Sandy's Picks 2013 - Picture Books

Now that the year is drawing to a close, it's time for me to look back on the books that I have read this year and pick my favorites.  According to my Goodreads account, I read a total of 74 books in 2013.  This number is down quite a bit from years past, but does not truly reflect every books that I read this year.  These 74 books do no include very many picture books (which I do not always remember to take the time to review), several volumes of a manga series or two (where I generally review the series as a whole, not each individual volume), or some self-help or reference non-fiction (which I feel a tad self-conscious about reviewing).

This is the first of a series of three posts, each covering a different type of children's book.  Today we will be looking at books that are generally written for our youngest readers:  Picture Books.

Journey by Aaron Becker

A girl draws a door on her bedrooms wall and travels to a fantastical world.  With her red marker she is able to travel by balloon, boat, and flying carpet until she is captured and imprisoned.  It will take a little daring and some help from a friend to escape.  The book reminds me a bit of Harold and the Purple Crayon in its theme, though the style is much more vibrant and complex.  I've had a hard time pinning down my top pick for this year's Caldecott Medal, but I think that I'll place my bets with this book.

Locomotive by Brian Floca

This train story takes readers back to the time of great steam engines, roaring down the track through the West.  I love this story for its beautiful sepia-toned illustrations.

Unicorn Thinks He's Pretty Great by Bob Shea

Goat was doing just fine until Unicorn showed up.  Unicorn can fly, turn things into gold, and make it rain cupcakes.  Ugh.  But what if the two teamed up?  I don't want to spoil what happens, but the phrase, "Taste my cloven justice" is part of the equation.  This book cracks me up.

The Dark by Lemony Snicket, illustrated by Jon Klassen

Laszlo is afraid of the dark.  The dark lives (naturally) in Laszlo's basement, but is not afriad of Laszlo.  One evening the dark comes upstairs to visit Laszlo, and poor Laszlo has to learn to not be afraid anymore.  It was only a matter of time before this author and illustrator teamed up, and the result is subversively brilliant.  Snicket's wordy, stylized text matches perfectly with Klassen's simple, moody, stylized artwork.  Perfect.

Dinosaur Kisses by David Ezra Stein

A baby T-Rex is good at lots of things.  She can stomp and chomp with the best of them.  But one day the dinosaur observes two other animals doing something different - kissing!  She decides to try that next, but unfortunately our baby T-Rex is too good at stomping and chomping and kissing does not come easily.  The illustrations really make this story work, rendering the poor dino's failed kissing attempts hilarious.  Great toddler story.

Mr. Wuffles by David Wiesner

Mr. Wuffles is a cat.  His owner brings him a toy, but (in the way that cats are) Mr. Wuffles shows no interest.  Why should he care when there is a spaceship full of tiny aliens in his house?  The aliens are in some real trouble.  Can they escape to safety in the walls of the house?  And are the insects who live there friendly?  This wordless picture book is done in Wiesner's signature style, showing a side of our fantastic world that we humans might never think to look for.

What were your favorite picture books of 2013?  Tell me about them in the comments.

Cookies, Cocoa, and Karaoke

I mentioned in my last post that we had a bit of a Christmas party for teens at the library this week.  The event was called "Cookies, Cocoa, and Karaoke."  Needless to say, the program involved all three of those elements.

I'd had teens asking for a karaoke program for quite some time, and the Christmas season seemed like a good time for this sort of event.  There are many options out there for hosting a karaoke event.  You can rent or purchase a karaoke machine.  There are several video games that have karaoke elements, including "Karaoke Revolution" and "Karaoke Joysound."  Several elements prevented me from using either of these options, however.  Price was an issue was getting a karaoke machine since I just didn't have much money left in my programming budget.  A Wii game, such as the ones listed above, would certainly have been cheaper to purchase and easy to use since we already have a Wii here at the library.  However, I didn't think that any of these games would give us a wide enough selection of songs to choose from.  I also wanted to have Christmas songs available as options for the teens to sing and I could not find a single karaoke game that included Christmas music.

Desperate for a simple solution, I asked around on Facebook and a friend told me that she had once hosted a karaoke event using a program she had found online.  She told me that she had simply hooked her laptop up to a set of speakers and paid a small subscription fee, which gave her access to lots of songs to sing along with.  I looked into several online options like this and eventually selected a program called KaraFun to use for our event.  There is a lot to like about KaraFun and I highly recommend the program to anyone else who is planning their own karaoke event.  The software that KaraFun provides was free to download and very easy to use.  KaraFun also boasts a very large music library of over 17,000 songs, which meant that just about anything that we could think of would be available to sing - including lots of Christmas music.  There was a small subscription fee that had to be paid to allow us to access KaraFun's music library.  I paid $5.99 for a two-day pass, giving me access to the music library for more than enough time for the event.  There is also an option to pay for an ongoing monthly subscription, which would certainly be worthwhile for serious karaoke enthusiasts but was more than we needed for a one-time event.  KaraFun also has an app which can be downloaded onto Apple or Android devices.  In the end I ended up putting the app onto the library's iPad, which gave the teens the freedom to hold the iPad right in front of them to see the lyrics they needed to sing and eliminated the need to set up a more cumbersome table with the laptop.

The KaraFun program worked perfectly for our event.  The teens were pleased with the song selection, and they sang a good mix of contemporary tunes and Christmas classics.  The free software was actually very easy to use and provides users with a surprisingly large range of editing options that allows you to customize the music to your liking.  The feature that I actually enjoyed the most was the ability to adjust the volume in three different areas.  Of course the music's volume could be adjusted.  The impressive part was being able to adjust the volume of the back-up vocals (or turn them off entirely) or turn on and adjust the volume of a lead vocalist.  We ended up turning on the lead vocals but adjusting the volume to make this element fairly quiet.  This gave less-confident singers a little bit of extra guidance as they could follow the lead voice, but keeping the lead vocals quiet made the singer's voice the focal point of the performance.

In the end the equipment that I needed was fairly minimal.  I put the KaraFun app onto the iPad and hooked the iPad up to a large set of speakers.  We also had a wireless microphone hooked up to a different set of speakers, which was perhaps not an ideal sound scenario but was the best system that we could come up with given the equipment at our disposal.  At any rate, none of the teens noticed that the sound was coming from two different places so no harm done.  I had a small book cart available to be used as a stand for the iPad and where the microphone could be set between singers.  Finally, I also set up a laptop to the side of the main stage.  This allowed teen who were waiting for their turn to sing to easily browse the music library and make sure that their songs were available before stepping up to stage to sing.

Of course, there was more to this event than deciding which karaoke program we were going to use!

As the title of this program indicates, there were also cookies and cocoa to be had.  I heated up lots of water in our coffee pot and put out a tub of cocoa mix.  It was really as easy as that.  For the cookies, I actually asked my very enthusiastic Teen Advisory Group if they would be willing to help provide the cookies for this program.  I asked everyone to bring 1-2 dozen cookies to the program.  The three teens from my TAG group who were able to attend complied and there were more than enough cookies to go around.  Asking the teens to bring food is allowed by my library's policies but might not be acceptable at other libraries - be sure to check your policies before trying this.  But the fact that we were able to do this not only meant that I could save some money on snacks, but also that we got to eat some yummy homemade goodies instead of bland store-bought cookies.

The teens also spent quite a bit of time creating Christmas decorations for the party.  We hung up tons of snowflakes and made festive paper chains.  And of course, there was the awesome book tree.   Unfortunately, I neglected to take any pictures of the other decor.  Oops.

In the end I had five teens in attendance for this program.  There was much interest in the program and almost all of the handouts that I had put out were taken.  But this time of year is tricky for a lot of people as schedules fill up quickly and everyone is busy getting ready for the holidays.  I was not too surprised at this fairly low turnout, and I actually wonder if we would have had more success holding this program a week later after Christmas had ended but during the kids' break from school.  The low attendance, however, did have its perks.  We could all be very relaxed about the structure of the program.  I never had to put together a formal waiting list of singers and what songs they wanted to sing, which I may have needed to do with a large crowd.  Instead we could simply use good sense to take turns singing and we could afford to take our time between singers to find the songs we wanted.  A larger audience would certainly have been nice, but there was something to be said for the relaxed nature of a smaller program too.

Fortunately, this was also a very inexpensive program to put together, and an inexpensive program does make one feel better about low attendance.  I only spent about $13 on this program, half of that cost being the rental of the KaraFun music library and the other half being the cost of the cocoa mix.  All other supplies and equipment used were already on hand.  Even if I had needed to purchase cookies to serve for this party, the overall cost would still have been very, very low.

I would certainly plan some version of this karaoke event again for the teens again in a heartbeat.  Now that I know about the features that KaraFun offers and know how to set up the equipment it would actually be a very easy program to plan.  Perhaps we'll see a karaoke event during this year's Summer Library Program...

Book Christmas Tree

Have you seen one of those pictures of a Christmas tree made out of books?  Well, I made one of my own:

We had a teen event at the library today (more on that later).  I placed my Teen Advisory Group in charge of planning decorations for the party, and they really wanted to create one of these trees.  The books that we used ended up coming from our Reference collection.  It's a set of law resources, including state statutes, court records, and who knows what else.  The collection is almost never used, so no one missed the books while they were in use for the afternoon.  We'd originally planned to use books that we had in storage to use as prizes during summer reading or books that had been donated to our Friends of the Library group for our book sale.  But this set of books worked much better since they were all fairly thick and all the same size.  Even better, the books are green and red - perfect colors for a Christmas tree.

It was the teens' idea to find a copy of Jerry Spinelli's Stargirl to place at the top of the tree.  Genius!

Here are a few tips for anyone out there who may want to construct their own book tree:

• You need lots of books to make a tall tree.  My tree used 123 books, and they all were fairly thick (2-3 inches).  You'll need more books if your books are thinner, and fewer books if you make a smaller tree on a tabletop.  I didn't measure the finished tree, but I'd estimate that mine was about 4'8" tall (including our Stargirl topper) and about 3' wide at the base.
• Paperback books are generally much thinner than their hardcover counterparts, and they're also much slicker.  This makes them more difficult to use for a project like this.
• The tree is much easier to construct if your books are all more or less the same size.  Different sized books can make for a very interesting-looking, eclectic tree and that's lots of fun too.  It just takes a little bit of extra work to fit everything together.
• Getting the height that you need is the hardest part.  Be sure to make your layers fairly tall (I recommend at least 4-6 inches per layer), and you'll probably need to have a few layers of the same width before you start to narrow the tree.  Having three or four layers all of the same width not only gives you lots of extra height, but it also makes the whole tree a little bit more stable.  If you look closely at my picture, you'll see that my tree has 16 layers of books, with each layer consisting of two books stacked together.  The layers taper in as the tree gets taller and there are five different widths.  If I would do it again, I would actually include a few extra layers of the widest widths at the bottom  to give it more height and stability, and possibly use fewer layers of the narrower widths at the top.
• The inside of my tree is totally hollow.  There's nothing in there supporting the books as the layers become more narrow.  This was achieved just by being careful with how the books are arranged and by having several layers on top of each other that were the same width.  
• I decorated my tree very simply with a single string of white lights.  You could certainly include other decorations if you wanted, but I personally like how the books themselves are highlighted with fewer decorations.  

If Einstein Said It, Then It Must Be True

I've actually been very busy in Library Land lately, but I haven't had the time or the energy to do much blogging.  Oops!  I'll try to do better next year.

In the meantime, enjoy this lovely thing that I stumbled upon on the Interwebs:

True story.

Do Five-Year-Olds Cry?

Today the kids were off of school, so we held another Lego and Keva Open Play at the library.  At one point during the program I overheard the following conversation between two young boys who, given the conversation, I estimate to be ages five and six.


"What would you do if somebody knocked that tower over?"

"I would be really mad and I would cry."

"You wouldn't cry!  Five-year-olds don't cry."

"Six-year-olds do."

"No they don't."

"They do when they bleed."

"I don't cry when I bleed."


At this point mom looks over at the boy who last spoke quite pointedly.  Neither boy noticed or cared.

Dinosaur Poster

Today we set up a display of dinosaur books.  The display has only been up for about an hour and a half at the time of this writing, and we've already had to restock it twice.  Can't argue with that kind of enthusiasm!

One of my co-workers went into our storage closet to look for a dinosaur poster to hang near the display.  We were surprised that there was not much to choose from considering the huge number of posters we keep in storage.  Eventually she did find this gem of a poster buried at the bottom of the drawer:

Note the date at the bottom.  Wow.  I don't want to say how old I was when this poster was new, but I will say that I was very, very small.

Since this was the only dinosaur poster we could find, we decided to simply cut the date off at the bottom.  The rest of the poster is fine as is.  The illustration style isn't too terribly dated, so it works.

The Hungry Games: Catching Fur

This video parody appeared in my Facebook feed this morning:

Enjoy, and may the cookies be ever in your flavor.

STEM for Preschoolers

A few weeks ago (has it really been that long?) I talked a bit about my experience at this year's WLA conference.  Some colleagues and I were able to give a presentation at this conference all about ways to incorporate science into our library programming for preschoolers.  Oftentimes we librarians get so caught up on incorporating early literacy skills into our storytimes that we forget that there are lots of other things that preschoolers could be learning at the same time.  Our goal with this presentation was to share a few ways that we had incorporated STEM concepts (science, technology, engineering, and math) into our own programs and to prove that it really isn't as daunting of a task as you might think.

You don't need to have an impressive science background to teach basic STEM concepts to preschoolers.  At this age children really benefit from being allowed to explore the world around them, make observations and predictions, and ask questions.  In fact, STEM for small ones often looks an awful lot like play!

We can lay a good STEM foundation by working a few basic concepts into our storytimes.  In fact, many of you librarians are probably already doing this without even realizing it!  Have you ever done a storytime that was focused on colors or shapes?  What about the weather, or a certain season?  Have you ever sang a song or done a flannelboard that involved "five little somethings?"  When you do animal storytimes, do you ever talk about the animal (what it eats, where it lives, how big it is, etc.)?  Do you have puzzles or blocks available for kids to play with?  If you answered "yes" to any of these questions then you are already well on your way.

During our presentation we also mentioned a few other activities that we had tried in the hopes of expanding the audience's repertoire a bit.  The first activity, which my supervisor and I use quite often in our storytimes, is a matching game.

The idea is actually pretty simple.  First, we cut lots of like or related shapes, usually using our Ellison Die machine.  Next, we do something to distinguish different "types" of each shape.  In the first example above you can see that we had trucks of several different colors, simply reinforced by writing the appropriate color word on each truck.  In the second example we added a certain number of dots to each heart.  Usually we have four, sometimes five different types or categories for each game.  Magnets are added to the back of each shape.  When it is time for our matching game at storytime, we go around the room and hand each child a shape.  We ask parents to look at the shape with their child and talk about it.  For example, parents might talk to their children about what color truck they have, or they may count how many dots their heart has together.  After everyone has a moment to observe and discuss their shapes, we begin the matching.  We will place one shape on our magnet board and ask the group, "Who has a [shape] (truck, heart, etc.) that looks like this?"  Children who are holding a matching shape are invited to come up to our magnet board and stick their shape up with the others.  We'll count how many of that type of shape there are, make a big deal out of what makes it special (color, number, etc.), and then move on to the next "type" of shape.  This continues until everyone's shapes are on the board.  This activity is great because it incorporates lots of observation and a basic STEM concept like color or number, plus it gives the kids to get up and move around a bit.

Another fun thing to try is using a parachute:

The parachute is great because it gets kids to exercise their gross motor skills.  You can also work some basic math into your parachute use pretty easily!  If you bounce balls/wads of paper/plastic frogs on your parachute you can, of course, count the items as you add them to the mix.  You can also talk about more and less, fast and slow, up and down, and other similar broad concepts that kids need to understand before moving on to what we picture as the math and physics learned in school.

If a librarian is interested in going the extra mile in their programming, I highly recommend looking at this blog, maintained a librarian friend of mine at the Madison Public Library.  MPL is really getting into the idea of creating makerspaces at libraries, and my librarian friend has begun a related program for preschoolers called WonderWorks.  The WonderWorks program delivers a different STEM concept each week and a hands-on activity for the kids to try.

Want to know more about STEM and how to incorporate it into your library's programs?  There's plenty of good information to be found out there, but I recommend starting with this article from last month's School Library Journal.

Book Drop Excitement

Earlier this week we had the third graders from the local elementary school visit the library.  We booktalked several great reads, and then each class was taken on a tour of the library.  During the tour we visited the adult reference desk, the circulation desk, the children's room, and finally the back area of the library where patrons don't usually get to go.  In this area the kids got to see where the magic of circulation happens - how the books are checked in, sorted, and sometimes sent to other libraries.  

For the last stop of the day, I opened up the back room where our bookdrops are located so that the kids could see the slots where they drop their books off from the other side and the bins where the books land.  Generally the book drop is the coolest thing that these kids will see all day.  They're fascinated by how cold it is in this room (the slots are open to the outside, after all), how big the bins are, and they love tilting their heads to see up the slots.  

At the end of the tour, one boy expressed his awe out loud to his friends:

"I got to touch the inside of the library!"

Glad we could make your day, kid.

Swag

I just returned from this year's Wisconsin Library Association (WLA) conference.  This year the conference was held in Green Bay, WI and as always is was incredible.  I sat in on a few good sessions which gave me ideas for new things to try at the library.  I actually got to work with a few other librarians to present a session about science for preschoolers (more on that later).  I had a blast meeting up with librarian friends that I haven't seen in ages.  I went to a lunch with a great presentation by an author/illustrator that I love and got him to sign a book for me.  I even attended a program called Librarians Rock, where I got to kick back, listen to a band, and watch some librarians sing in a Librarian Idol contest.  I was at the conference for less than two days and attended only a fraction of the planned events, but it was still such a great experience.

One of the fun things about a library conference like this is that there's always an exhibit hall where library vendors come to set up booths and talk to librarians about their products.  The vendors range from book sellers to architects to consultants to database gurus.  There's always a lot to looks at and plenty of people who want to try to sell you something.  Fortunately for everyone, the vendors always come up with some good ways to get you to approach their booths and get you to talk to them.  Namely, there's always lots of good swag to take with you!

This year I actually made out like a bandit when it came to all of the goodies.  Two factors made this year's swag better than usual:  1) I made it into the exhibit hall during a time when many other librarians were attending other sessions/meetings so I had most vendors' full attention, 2) I also visited on the very last day that vendors would be exhibiting, which made them desperate to unload all of their extra stuff to whoever would take them.  Take a look at all the stuff I came back with:

This year's haul includes:  Four tote bags, three galleys from a small press, one audiobook, a preliminary list of titles from the CCBC's annual Choices list, a whistle/keychain, a pizza cutter, four pens, a BrushBot (plus a kit to make four more), a Superman bookmark, a rubber bracelet, five buttons, and lots of candy.  Not pictured:  Dozens of fliers and pamphlets advertising various products and services, business cards, and a few packages of promotional bookmarks.

That's a lot of great stuff!  I was a tad stingier this year than I was last year when it came to taking the bags and pens, but some of the other items more than made up for the difference.  The audiobook alone was a huge score in terms of monetary value, given to me by an audiobook supplier who just didn't want to take all of his display items home.  I'm also hugely excited about the BrushBots (available for purchase here), which I'm sure will turn into a great program next summer.  Everything else just seems like good things to have around - especially the chocolate.