With this post, $25 of pantry items and some junk, you can host a delightful Petite Picasso (preschool) program with playdough! Supplies: Pantry items (flour, salt, etc., see recipe) ($25) Plastic bags or containers for storing the dough ($0-$5) Various junk (cookie cutters, receipt rolls, rulers, craft sticks, etc.) Use the playdough recipe in MaryAnn Kohl’s First Art: Art Experiences for Toddlers & Twos to turn flour, water, food coloring and a few other items into pliable, shapeable, squeezable, colorful dough before your program. Room setup: Tables (with the legs folded up, just put the tabletop directly on the floor) each with a variety of junk and one color of dough. Format: Petite Picasso one hour long open house. Preschoolers and their grown ups had a great time rolling out, cutting up and building with the brightly colored dough. There was a fair amount of prep work involved to make…
Month: September 2014
2015 Building STEAM with Día Mini-Grants Available
ALSC is now accepting mini-grant applications for libraries through the Día initiative. Mini-grants will be used to initiate a Building STEAM with Día program in libraries. Programs will focus on bringing culturally diverse and appropriate STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, and Math) activities to awarded communities. Up to 20 mini-grants will be awarded at $1,500 each. Mini-grant awardees will also be invited to attend ALSC’s Diversity Forum which will be held at the American Library Association Midwinter Meeting on Friday, January 30, 2015 in Chicago. Awardees will receive a $500 travel stipend to attend. Intended as an expansion of El día de los niños/El día de los libros (Día), the mini-grants will be awarded to libraries that demonstrate a need to better address the diverse backgrounds within their communities and demonstrate interest in hosting culturally diverse and appropriate STEAM programs. The mini-grants are part of the Everyone Reads @ your…
Tween Tabs Take Two
In many ways, it is difficult to believe that my library has been circulating iPads in the children’s library for almost three years. Despite the continued discourse on the role of tablet technology among pre-readers, there is no question that children and families have continued to integrate such devices into their lives. In our community parents look to the librarians to guide their app selections, or at least point them towards the resources that can assist in discerning which purchases to make. It first began with the preschool set, as our library made the decision to circulate Early Literacy Kits. The idea was to infuse tech into what we as children’s librarians were already expounding to parents and caregivers about the practices they can master in order to cultivate a reader. Now after so many parents have expressed that their child has already “Spot the Red Dot,” so to speak, what’s next?…
What GREAT children’s recordings have you listened to this year?
ALSC members are cordially invited to participate in the 2015 Notable Children’s Recordings list by submitting titles for consideration. The Notable Children’s Recordings Committee’s charge is to select, annotate, and present for publication an annual list of notable audio recordings (music, audiobooks, and read-along kits) of interest to young people from birth through age 14. The recordings must have been released between November 1, 2013, and October 31, 2014, and be available through a US distributor. Please follow this link to find out more details about the list and criteria for inclusion: http://www.ala.org/alsc/awardsgrants/notalists/ncr The column on the left of that page includes links for information about NCR, including Committee Members, Submission Process, and Past NCR lists. Please send suggestions with full bibliographic information to chairperson Jennifer Duffy at jenniferaudio@gmail.com. The deadline to submit title suggestions is October 31st.
Camps: The New Trend in Summer Reading
This summer at the Fayetteville Free Library in Fayetteville, NY we piloted our first ever week long summer camp during Summer Reading. The Fayetteville Free Library Geek Girl Camp is a camp for girls in grades 3 through 5 introducing them to hands on STEM skills and to female role models. Months of work went into planning this camp fulfilling a need in our greater community. According to the Girl Scout Research Institute, “Research shows that girls start losing interest in math and science during middle school. Girls are typically more interested in careers where they can help others (e.g., teaching, child care, working with animals) and make the world a better place. Recent surveys have shown that girls and young women are much less interested than boys and young men in math and science.”[1] We had 44 girls attend the FFL Geek Girl Camp from all over the greater…
Not-So-Cozy Bedtime Stories
Some of my favorite story time themes involve contrasting themes: Big and Little, Noisy and Quiet, and Awake and Asleep. While I have several favorite titles perfect for snuggling just before bedtime, they’re not stories that I want to include for a 10:30 story time full of wide-awake toddlers. Luckily, there are any number of rollicking stories that are bedtime-oriented, but won’t invoke drowsiness: (image from HarperCollins site) Although “beebee bobbi bobbi” runs through my head all day long after using this in story time, I can’t resist using The Baby Beebee Bird in story times about baby animals or my awake/asleep story time. This energetic story about a baby bird who prefers to (initially) sleep through the day and sing all night long (and making a very restless night for the other zoo animals, until they hatch a plan to teach the bird a lesson) will require creative and…
Happy Banned Books Week!
Here we are in the middle of Banned Books Week again! This is one of my favorite celebrations of the year because I love to read and I love to defend everyone’s freedom to read. I appreciate the conversations that I get to have with customers around banned books and I have a lot of fun working with creative staff to plan our celebrations. This year at Rochester Public Library (MN) we created posters of staff holding the top ten challenged books of 2013. We also created a banned/challenged books reading area which we put right inside the front entrance. The area includes piles of banned books, comfortable seating, signage explaining book challenges and bans and small cards with the staff photos on one side and the list of the top 10 challenged books of 2013 on the reverse. There are many creative ideas for celebrating banned books out there….
Strange shelf-fellows
Love him or hate him, Melvil Dewey was the architect of modern library cataloging. His classification system added order to the world of books like the classification system of Kingdom, Phylum, Species, etc., made sense of the biological world. In most instances, Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) makes for easy non-fiction browsing. Once in a while, however, it makes for some strange “shelf-fellows.” Here are two that you might enjoy: What strange shelf-fellows are nesting on your shelves? If you’ve got a great photo, I’ll be happy to add it to the post. (Be sure to tell me whom to credit for the photo.)