WE DID IT. We survived summer! Ah summer! The most exciting and exhausting time in a public youth services librarian’s life. Even when you’re pulling your hair out, every day has a moment or two that reminds you why you’re doing this whole thing. This summer I decided I wanted to make some BIG and…
Do you love Emery Lord? If you’ve read her first two books: Open Road Summer and The Start of Me & You then you’ll know the answer is obviously YES. Her books are the exquisite and painful and lovely contemporary stories that are about romance, friendship, healing, and grief. Her work reminds me of early Sarah Dessen –…
What a lovely marvel this book is. This is a picture book biography of John Roy Lynch, who was freed from slavery at 16 and within ten years was elected to the United States Congress. The book doesn’t try to cover Lynch’s entire life (though there’s great back matter including a timeline, suggestions for further…
I have many posts in the works that I promise to get posted in May! BUT I wanted to make sure I got something posted for April so I could keep my streak of posting going. In the spirit of my December post of BOOKS I’M LOOKING FORWARD TO I thought a fun and quick…
I was brainstorming for summer reading when I came up with this program. A lot of the inspiration came from What Color is My World? The Lost History of African-American Inventors by Kareem Abdul Jabbar and Raymond Obstefeld. This book traces the history of several African American inventors who are not widely known. As I was thinking…
One of our easiest and most useful initiatives is our Celebrate A Grade initiative. We’ve run it for the past three school years and it has lots of applications. Every month celebrates a specific grade. We begin in October with kindergarten. When kids in each grade come up to the desk and tell us their teacher…
It all started with Little Melba! Little Melba and Her Big Trombone was one of my favorite books of 2014! This swinging picture book biography (winner of a Coretta Scott King Illustrator Honor for Frank Morrison, yay!) tells the story of Melba Liston, a girl in the 1930s who was told little girls couldn’t play…
Welcome to Thrive Thursday for February the month of love. It’s a perfect month for me to host, because I LOVE THIS ROUND-UP and I love this community! There’s TONS of great content this month, so let’s get going! Mallory has a BRAND-NEW blog (aw yes new bloggers, welcome and keep writing!) and she wrote this…
Last January, I first heard about libraries hosting Noon Year’s Eve parties for kids on New Year’s Eve, celebrating the new year at NOON instead of midnight. My only regret was that I was going to have to wait a whole year to have the event at my library. I like to have at least…
I honestly can’t think of anyone in YA who does what Marcus Sedgwick does. Perhaps this is why I am so entranced by everything he’s ever written. Sedgwick won the Printz Award last year (that is the highest honor in young adult literature) for Midwinterblood, which remains one of the most atmospheric and overwhelming YA books…
