goodbye poetry month

It's the last day of April so we said goodbye to our blackout poetry wall and put up something new, which you'll see soon!

In case you are wondering what the black square is - that was our branch's name.  I copied several pages of popular books, including graphic fiction (which is easier to do) and offered those with washable markers.  Not too many kids participated in this, but at least the wall was never empty.  A few kids took their poems home with them.

The above poem is:

Be a bear

hibernate during winter

sleep in the summer

work a day

live a day

then take a nap

Books Rock My World!

I am changing out our displays and bulletin boards for the summer!  The theme for our 2018 summer reading program is "Libraries Rock!"  I have two different bulletin boards going up with that theme and a bulletin board/display that will relate to our new play space theme, which is loosely about diversity.

I finished putting this one up today, but it's missing...everything!  

I cut out a ton of first lines from books plus keyboard and guitar cutouts.  Kids will have the option to paste those lines together on a guitar or keyboard and create a song.  Or they can color the piano keys and guitars.  Or lyrics plus decoration!  So many options!  We will then tape them to the window and hopefully completely fill it up.  If all goes well, it will look very cool by the end of the summer.

I cut out the letters from old National Geographic magazines, which perfectly fit the saying.  Though the letters are not perfect, they look pretty nice and are just as easy to make as it is to dig through the mountain of ready-to-go-letters.  I will definitely be cutting out homemade letters for some of our future displays!

What happened to storytime?!?

So I bet your're wondering - what the heck happened with those storytime posts?

We ended our season in March and are in the middle of a two-month break due to system-wide changes at my library.  This is code for chaos, library chaos!  We recently added a new branch and have a list of branches needing extensive renovation.  Because of the new branch, we have hired and moved around a lot of people, and there are currently four new people at my branch with more staff changes ahead.  

I'm not sure a storytime break was best for our patrons, but I have been using the time wisely.  It was brought to my attention that all three of the storytimes offered at my branch, including toddler storytime, were far too large and surpassed the number of individuals allowed in our meeting room at a time.  Sadly but wisely, this means we will most likely need to ticket in June and July for our family storytime.  What the heck is ticketing, you ask?  Well, we will have a certain number of tickets to hand out, and once we've handed them all out, everyone else is turned away.  Oh the despair!

In the fall we will be offering the same storytime twice in one day at staggered times in the hopes we do not have to ticket.  We will be doing this for all three age groups due to their popularity.  There has been much discussion about this.  Two identical storytimes means I will have twice the practice and be a storytime expert in no time, right?

As for the June and July storytime, I will be facilitating the June portion of it and have lots of new ideas to implement and try.  Though I have purchased my first puppet, a crow named Larry the Librarian (Robert, always the creative soul, named him), I still don't have voices mastered.  Therefore Larry is still in the frightening developmental stages of creation.  I've also been researching how to engage parents more in my storytime, because it was something I struggled with during my toddler storytime.  And flipping the room around, changing up my hello and goodbye song, and trying the parachute again (I guess it's true time heals all things).  Lots of changes!

I still have one more month of storytime planning so who knows what other crazy things I'll think of.  Perhaps disco storytime?  Disco storytime with Larry the Librarian?

whale kidnapping

Overheard in the children's area:

"Put down the whale."

Ominous silence.

"Elise.  Give me the whale."

Gibberish and wet smacking noises.

"Elise, get that whale out of your mouth!"

A sigh, and then with a more patient voice, "Elise, give me the whale."

More ominous silence followed by squealing and sounds of little feet running.

"Elise, give me the whale.  Elise!  We do not throw whales!"

I know most of you are concerned right now about the whale's well being.  No need to worry, the whale is part of our play space, which is currently ocean-themed, and therefore a rubber toy, and not a real whale.

But the carefree and bumbling world reigned by toddlers is not entirely free of barbaric activity.

After they left, armed with wipes in hand, I inspected the play area and surveyed the aftermath of the whale kidnapping.

When I finally located the injured whale, I discovered a ghastly tear, and worse, a belly bloated with spit.

Do you want to hear something gross about koalas?

A second grader requested a few books about koalas last week for an upcoming "research project."  I found one on shelf and placed three more books on hold for her.  

Today she came in to pick up her holds.  I told her the holds were kept over on the adult side and walked her over to the holds shelf and showed her how to find them.

While we were there she asked me if I wanted to hear something gross about koalas.  I tried changing the subject but to no avail.

She really wanted to tell me something gross about koalas.

So I asked her to whisper it in my ear.  I leaned over and she cupped her fingers around her mouth and giggled like she had a juicy secret to share.

Just a few inches from my ear, she could no longer contain her excitement and loudly shouted, "baby koalas eat their mommy's poop!"

Because we were standing by the holds shelves, which were smack dab in the middle of the adult section, and it was a busy time of day, about a dozen heads whipped toward us all at once.

Meanwhile the little girl began hooting loudly while she waited for my reaction.  So I said, "well that's certainly a surprise, isn't it?" as I looked at the disapproving faces surrounding us.  A few people nodded gamely, one lovely soul gave a small chuckle, and everyone else shot us looks of disgust and hurried away.

And it was a surprise.  A very loud surprise.  

painted rocks

Lately, I have been finding painted rocks in a few of the Little Free Libraries in my neighborhood.

This is my favorite one:

So far, it has remained in its Little Free Library for a week.  It has nothing to do with books, but it makes me smile.

kindness matters

Here's yet another reason why I love my job - because they do lovely things like this:

I worked with this gal for a whopping three months and she was part of the team of people who hired me.  She was transferred to another branch, which will be opening a brand new building in the next year, which is a very important job.  She was the coworker I referred to as "D," and as you can tell, she is delightful and certainly missed. 

Now if I can just narrow it down to one person to send this heart to.  A month may not be enough time!

Happy Poetry Month!

This is one of two displays in the youth area at our library branch:

I borrowed the popular Poetree idea and turned one of our columns into one.  With a gentle tug each poem comes free, and there are twenty plus poems to choose from. 

After reading the poem, there is a surprise origami activity on the other side of the tree, which includes instructions and supplies to create a leaf monster bookmark.



So far I have had two kids who each chose a poem and then read them aloud with their adults.  One child did not want to make a leaf monster because he loved his poem so much and wanted to keep reading it.  This nearly caused me to faint from happiness. 

I put up one other display, but it's one of those displays that's only cool if I get enough kids to participate, so there will hopefully be a happy surprise at the end of the month.

Favorite March Reads

Though the list of amazing books I read in March is nowhere the size of February's list, it was still a wonderful month of reading.  

I read a handful of good books that were almost great except for a few nitpicky reasons.  I finally got around to reading both The Story of Arthur Truluv by Elizabeth Berg and A Long Way Home by Saroo Brierley.  Both were pretty good.  I will recommend them but definitely not rave about them.

Here are the books I will not only recommend and rave about, but also wave my hands excitedly and possibly hop up and down too.

This is My Book by Mark Pett (picture book)



Who wouldn't love a mischievous panda completely taking over a book and turning it into a hilarious adventure? Well...quite possibly the person who is trying to write the book. Can this panda win him over with his charming illustrations and outlandish extras such as pull tabs and flaps? You'll have to read it to find out! Be sure to check out what the panda did to the book blurb author's bio!

The Rabbit Listened by Cori Doerrfeld  (picture book)

Taylor's amazing block art piece is destroyed and he is incredibly sad. One by one, an assortment of animals barge into his unhappiness without truly listening. And then the rabbit appears, moving closer and closer so Taylor can share its warmth and friendship. The rabbit listens to and acknowledges Taylor's feelings and helps Taylor rebuild not just a new block art piece, but also his composure. In beautiful illustrations and simple lines The Rabbit Listened delivers a beautiful and powerful message about active listening.

Reading Rooms edited by Susan Allen Toth (adult nonfiction)

What a book! Reading Rooms is packed full of essays, songs, poems, snippets of novels and memoirs, all relating to the library. It's broken up into sections - Small-Town Libraries, City Libraries, Love in the Library, and Mystery and Murder in the Library to name a few - and within each section is a handful of writings reflecting the theme.

There are plenty of well-known authors in this collection, including Stephen King, Eudora Welty, and Betty Smith. But there are also a handful of lesser-known authors such as Patricia McGerr, whose story surprised and delighted me. In fact, most of my favorite pieces were written by authors I hadn't heard of or authors I'm uncertain about.

The greatest, most beautiful surprise came from Stephen King's "It," which, surprise surprise, has a snippet about the library in it. Though I haven't read Stephen King for many years because he gives me nightmares, I couldn't help but read this piece because the writing was astonishingly beautiful. I had no idea Stephen King was so poetic. In this snippet of “It” he does one of my favorite writerly things and combines pretty phrases and words with slang. For example, he writes, "He liked the smell of the books - a spicy smell, faintly fabulous. He would sometimes walk through the adult stacks, looking at the thousands of volumes and imagining a world of lives inside each one, the way he sometimes walked along his street in the burning smoke-hazed twilight of a late-October afternoon, the sun only a bitter orange line on the horizon, imagining the lives going on behind all the windows - people laughing or arguing or arranging flowers or feeding kids or pets or their own faces while they watched the boobtube." holy moly that's some beautiful writing.

I also loved Pete Hamill's piece, "D'Artagnan on Ninth Street,” and in particular, these lines, "I can feel now the way my blood quickened as I...saw ahead the wild gloomy garden behind the library. As a gesture of support, I would run a finger along the menacing iron pickets of the garden's fence. I wanted that fence to stand forever, holding back the jungle... I sometimes imagined it spilling into the streets, marching steadily forward to link with Prospect Park. Or it would turn to the nearest target: the library itself. The vengeful blind force of untamed nature would climb those granite walls, seep under the windows and assault the books, those sheaves of murdered trees, sucking them back to the dark earth."

Reading Rooms was everything I hoped for and more. I mean, where else am I going to find such a strange compilation of authors and styles of writing about my favorite place in the world? It falls into that rare and awesome category of books that keep on giving long after they’re read. I not only jotted down a handful of names and books to look up, I also went on a wild and entertaining exploration of the Ellery Magazine thanks to Patricia McGerr. As a person who hasn't read a single adult mystery book, not even Agatha Christie (*gasp*) I'm now intrigued, which is the first step towards reading my first mystery. As for Stephen King, there are just too many scary things circling the island of beautiful writing, so I will continue looking at it from afar.

A Great Big Cuddle written by Michael Rosen and illustrated by Chris Riddell (children's poetry)

This is a book of poems for the silly-hearted souls who love nonsensical words and ideas. It's also wonderful for storytime. I chose my three favorites and added a few movements to each poem to make them more interactive. It's a very imaginative, fun book to read aloud and share with others.

Tea Rex by Molly Idle (picture book)

The idea of a tea party with a t rex is outlandish and thrilling. I enjoyed the illustrations (big dinosaur sitting in a little chair for example) and appreciated the clever and sneaky effort to encourage politeness and manners in young readers.

Stitch-illo by Janine Vangool (adult nonfiction)

Is it ok to say I love this book because of how pretty it is? Before reading this, I hadn't heard of most of the textile artists and I was delighted and inspired by their different styles, stories, approaches, and techniques. Though most of their websites are easy to find I am keeping my copy of the book so I can leisurely flip through the pages anytime I'm feeling totally stumped and creatively drained.

Happy Easter!

This is Chickie.  He was the star of the Easter display at our library:

I borrowed the cheesy quote from Pintrest.  Everything else, including the charming color of the egg, was all me.  Due to the white paper on the other side of the window, chickie's egg was chocolate.  When kids asked about the color of the egg, most accepted my response that it was a chocolate egg.  Only one kid called it something else, which I shall not repeat (it starts with a P, that's all I will say).  Also, before the googly eyes, the black circles I drew were terrifying.  Thank goodness for googly eyes.  And though I wasn't thrilled with my eyelash artwork, I saw a kid point them out to her dad and say, "look at those beautiful eyelashes!"  

For the past couple weeks, kids wrote their favorite books on a dot and decorated Chickie's egg:

Whenever a dot was filled out I asked the kids where they wanted their dot to go.  My thought was that if I cared where my dot would go, so would the kids, but I was really surprised by how much it mattered to them.  It mattered just as much as figuring out which book and dot color to pick, and I had some great interactions with the kiddos while they made their decisions.  

In addition to Chickie and her chocolate egg, I also hid pictures of several famous bunnies, such as Peter Rabbit and Knuffle Bunny, around the library and offered a selection of 'color your own bookmarks' for kids who found the bunnies.  This was also a hit.  We had so many delightful interactions with patrons about the bunnies.  Some kids found a few bunnies and were satisfied with that.  Even when their adult told them there were more bunnies to find, the kids would shrug and choose their bookmark.  Other kids, upon discovering they didn't find all the bunnies, went right back to searching.  One kid found all the bunnies and decided that she could do better.  She was at the library for about an hour and in that hour she pulled out a handful of books that had bunnies in them and brought them to the desk each time she found one.  I wouldn't be surprised if she grows up to be a librarian.  

Overall, it was my best display so far.  I enjoyed how interactive it was and hope the poetry displays I'm putting up next week are just as interactive.