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At my library we have a monthly guessing game in a display case near the Children’s Services desk. Last month’s theme was guessing the number of drops of water in a bottle. This month’s game has lots of puppets stuffed in the case. In the winter it was about snowflakes. The library has been doing this since before I started working there, and I can see the positive effects of the game.
To participate in the month’s game, a library visitor must fill out a guessing form at the Children’s desk. A child doesn’t have to be able to write to participate; family members can help make sure the guess itself is legible. There is generally an employee working at the desk, and having the forms and pencils near us encourages interaction between the families and staff. Sure, we greet people as they enter the Children’s Library, but the guessing game allows for more meaningful interactions. Anyone can guess – it’s not just for children, so we have memorable conversations with caregivers too. The guessing game is a conversation starter, a recurring activity that children can look forward to every visit to our library, and builds upon skills like observation, counting and estimation in addition to incorporating several of the Every Child Ready to Read practices. The prize, generally a donated book in near new condition, is awarded on the first day of the following month, and the name of the person with the closest guess is posted near the display case.
On special days we also have scavenger hunts and the related sheets and prizes are at the desk. This is another way for us to show that we are not scary librarians, but rather nice and fun. This summer we are celebrating Beatrix Potter’s 150th birthday on July 28 with her character hidden around the room.
Does your library have passive programming like this? Do you have a way to encourage children and families to approach the Children’s service desk? Share your successes in the comments.
The post Guessing Games appeared first on ALSC Blog.
This month I am thinking about the trend of public libraries offering museum passes for check out. The idea is to partner with local museums and other fun, family-friendly, educational and/or cultural places and create an agreement that allows the library to circulate day passes to the partnering institutions. From the small amount of research I’ve done, I see there are many ways to go about doing this. Some libraries are high-tech and have web portals that allow patrons to print off museum passes from any computer. Some libraries have actual tickets that circulate like any other physical materials in the collection. Does your library have circulating museum passes? Do the tickets allow an entire family in to a facility for free? Do the tickets cover any kind of additional fees (like parking)?
Here are some examples of this kind of service – this is just a few, there are many more out there:
Please share your knowledge about how this program works. If you offer at your library, is it a popular service? How is this service funded – through donations or grants? Any words of wisdom to share? How many days is the ticket valid or how long can each patron keep it? Have you used this unique kind of circulating material as a patron? Tell me all about it in the comments.
The post Museum passes appeared first on ALSC Blog.
Picture courtesy of Allen Public Library
It’s the time of the year for brackets – and we are hosting our own tournament to determine which picture book series is the favorite in our community. Our informal competition was organized by Sarah Davis, one of the Youth Service Librarians here at the Allen Public Library.
We started with the top popular children’s picture books according to circulation stats and didn’t allow for multiple books from the same series. The 16 books that came to the top were: Barbie & the Secret Door, Pete the Cat: I Love My White Shoes, We are in a Book (Elephant and Piggie), Thomas the Tank Engine, Berenstain Bears and Too Much Junk Food, Ella Bella Ballerina, If You Give a Cat a Cupcake, Everything Goes on Land, Hug Machine, Pigeon Finds a Hot Dog!, Dora Saves the Crystal Kingdom, Pinkalicious, A Sister More Like Me (Disney’s Frozen), and Happy to be Healthy (Doc McStuffins).
Picture courtesy of Allen Public Library
Sarah created a large bracket on the large bulletin board in our Children’s Library. Any library patrons can vote by picking up a slip and circling the book they prefer. See the cream colored envelopes on the bulletin board? The kids would pick up the slips of paper out of those envelopes, cast their votes, and then put them in a voting box.
At the end of the first week, 489 people had voted and eight titles were eliminated from the board. Goodbye, Thomas! Good effort, Hug Machine! After the second week, there were four titles remaining: Elephant and Piggie, Pinkalicious, Pete the Cat and the Pigeon.
It’s the final week of our competition and can you guess which books are pitted against each other? We predicted this would happen: it’s Mo vs. Mo, Elephant and Piggie vs. the Pigeon. Which book will win? We’ll find out on Monday, March 28!
Picture courtesy of
Allen Public Library
Which Mo Willems book would you vote for in our final competition?
The post Picture Book Brackets at the Library appeared first on ALSC Blog.
Howdy from the Lone Star State!
The Children’s Round Table of the Texas Library Association had a strong start to the new year.
In January the Texas 2×2 Committee announced the 2016 Texas 2×2 reading list of 20 recommended books for children, age 2 through grade 2. The content, presentation and interest levels of the books vary broadly and generally range from board books to beginning chapter books. On its website the committee also provides a cute boot-shaped coloring page and recommended activities and discussion points. Even if you do not live in Texas, I recommend that you look at the great selection of books!
Courtesy of the Texas Bluebonnet Award committee
Another exciting recent development occurred in early February. The Texas Bluebonnet Award committee announced that When the Beat Was Born: DJ Kool Herc and the Creation of Hip Hop by author Laban Carrick Hill and illustrator Theodore Taylor III was 2016 Texas Bluebonnet Award Winner! You can watch the announcement video that went live on YouTube at 7 a.m. on February 12.
I explained the basics of the Texas Bluebonnet Award in a previous post, but to summarize: the Texas Bluebonnet Award Winner is selected by children (in Texas) in grades 3-6 who read at least five of the 20 books in the Bluebonnet nominee list. This year 152,369 students in 1,536 institutions cast their votes and let their opinions be known! WOW!
The winning author and illustrator will be the special guest speakers at this year’s Bluebonnet Luncheon during the Texas Library Association Annual Conference in Houston, TX in April.
Have any other state children’s book awards or lists been announced recently? Brag about your reading list in the comments below! What do you think of this year’s Bluebonnet Award Winner and the newest Texas 2×2 Reading List?
Note: I am not on either the 2×2 or the Bluebonnet selection committee – I am just an enthusiast!
The post Texas Bluebonnet and 2×2 Reading List Updates appeared first on ALSC Blog.
In last month’s post I shared my library’s experiences during the planning phases of our 1,000 Books Before Kindergarten reading initiative for preschoolers. This month we launched the program, and I have some updates to share with you.
Our 1,000 Books Before Kindergarten program launched the day we started our first 2016 session. Since last Monday we have been registering children in person and on our website. If caregivers sign up online, we e-mail them the reading log for the first 100 books. To receive prizes and subsequent logs, they must visit the library in person.
Photo courtesy of the author. Bulletin board created by Melody Perez. Yes, the leaves on the tree are books!
We publicized the start of our new program in several ways: we inserted a PowerPoint slide at the beginning of every story time presentation, our bulletin board artist, created a colorful display showing a tree with books for leaves, and we included a blurb about it in our January youth events flyer.
In the past nine days, 141 children have registered for 1,000 Books Before Kindergarten and one child already even returned the first reading log and has moved on to their next 100 books!
We are still preparing the prize pack that we will distribute for children who reach the half-way point (500 books) and complete the program. Allison Chao, the Youth Services Librarian who has been overseeing this project, has been creating the Apples and Ants booklets (originally created by Nancy Stewart) and the felt-piece sets. We’ve found that children might be half-way done sooner than we anticipated!
I will keep you updated on when our first young patron reaches 500 and 1,000 books. So far thing are going very well!
The post 1,000 Books Before Kindergarten Update appeared first on ALSC Blog.
I am happy to announce that my public library will be rolling out our 1,000 Books Before Kindergarten program in January 2016! Allison, one of our Youth Services Librarians, has been hard at work this fall planning the details and creating print pieces for our upcoming soft launch.
Have you heard of the 1,000 Books Before Kindergarten program? It’s a program in which preschool children (with their caregivers) register either in a library or online to attempt to read at least 1,000 books before the child enters Kindergarten. The caregivers keep track of the books they read with the child, and at certain milestones the child earns prizes. Once the child has read 1,000 books, they’ve completed the program and receive great accolades, in addition to all the benefits of being exposed to a variety of children’s literature. Of course it doesn’t necessarily have to be 1,000 different books; we all know that children enjoy reading the same books over and over.
This program goes hand-in-hand with reading aloud 15 minutes per day and supports both Every Child Ready to Read and Babies Need Words Every Day. There’s no best or correct way to implement the 1,000 Books Before Kindergarten program; it can be customized to fit any budget, for unlimited number of participants, and can go on indefinitely.
Upon first hearing about the program, the number 1,000 may seem quite large. How can children possibly read 1,000 books before Kindergarten? It’s actually quite simple. If a child reads 1 book each day, the 1,000-book goal can be met in less than three years. Increasing the reading to three books per day would mean that the child completes the 1,000 books in less than a year. While it seems daunting, the goal is attainable. Any reading counts, including books shared in story times.
Ready to learn more about this program? Here are some resources that you might find useful in deciding whether or not this is a good fit for your library and your community.
What do you think about this kind of program? Have you tried it at your library? Are there any last minute tips you want to share before we launch our program next month?
The post 1,000 Books Before Kindergarten appeared first on ALSC Blog.
A still life with easy readers. Photo courtesy of the author.
Let’s talk best practices for organizing easy or beginning readers. I mean the books used by new readers to facilitate print word recognition. The easy reader collection is difficult to browse. Not easy! There are as many leveling systems as there are publishers that use different letters, numbers, or colors depending on the series; sometimes a level 1 is harder than something marked as a level 2 or 3. This makes parents and new librarians confused when browsing the collection. How can we simplify things?
I am looking to you for help! Give me some ideas of how your library treats the not-so-easy-to-browse easy reader collection. Help me (and maybe others) in future decision making by answering the following questions in the comments:
- Does your library separate materials in the easy reader section using a leveling system?
- How easy is it to browse the easy reader collection in your library?
- Are fiction and nonfiction easy readers interfiled, or where are your leveled non-fiction books?
Every public library I’ve worked in (that would be four) has a different way of treating this collection. In the library where I work now, the easy reader fiction books are in near the picture books, organized by author’s last name (or popular character if there are multiple authors working in the same character series.). The easy readers that have the easiest-to-read content have a green dot on the spine label to help with browsing. The leveled non-fiction books are interfiled in the children’s nonfiction collection.
Now for more questions – Should we devise our own leveling system or use the A.R (or lexile or whatever) number to create levels for the titles in our easy reader collection, and shelve the books by those levels? Should the leveled non-fiction instead be interfiled with the easy reader fiction, or should we have a separate easy reader nonfiction collection? Is there another system that libraries have used successfully that you’d love to share here?
Please share your thoughts and best (or even pretty good) practices. I would love to learn how other libraries (public, school or otherwise) treat the easy reader collection.
The post Organizing Easy Readers appeared first on ALSC Blog.
With my new position that I started last month I have adopted several collections. One of my new collections is the popular E (easy? everyone?) picture book collection. This collection is generally for a wide range of readers, consists of books that offer a rich vocabulary, and have stories told through text and images. Picture books, on average, are 32 pages.
I have picture books that I love to read in story times. I have a list of picture books that I recommend to adults when they are special guest readers in an elementary classroom. There are some great picture books that are informational in nature and sometimes hidden in the nonfiction collection, as they don’t necessarily tell a story but rather convey information. There are the picture books sometimes nestled in the 398.2 section, as they retell folk and fairy tales.
Today I am going to focus on the materials in the picture storybook collection – or the E’s and specifically how to weed them. I am currently engaged in the important task of weeding the E collection in my library, so it’s been on my mind.
Kendra Jones, a member of the ALSC Managing Children’s Services committee, wrote about the importance of weeding in her post from May 2015. In her post she mentioned the CREW Weeding guidelines published by the Texas State Library; when starting the weeding process, I refer to CREW to establish a quantitative baseline to decide how long to keep things that aren’t moving. Beyond the “MUSTIE” considerations, items in easy picture book collections should be analyzed according to last circulation date.
CREW states that easy picture book materials that haven’t checked out in 2+ years should be weeded. When I ran a report using this criteria, I found that there were less than 35 items (out of several thousand) that had been collecting dust and taking up valuable shelf space.
Another report that I generally run when “learning” the movement of a collection is used to find items that have been around for over two years but have never checked out. That doesn’t mean those items are automatically on the chopping block, but it is a good practice to know what moves and what doesn’t. This technique also highlights items that have not checked out because they are missing.
After looking at the most recent circulation statistics for items, I move onto items that may need to be replaced due to high usage and show normal physical wear. There isn’t one circulation number that universally works for all libraries; I’ve seen collections with items that have circulated over 200 times that are still in good shape; meanwhile other collections contain items that need to be considered for weeding due to poor physical condition after 50-75 checkouts. “Normal” physical wear is something that varies widely.
Is weeding part of your job responsibilities? If so do you have a circulation number that you use as your benchmark for replacement consideration? What constitutes “normal” in terms of physical wear for the collections you weed? Do you consider the size of your collection, regional standards, or the age of the collection? Does your library set aside a certain amount for replacements? What about audiovisual materials? I would love to discuss best practices from librarians in the weeds.
The post Picking the library weeds appeared first on ALSC Blog.
