Every Child Ready to Read-Print Motivation

Print Motivation is perhaps the easiest and ( sometimes challenging) skill of Every Child Ready to Read. It is simply about a child's interest and enjoyment of books. Children who enjoy books at an early age will want to read more.  Children who see Mom or Dad enjoying a book will want to read more. Families who make frequent, enjoyable trips to the library will motivate the child to read more.


Some tips for print motivation:

• Read often and make it enjoyable.
• Read when you and your child are in a good mood, so the experience is a positive one.  Stop reading if they tire or lose interest.
• Let your child see you enjoying a book

We do have list of recommended books for print motivation at our website,  here are a few of my favorite books:

• There are Cats in this Book -Viviane Schwarz
• BowWow Bugs a Bug-  Mark Newgarden
• I Love You Through and Through- Bernadette Rossetti-Shustak
• Where Does Thursday Go?-Janeen Brian

 

Review-Tony Baloney-Pam Munoz Ryan

Poor Tony Baloney! The middle child ( and only boy) of a macaroni penguin family, he has a big bossy sister and twin sisters that get into everything. One day, he's tires of pretending to be the  Big Sister's cat and becomes very exasperated ( yes this big word is this book) by the baby sisters that he acts out. Can a time-out eventually lead to an apology and him being  the " Boss of the World"? Can Parmesan cheese and fish tacos make everything better?

The illustrations are bright and vibrant, and I think this would a great book for practicing the Every Child Ready to Read skill of vocab  because it introduces words one might not normally find in preschool picture books, like "exasperated" and " Parmesan cheese".  It also has a very cute ending.

Tony Baloney-Pam Munoz Ryan
Age Range: 3 and up
Lexile: 880
***** ( 5 stars)

Upcoming programs in May

Here are some programs that will happening next month in the Children's Dept at the Central Library. Please visit Library Events for information and register.

Story Time for 2 and 3 yr Olds- Monday, May 2  at 10 am- Audience: 2 and 3 year olds and caregivers.

Mother Goose on the Loose-Tuesday, May 3  at 10 am-Audience: Infants 6-23 Months and caregiver.


Story Time for 4 and 5 yr Olds- Tuesday May 10 at 10 am and 2 pm- Audience: 4 and 5 year olds.

Gaming Night- Wednesday May 11 at 6 pm- Audience: 12 to 17 years old.

Arabian Night- Tueday May 17 at 4 pm- Audience: K to 5th grade


Summer Volunteers Sign up- Tuesday May 24 at 3:30 to 5 pm and Thursday May 26 at 6-7:30 pm- Audience: 11 years old ( must have completed 4th grade) and up. Please sign up for either one of our two sessions if interested to help with our summer reading program.

Coming this Summer- One World, Many Stories ( June- July 2011)!!!!

See you soon!!!

April brings... Bats!!!

Welcome to the second week of April, where it's showers bring May flowers. It also brings baseballs, bunnies ( as in Easter), and ... bats. Yes, this Sunday, April 17th is Bat Appreciation Day, when nature's nocturnal ( meaning they stay up all night and sleep all day) creatures wake from their winter slumber ( also known as hibernation).

Here are a few interesting facts I found at Kidzone: Bats (see more at 
http://www.kidzone.ws/animals/bats/facts.htm ):

• Bats use their wings for more than just flying.  They can wrap their wings around insects or fruit to hold it while eating.
• Bats feed at night and spend the day sleeping caves or trees. The place where they sleep is called a roost, and they sleep in large groups.
  
• Bats have one baby, or "pup" at a time. 

Some books on bats:

Juvenile Literature ( Non-fiction)- Most are listed under the call number 599.4.

Juvenile Fiction- We have  about 40 story books featuring bats, including:

• Bat Love the Night-Nicola Davis
• Stellaluna- Janell Cannon

To those wondering if there is a Bat Appreciation Month, it's appropriately in October. Still, come check out our display at the entrance of the Children's Dept, along with a free bookmark.

Every Child Ready to Read-Narrative Skills

Narrative Skills is the ability to describe events and tell stories. Being able to talk about what happens in a story helps a child understand what they read. Every book has a story, even wordless picture books "tell" a story by pictures.  From stories, we learn that an action or event has a start, a middle, and an ending. We learn that actions can also repeat ( this can found it a lot of stories or songs that have sequences, such as " There was an Old Lady who Swallowed a Spider").

Some tips for practicing Narrative Skills at home:

• Ask your child about their day, encourage then to add detail to their story.
• Read wordless picture books and have your child tell the story.
• Act out the story with dolls or puppets

Some books that are good for Narrative Skills ( see more at  http://www.lcplin.org/children/ecrr-narrative.htm):

 Good Night, Gorilla- Peggy Rathmann
  There was An Old Lady who Swallowed a Bat- Lucille Colandro
   First the Egg- Laura Seeger
   The Snowman- Raymond Briggs

Review-Hunger Games-Suzanne Collins

 So I was very hesitant  about reading the first book of Suzanne Collins's The Hunger Games series because I'm not really a huge science fiction fan. But it has sort of become the Harry Potter of this century and with  the film adaptation of the book coming to the big screen next spring, I decided to give it a try.

The Hunger Games is  set the future, in a place called Panem ( one of the many cool names in this book), consisting of a gleaming city known as the Capitol and twelve pleasant-like districts. ( Actually there was a district 13, but it was wiped out during an uprising against the Capitol.) To keep  the districts in line ( and as punishment for this uprising), the Capitol selects one boy and one girl from each district to compete in the Hunger Games, a life-or-death competition broadcast for all to see. When Katniss Everdeen  (see the names are getting cooler) hears her little sister's name selected, she volunteers to take her place. Once in the Games, Katniss learns she will have to do more than outlive her competitors ( and possibly falling in love with Peeta
Mellark, her co-tribute from distract 12 who's had a crush on her since age 5) to survive the Games.

Two words: Awesome.  It's a page turner with a lot of adventure, romance, humor, sadness, and violence ( and pretty vivid violence, so not really for the squeamish). Collins creates a world that is wonderful and wicked at the same, full of strong characters with great names. I really love that the story is told from Katniss, who is both strong and girly from beginning to end. I also love Haymitch Abernathy ( his name may be better than Kat), former Hunger Games victor of long ago and Katniss and Peeta's wise but drunken mentor. Foolish and arrogant, he knows the secrets of surviving the Games, plus adds humor to this gruesome and page- turning adventure.  And now that I have finished book 1, I so plan to request the other two books in the series as soon as I can.

Hunger Games-Suzanne Collins ( we have it  in children's and young adult)
Ages 14 and up
Lexile: 810
***** ( 5 stars)

I mentioned at the beginning of this post  that a film version of this book will be coming out next spring. Since the movie's announcement, fans have created their own wish list of the cast ( and some have even created music videos and posted on Youtube. The choices for Haymitch are very interesting, including big franchise actors.) The main three characters have already been cast. Jennifer Lawrence of Winter's Bone will be Katniss, and yesterday, it was announced that Josh Hutcherson of Journey of the Center of the Earth will be Peeta, Katniss's love interest and fellow contender, and Liam Hemsworth of The Last Song  will be  Gale, Katniss's best friend. Being a budding fan of the series, I'm going to throw in my dream choices for some of the other characters ( Note- these are my choices, not who will be actually in the movie) .

Effie - the chaperone of district 12, she's perky but a strict cookie with pink hair. Sounds a bit like Elle Woods of Legally Blonde, so the best choice would be Reese Witherspoon ( and I think she has the coloring for pink hair).

Haymitch-. In picturing Haymitch as a ruggedly handsome space cowboy, Nathan Fillion of the sci-fi western Firefly  came to mind.  But, thinking that a big name might be needed  in some form( and  perhaps someone who's been in kid movies but  would not overshadowed the main young actors), Jack Black would be perfect because Haymitch is similar to the character he played  in the King Kong remake of 2005.

Every Child Read to Read-Vocabulary

Vocabulary is knowing the names of things. This is a important pre-reading skill because learning the more words a child hears, the more they will able to understand what they are reading.  In reading, they will learn names of animals, things around the house, ways of moving, and so on.

Some tips for practicing vocabulary at home-

• Talk to your child about what is going on around you. Talk about how things work, feelings and ideas. Listen when your child talks to you. 
• Read to your child every day. Picture books are a good place to start ( they introduce a lot of " rare" words not used in every day conversation). Nonfiction books are good too, as way expanding a child's interest.

Here are some recommended books that are good for this skill ( please see  
http://www.lcplin.org/children/ecrr-vocab.htm )

Fancy Nancy- Jane O'Connor
Wiggle- Doreen Cronin
Edward the Emu- Sheena Knowles
Dinosnores- Kelly DiPucchio

Upcoming programs of April

Here are some programs that will will happening next month in the Children's Dept at the Central Library. Please visit  "Library Events"  for more information and to register.

Storytime for 2 and 3 Year Olds- Monday, April 4 and April 18, 10 am-  Audience: 2 and 3 year olds and caregivers.

Mother Goose on the Loose- Tuesday, April 5 and April 19, 10 am- Audience: Infants 6-23 Months and caregiver.

Storytime for 4 and 5 Year Olds-Tuesday April 12 and April 26 at 10 am or 2 pm- Audience: 4 and 5 year old and caregiver

Gaming Night- Wednesday, April 20 at 6 pm- Audience: 12- 17 years old.

Child Safety- Wednesday, April 6 at 6: 30 pm- Audience: All ages

GROSS!- Thursday, April 21at 4 pm- Audience: School age, grades K-5th

Hope to see you soon!!!

Rest in Peace Little Eisbarbaby

 

So yesterday, while reading an article on Hunger Games's star Jennifer Lawrence, I saw one of the side headlines was that Knut the polar bear had died (  see http://www.people.com/people/article/0,,20475069,00.html  for more information).  To honor the memory of German's  beloved Eisbarbaby  ( German for " polar bear cub"), I felt like mentioning a book I used about two year ago for a program on the animals of the North and South Poles.


 Knut: How One Little Bear Captivated the World introduces to the beginning of Knut. Born Dec 5, 2006 at Zoo Berlin, he and an unnamed twin were raised by  zoo keeper Thomas Dorflein ( October 13, 1963 –  September 22,2008) after being abandon by their mother.  Sadly, the twin died a few day later due to an infection, so Thomas took to raise the bear that the world would know as "Knut" ( and Thomas selected that name thirty-two days after his birth because he felt the bear fit that name).

Written by Craig Hatkoff and his daughters Juliana and Isabella ( who wrote the books about Owen the hippo and Mzee the tortoise), Knut features lovable pictures of the cub and "dad", from exchaging a kiss to  learning to swim, along with facts about polars bears, prounuciation of German words and terms,  and how to keep their environment safe from global warming.  If you love animals, especially polar bears, you'll love this
 book.


Knut: How One Little Bear Captivated the World
Ages: 6 and up
Lexile: 950
***** ( 5 stars)

 On a personal note, when I read parts of this book for a program on animals of the North and South Poles ( and a few school visits for the library's Read-a-thon program), the kids love it. They even thought he was still cute when I showed them what he looked like as a grown bear.  RIP Knut.

Every Child Ready to Read: Phonological Awareness

At the programs we librarians do for the babies, toddlers, and preschoolers, we try to focus on one of the six pre-literacy  skills of Every Child to Read. Pre-literacy is what children know about reading and writing before they actually can read and write. For next Monday's 2- and 3-year old program, we will be focusing on Phonological Awareness, which is the ability to hear and play with the sounds of smaller words to sound out the words on the page. Obviously, the easiest  way is through rhyming. Rhymes, particulary nursery rhymes and songs present sounds or syllable in each word.

Two Little Blackbirds

Two little blackbirds

Sitting on a hill

One named Jack and one named Jill

Fly away Jack. Fly away Jill

Come back Jack. Come back Jill.

Notice the "ill" in " hill" and " Jill" have the same sound.

Another place children learn about sounding out words in the syllables in their name. In our infant program, we do a game called " Rum-Tum-Tum" where we ask the children to tap out their name on the drum. This is easy to do at home by using an empty can ( such as a Quacker Oats can) and the following rhyme:

Rum-Tum Tum

This is my drum

Rum Tum Tum

This is my drum

My name is ( tap out name)

What your's? ( child taps out name.)

Again, you could also just play with the sounds in your child's name or find words that have the same rhyming pattern.

Here are  some recommended books ( for more information, visit http://www.lcplin.org/children/ecrr-Phono.htm)

• Llama Llama Mad at Mama  -Anna  Dewdney
•  Ten in the Den- John Bulter
• Bless this Mouse-Dianna Hutts Aston
• Goodnight Moon- Margaret W. Brown