Day in the Life of a Children's Librarian

Another day, another completely different set of tasks...

8:30am - Arrive at work. Get materials ready for outreach storytime (get the lightweight felt board, find stickers to give out, pack up books and materials).

8:45am - Leave library and travel to local preschool for storytime.

9:00am - Arrive at local preschool and begin programs. This particular preschool contacted us to schedule visits on two days (they have a LOT of classes). They wanted a program about black history and/or multicultural diversity. Yesterday two of our librarians went and did storytimes for infants, toddlers, and 2's. Today we presented for 3's, 4's, a class of 4-5's, and a class of toddlers. We used the following books (not all of them for every class):

It's Okay to Be Different by Todd Parr (funny! And I love Todd Parr!)
We All Went on Safari: A Counting Journey Through Tanzania by Laurie Krebs and Julia Cairns
Kente Colors by Debbi Chocolate and John Ward (love this book and it worked with younger and older kids...)
My Nose, Your Nose by Melanie Walsh
Here Are My Hands by Bill Martin and John Archambault (we used a big book)
A Triangle for Adaora: An African Book of Shapes by Ifeoma Onyefulu (great book, but the text is too long for a readaloud, so I paraphrased it)

We also used a felt of the story Duckie's Rainbow and we sang the song "If You're Wearing Red Today", which don't really fit with multicultural diversity, but we worked the colors angle, tying them to Kente Colors.

We saw three classes of 3's (combined into one group), 2 classes of 4's (combined into one group), one class of 4-5's, and one class of toddlers for a total of 118 kids. Whew.

10:50am - We head back to the library.

11:00am - We arrive back at the library. I put away the storytime stuff (make sure the books are checked in, put away the felt board, stickers, and bags) and record the stats from our visit.

11:15am - I call another local preschool to attempt to reschedule last week's visit that was canceled due to snow storms of doom. The director isn't there, so I leave a message with some possible dates.

11:25am - I log the titles we used at our visit. We keep track of the stories we use for each in-house and outreach storytime so that we don't use the same ones all the time.

11:35am - I check my email and voicemail.

11:45am - I take down a preschool loan that needs to go out on the van on Monday. This teacher has requested a bag of books about presidents and about dental health. Sometimes a lot of the preschool teachers request the same topics at the same times (like right now dental health is very popular), so pickings can become slim... We do the best we can to please everybody!

12:00pm - Lunch time! I use the first half of my break to peruse the Friends of the Library book sale and come away with a stack of books for only $5.50. Score. Then I head to the staff room to eat my sandwich.

1:00pm - I'm on desk from 1-4. Since it's a no-school day, we were pretty busy, and in the down time I work on updating my booklists. Here's a sampling of the questions I was asked:

Where are the Barbie video games?
Can you help me find all the Clique books?
What are some good videos about shapes for preschool kids?
Do you have Hannah Montana DVDs in?
Where are the Calvin and Hobbes books?
How do I inter-library loan something?
These two computer mice are broken.

4:00pm - I'm back in the office. My boss stops by for a chat about the Summer Reading Club prizes. I'm not sure we really said anything helpful, but it was an interesting discussion anyway!

4:25pm - I fill out graphics requests for some programs I'm doing in April and talk with our graphic artist about them a bit. I'm requesting a poster for our Life-Sized Clue Game that we're hosting for teens and a sign for Mad Scientist Nitro Joe (both are programs I heard about at ILA).

4:50pm - I clean off my desk, put away my files, and...

5:00pm - I head home for the weekend! TGIF!

And there you have another day in the life of a children's librarian. Even though we sometimes get super busy, I love that we do our own outreach (as opposed to having an outreach department). It's so nice to get out of the library sometimes and visit local schools and preschools. There are some that we go to on a regular basis, but the one we visited today is one we haven't been to in a long time and I'm hoping they'll ask us back!

Mini-Review: Cornelia and the Audacious Escapades of the Somerset Sisters

Cornelia and the Audacious Escapades of the Somerset Sisters by Lesley M.M. Blume. (Grades 5-7)

I think there must be some rule that at least one Caudill nominee must have an intriguing and unwieldy title. Of the 2008 nominees, I think The Misadventures of Maude March, or Trouble Rides a Fast Horse takes that honor. Of the 2009 nominees, I am happy to bestow that honor on Cornelia.

Unfortunately, Cornelia, despite its intriguing title, is not one of my favorite books. I read it in March and this is what I had to say:

"Cornelia is a lonely little girl whose famous pianist mother often leaves her alone while she goes on trips. Having a famous mother is a burden for Cornelia, who feels like most people she meets are more interested in her mother than they are in her. Until she meets her new next-door neighbor- Virginia Somerset. Virginia is the only grown-up that's ever treated Cornelia like she was her own person and Cornelia grows to relish hearing Virginia's stories of her travels with her sisters.

There's not a lot of plot in this book- the bulk of the book is made up of Virginia's stories. Even so, you get to know the Somerset sisters a bit and their escapades can be funny. The book seemed a bit too long to me and I'm not sure how I feel about the ending..."

I tend to like books that have a lot of character development and relationships between characters. From what I remember, Cornelia was more concentrated on the exotic settings of the adventures the Somerset sisters had. It just wasn't my kind of book... or perhaps I wasn't in the right frame of mind for it when I read it...

2007 Cybils Announced!

Happy Valentine's Day, all...


and more importantly, Happy Cybils Announcement Day!!!

Yes, the 2007 Cybils winners have been announced. I think it's a great, great list. I'm especially happy to see A Crooked Kind of Perfect, Book of a Thousand Days, and Boy Toy on the list, as I loved all those books. I've got The True Meaning of Smekday and This is Just to Say: Poems of Apology and Forgiveness on my TBR pile (and they just got bumped up).

Yay Cybils! And thanks to a great team of bloggers that brought them to us!

Book Review: Oh, Rats!

Happy Nonfiction Monday!! Do be sure to check out the great posts collected over at Picture Book of the Day. Today, I've got another Caudill review for you, the only nonfiction book on the list.


Oh, Rats!: The Story of Rats and People by Albert Marrin. (Grades 4-6)

Did you know that rats can be flushed down a toilet a live? Did you know that rats sometimes fish with their tails? Did you know that a pair of rats could have 359 million descendants in 3 years?

If you didn't know any of those superbly interesting facts, you'd better go out and obtain a copy of Oh, Rats! It's filled to the brim with interesting facts about rats. Now, I don't know about you, but when I think of rats, I tend to think about disease-infested vermin biting babies and eating all our food. (Remember Lady and the Tramp?? That rat that attacked the baby?!) Well, imagine my surprise to find out that rats are not all bad. Certainly, our author presents the unappealing facts along with the cute-and-cuddly-rats-as-pets angle. But, as Marrin experienced himself, once you learn about rats they become much less scary.

Illustrations in black, white, and crimson decorate the book and sidebars on nearly every page provide additional fun facts. Although I do like the illustrations, they were a bit distracting because the full-page pictures do not have labels and sometimes I couldn't figure out what they were supposed to be illustrating.

Mr. Marrin provides a bibliography at the end, as well as a short list of recommended reading. The neat thing is that he also includes a list of fictional books that feature rats as (good or evil) characters. I guess I was left wanting a little more from his bibliography and I wish he had included an author's note. But I will say that it's a greatly entertaining book and likely to appeal to kids.

Also reviewed by A Fuse #8 Production.

Mini Review: Gossamer

*waves* Hi, all. I'm back from Florida (best trip ever, by the way)... and it is cold. Yeah, when our plane landed and the guy told us that the temperature was 0 with a wind chill of -24, I pretty much wanted to quit my job and run back to live at Disney World. I won't, though. Instead, how about another mini-review of a Caudill nominee???


Gossamer by Lois Lowry. (Grades 4-7)

I read this one a year ago and I must confess that I remember hardly anything about it. My booktalk for this one would go something like "Umm... it's about dreams... and a boy who goes into foster care and lives with an old lady and he'd been abused... And... yeah, you should read it!" Clearly, I need to reread. Here's what I wrote last January right after I finished it:

"Lois Lowry explores the nature of dreams in her latest book. Chapters alternate between Littlest One, a creature learning how to bestow dreams on sleeping humans and animals, and a pair of humans brought together by fate. The old woman is lonely and bored and decides to take in a sweet little foster child, never dreaming that they would send her the abused and angry John. John is an 8-year-old boy who's been taken away from an abusive home and lashes out at anyone who tries to get close. Now the nightmares are after John and Littlest will do whatever she can to protect him.

It's a very interesting idea, although the book is short and the action maybe goes too quickly. I found it a little unrealistic how quickly John came to accept his foster home. Still, it was an enjoyable story and could spark some interesting discussions in classrooms or book clubs."

Better reviews can be found at Fuse #8 and Blog from the Windowsill.

Mini Review: A Drowned Maiden's Hair

A Drowned Maiden's Hair: A Melodrama by Laura Amy Schlitz. (Grades 5-8)

Hmmm. Laura Amy Schlitz. Where have I heard that name before? Hmmm. OH RIGHT, she won the 2008 Newbery! Well. Not only did she win the Newbery, but her historical novel, A Drowned Maiden's Hair, is nominated for a 2009 Caudill award. I was quite pleasantly surprised to see it on the Caudill list because I really enjoyed it. Here's what I wrote when I read it a year ago:

"Maud Mary Flynn is a scrappy little orphan living in an Asylum in the early 20th century. Maud knows that she's a bad girl, too rambunctious and stubborn to be of much interest to potential adoptive parents. And when Hyacinth Hawthorne overhears her singing and offers to adopt her, no one is more shocked than Maud herself. She's quite happy to leave the overcrowded, dirty asylum behind and start her new life with the glamorous Hawthorne sisters. But Maud discovers that her new life has some strange twists, like the fact that they all must keep Maud's existence a secret and the fact that her beloved Hyacinth leaves for weeks at a time without even writing to say she misses her new daughter. As time goes on, Maud unravels the truth and finds out why the Hawthorne sisters didn't want to adopt a little girl, they needed to. And Maud must determine whether she has the courage to stand up for what she knows is right.

I couldn't put this book down! Maud's a very likeable and spunky character. It reminded me a tiny bit of Flowers in the Attic, but much less gruesome. Great characters and though it was long, I didn't think that it dragged."

I must admit that I have a weakness for books set in the early 20th century. I love 'em. And I loved this one, too. And I'm not the only one who loved it... Check out rave reviews at bookshelves of doom, Fuse #8, and The Edge of the Forest, PLUS, it won the 2006 Cybil for Middle Grade Fiction! If that isn't enough recommendation, I don't know what to tell you.

(And this had nothing to do with the book, but I wanted to let you know that I'm escaping the Chicagoland winter storms of DOOM and heading down to sunny Florida for the next couple of days... yes, be jealous of me!! So, no posts for the next couple of days.)

Book Review: Phineas Gage

Phineas Gage: A Gruesome but True Story About Brain Science by John Fleischman. (Grades 5 and up.)

I majored in psychology in undergrad. So I forget that not everyone knows about Phineas Gage. Phineas Gage is famous because of an accident. It was 1848 and Gage was working at putting down railroad tracks. The crew often had to blast some rock out of the way to put down the tracks and to do this they put down blasting powder, covered it with sand, put a fuse in it, and tamped it down with a tool called a tamping iron. A tamping iron is an iron pole that's pointy on one end and rounded on the other end. The pointy end is for poking a hole in the blasting powder to place the fuse and the rounded end is for tamping down the sand-covered powder. Well. On this particular day, someone forgot to put the sand over the blasting powder. When Gage went to tamp it down, his rod hit the rock, making a spark that ignited the blasting powder and shot the tamping iron up through Gage's head. It entered his left cheek above the jaw and came out the top of the left side of his head.

The thing about Phineas Gage, though... He didn't die. In fact, he was walking on his own and talking right after the accident happened. It was a medical marvel in this age before doctors know about bacteria or living cells. The other thing about Phineas Gage, though... His personality completely changed after the accident. Before, he was a kind, friendly person. After the accident, he was moody, yelling at people for nothing and unable to make logical decisions.

Students still study Phineas Gage today because his accident indicated that different parts of the brain are responsible for different aspects of human function and personality. Phineas Gage: A Gruesome but True Story About Brain Science explains all this and more in a very readable way. Fleischman includes information about the development of medicine and the 19th century theories about brain function. He tells the story of Gage's accident and then his life after the accident and how doctors studied his case to learn more about the brain.

Along with interesting text, Fleischman includes pictures... photos and diagrams of the brain to help illustrate the medical information he provides. All photos and illustrations include source notes. The book ends with an extensive glossary, a list of resources, and an index.

Hand this one to kids interested in medicine or science or anyone who wants to know how a guy could survive an iron rod shooting through his brain.

And Happy Non-Fiction Monday!!

Book Review: I Heart You, You Haunt Me

I Heart You, You Haunt Me by Lisa Schroeder. (Grades 7-10)

I wandered down to Anderson's Bookshop today and when I saw this novel on the shelves, I had to have it. Ever since I heard the title, I've been wanting to read this one and my library seems to take forever to get new stuff (we're working on it). I just couldn't wait. And I'm glad I didn't.

"'Look around at the friends and the family
who loved Jackson Montgomery.

'You will keep the memory of him alive.'

There is one memory
that floods my brain
every five minutes.

It reminds me
over
and over
and over again,
I'm the reason
my boyfriend
is gone.

Memories might keep him alive.

But they might
kill
me."
(pg 6)

The book starts with a funeral. Ava was so in love with Jackson that she can't really believe that he's gone. The thing is... maybe he's not really gone... While Ava's trying to deal with her grief, her guilt over his death (which she thinks is her fault), her parents' and friends' concern for her... Jackson's coming back to see her... as a ghost. At first, Ava is thrilled that he's not really gone. She loves to feel him near her, she wishes he could say more to her. She wants to spend all her time at home in case he shows up... but eventually she starts wondering if that's really what she wants... if having a boyfriend who doesn't really exist is enough for her... And if it's not, does she has what it takes to let him go?

This book has definite fantasy elements, but it focuses on Ava's struggle to come to terms with her loss. At first, she can't move on, doesn't want to move on. Jackson's ghost is enough to satisfy her because she misses him so much. I think it's a spot-on portrayal of first love and the loss you feel when that first love is over. You'll hold onto anything, any little shard, to keep the illusion going, to believe that your love is not gone.

I loved this novel in verse. Ava's a very real character, dealing with very real feelings. Her friends and family support her, but they don't really know what to do. This is one road that Ava's got to navigate herself. I thought the ending was very satisfying and I was rooting for Ava all the way through.

(As an aside, my cat's name is Ava. Just sayin'.)

The subject matter and verse format are sure to appeal to teens. It's about a relationship, but it's strictly PG - physical intimacy is limited to kissing. And can I just say that it's got the perfect title? I wanted to pick it up based on the title alone, but I think the cover art is also perfect. My one teeny weeny complaint is that I found the scripted font for the poem titles a bit hard to read. The D's looked like W's, so I found myself wondering about the first poem title "What's 'A Way of Black' mean?" (It's actually "A Day of Black", which makes much more sense.)

Lisa Schroeder is a member of the Class of 2k8 and IHYYHM has also been reviewed by Teen Book Review (who's also posted an interview with the author) and The Page Flipper.

Mini Review: Life as We Knew It

Life as We Knew It by Susan Beth Pfeffer. (Grades 6-8)

I am not lying when I say that Life as We Knew It is required reading in my department. Seriously, it's one of the first things we ask anyone new. "Have you read it?!" and if they haven't, we assure them that they must. Not only is Life as We Knew It a thrilling story of survival, it will stick with you for a long, long time.

I believe I originally picked up LAWKI because of its cover. I mean, take a look. That cover sells itself. You shouldn't need to know anything more.

But in case you do want to know something more...

LAWKI is told in diary format by Miranda. When the story begins, Miranda is just another anykid, going to school, coming home... and wondering why everyone is so freaked out by this moon thing that's happening. See, an asteroid is going to hit the moon. And everyone's talking about it. The science teachers are all atwitter and everyone's going to gather outside and watch the asteroid explode against the side of the moon or whatever it's going to do.

But when the asteroid hits, it hits with such force that it pushes the moon closer to the earth. And from there everything changes. Due to the moon's new position, the tides and weather is all out of whack. Tsunamis hit many major cities and eventually the world is thrust into a nuclear winter. There's no electricity, no gas for cars. The temperature drops and Miranda's city is covered in snow. There's no way of knowing if there is anyone else alive, so Miranda and her family must learn to survive on their own...

It's haunting and once you read it, you'll be checking the moon for days. Make sure you have a bag of chocolate chips stashed in the pantry and pick up Life as We Knew It. It's required reading of the best kind.

Need more convincing? Check out reviews at Three Good Rats and bookshelves of doom. Also note that the sequel is due out June 1. (Any ARCs floating around?? I (and my department) would love you forever...)

Mini-Review: Rules

Rules by Cynthia Lord. (Grades 4-7)

I was quite happy when Rules won a Newbery honor. In 2006, when this book was published, I worked as a library assistant at a special library with a collection of disability-related materials. Because of this job, I have a special interest in books about kids with disabilities. Still, I didn't manage to pick up this book until I was invited to a wedding this past August. The wedding was in Indiana, a five-hour car trip away, and I stocked up on plenty of listening material to pass the driving time. Due to circumstances beyond my control (massive flooding due to massive storms in the greater Chicago area), the five-hour car trip stretched into a nine-hour car trip. Thank goodness I had the audiobook of Rules to entertain me during four hours of that awful trip!

Here's what I wrote about the book right after I listened to it:

"This book was completely not like I thought it would be. It's about Katherine, a twelve year old girl trying to make a new friend and deal with her younger brother David who has autism. One day while she's at the clinic where David has occupational therapy, Katherine meets Jason. Jason is another patient at the clinic. Jason has cerebral palsy and he communicates using a book with pictures. Katherine creates some new pictures for him and begins a friendship that becomes very important to them both. Katherine learns a lot about communication and the importance of having words, even if they're negative words."

I knew before I started listening that the book was about a girl with an autistic brother. I did not, however, expect the character of Jason. I loved the friendship that develops between Katherine and Jason. It's not always an easy friendship, but it helps Katherine to grow in ways she didn't expect.

I think this book is an important book. It's a book that portrays a relationship not often portrayed in the middle-grade novel and it portrays it well. On top of all that, I think it has a down-to-earth protagonist that will actually appeal to kids.

As I mentioned, I listened to the audiobook and I thought the narrator was perfect for the book. Don't hesitate to pick this one up for a solid listen or read.