two on each I'm just going to do like one on the top part of that peanut one at the bottom part of this peanut and you just again use Elmer's glue or hot glue if you have it they work the same just hot glue will dry faster and I have finished inventing my magical creature what do you guys think maybe come up with a good name for this one like flipper tea maybe this is a flipper tea or what what does we think moustache moustachio moustachio man all right guys keep selling I can't wait to see your creatures the last step is to write a story about your creature explaining its magical power or its adaptation oh it's mrs brown with the borysville public library and I hope you are having a fantastic summer that you're creating memories and sharing some special times with your family and that you're going outdoors and creating some grand adventures and of course I hope that you're reading this summer and the beauty of summer is that you get to pick whatever you want to read so whatever speaks to your interest you go right ahead and read that I hope that you enjoyed the instructional video from mrs leanna hawkins about the magical creatures doesn't that look like a lot of fun and I'm sure that you're really looking forward to creating your own magical creature what will your magical creature look like how will it be specially adapted to suit the environment in which it lives and remember snap a photo of your wonderful magical creature and send it to me at gale dot brown at the oor pl dot org I would love to see your creatures and I would also love to see the stories that you write about them and we will showcase those to the community so that they can see all of your creativity one of the magical creatures that I love most is a unicorn and this book is hysterical it's called unicorn thinks he's pretty great by bob shea and as you can see goat is looking a little disappointed and sad I don't think he feels that he can live up to the sparkly and magical nature of a unicorn so let's see what happens things are a lot different around here since that unicorn moved in I thought I was pretty cool when I rode my bike to school until that show off went flying by or the time I made marshmallow squares that almost came out right then at the big talent show I was dropping my signature dance moves when he steps up with some serious prancing and wins first prize that's not all oh it gets much much worse check out this great magic trick that I totally invented okay close your eyes keep them closed while your eyes were closed I pulled this quarter out from behind your ear nice right well when I get to school to try it out he's turning stuff into gold I can't follow that dopey unicorn thinks he's so great how can anyone be friends with that guy look at me hey hey I'm unicorn I think I'm so cool well this goat's not buying it great here he comes goat cheese pizza I'm a goat what goats have cheese unicorns don't have cheese may I try also good smeared on a tin can or sprinkled on some garbage these bad boys are cloven it means they're split at the end they let me stand on steep hills or climb to the tops of mountains don't be so hard on yourself just look at your fantastic horn that thing is not just for show all it's good for is pointing I can't play soccer headbutt and it's game over I bet those awesome horns are perfect for soccer I have an idea with your magic and my awesomeness we'd be an unstoppable team bam taste my cloven justic and you've been unicorned nice right I had a feeling we'd be friends love love love this book and you know what I love most about it yes I love all the sparkles and the fun colors the illustrations are hilarious love the characters but I really like that they realized that each of them has something special and together as friends they made a great team so I hope that you continue to read a lot of books this summer and that you enjoy this time with your family and just enjoy the sunshine and playing outdoors and I really look forward to seeing your magical creatures so remember to email them to me have a wonderful wonderful summer and I will see you soon goodbye