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Blogger Jonathan Dolce

Things on Sticks – Shadow Puppets You Can Do!

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children performing shadow puppet show

No Excuses Honestly, there are no excuses for not being able to make a shadow puppet show. I’m not talking using your fingers to make that barking dog or your hands to make a butterfly. Shadow puppets are almost as easy to make, economical, easy to store, and frankly an art form in themselves. And thanks to the magic of internet and photocopiers, ANYONE can make these. Let’s dive in! What is a shadow puppet? A shadow puppet is any character, prop or background, made of almost any 2-D material that casts a shadow on another flat surface/curtain. It is a silhouette of a character, or object that helps you tell a story. Shadow puppets can be opaque, translucent, transparent, and include color. Any open areas “holes” or negative space as we say in the art world, allow light through. These areas can have color added with colored tissue paper,…

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Blogger Jonathan Dolce

Risking Everything: explaining migration and internment

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Risking Everything For freedom, a new life, or just a chance at life, people worldwide migrate.  Be it climate change, political strife, or economics, we live in an age of mass migration.  How we react to it as information professionals and caretakers of our community’s children is critical.  Daily, we are being tapped for explanations for these crises as well as internment.  This tugs at our heart strings, and reminds us of US’ origins and populations fleeing religious persecution in 17th century Europe. Or fleeing famine during the Irish Potato Famine. Internment Explaining internment to grade-schooled aged children can be difficult at best.  But one selection that can help illustrate the feelings behind this: The One and Only Ivan.  There’s even a movie of it, but here’s the book trailer:                                        …

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Blogger Jonathan Dolce

Celebrating Pura Belpré’s Birthday!

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Celebrating Pura Belpré’s Birthday! February 2nd is Pura Belpré’s birthday – for those of you playing along at home, she’d have 119 candles on the cake!  Continuing my unofficial, non-sequential series of how to incorporate multicultural offerings in every program, we’re going to see how we can make Pura’s award winners come to life!  But first… Who was Pura Belpré? For those of you just joining us, Pura Belpré was born in Cidra, Puerto Rico.  By serendipitous circumstances, she ended up in New York City for her sister’s wedding and was hired by a public library.  Huge emphasis on this, folks: it was 1920 and they were looking to hire young women from ethnically diverse backgrounds!  Imagine that!  Almost 100 years ago! Her career took her from the Bronx to the Lower East Side, where she spread the love of stories in English and Spanish – which had never been done before.  As…

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Blogger Jonathan Dolce

Hispanic Heritage Month Year-Round

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Integrating Hispanic Heritage I’d been conducting storytime and other children’s programming for 18 years.  I felt like a veteran, or some kind of master.  In just one hour, my wife Marianne – who was born and raised in Puerto Rico – made me feel like I was only just beginning. For years I would start with a theme, pick out the books, make the puppet shows. And yet, how often did I reach for my Hispanic picture books?  Twice a year?  El día de los niños/El día de los libros (Children’s Day/Book Day, commonly known as Día) and Hispanic Heritage Month?  My wife showed me how to take a picture book or a story and build a theme from it – to reverse the storytime building process, and thereby integrate diverse materials into storytime – Every. Single Week. Hispanic/Latino Contributions So, I made a video.  It was all about the contributions…

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ALA Annual 2016

Pura Belpré – Twenty Years of Conceptual Continuity

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My wife was born in the same town, Cidra, the town of eternal springtime, in the east central mountains of Puerto Rico.  I remember her delight when she learned of Pura, years later, when she was studying for her MLIS, and her joy at knowing of her connection with this legendary woman, that they had the same hometown.  I am sorry, New York, though Pura called New York her home, like so many Nuyoricans, Puerto Rico will always be their spiritual home, even if they were born en la gran manzana.

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