And I mean it. Fellow YS librarians! I know that this is our most stressful time of year: this lead-up to summer reading when all things converge into one mass of school visits, school tours, preparing publicity, lining up programs and getting ready for the crush of all those endless days of patrons, programs, and mayhem….
I had such a great response to my passive programming post, I thought I’d do two complimentary posts for some of our teen passive programming. These programs have a little more staff involvement but you can easily scale them for what works with your staff time and patron interest and response. Both of these ideas…
We just wrapped up our Spring Break. Last year, as you might remember, we experimented with doing a week worth of mostly school-age programming. We had mixed results, but I’m glad we tried it. You can read all about what we did during that week here. But I was going to be out of town…
A few weeks ago there was a longform article in the New York Times about scientific studies being done with the goal of proving that bisexuality exists. I suppose it was interesting enough, reading about the motivations of the researchers, hearing about the history behind studies like this. And yet. And yet at the same time…
The key to unlocking American Girl was understanding that I had to understand the material AND that I should let the material guide me and guide the program. And not just the material as in American Girl but the material as in the specific girl I’d chosen: Rebecca. In reading the Rebecca books (I’m speaking here of…
Does your library host an American Girl program? For many years, our library has run American Girl during the summer. It was as close to a core program as our library has ever had hosted and certainly the closest to a core program for school-age. And yet. I watched as year after year it spiraled out of…
“Give me some genuine emotion. Challenge yourself to be honest instead of merely clever.” I read Wise Young Fool for the first time months and months ago. I have read many and many books since now and then. And yet. And yet Wise Young Fool has stuck with me through all that. And yet Wise Young Fool is…
If your patron base, ages 7-18, is anything like mine they are either on the giant reserve list for one of your library’s copies of The House of Hades or already dying to talk about every single detail with you. If your patron base is like my patron base they are already fiend’ing for the next Rick…
Where to begin? Where even to begin with a book this finely crafted, this breathtakingly realized, this clever, this full of love and aches and metaphors and, yes, magic? (but not the magic you’re thinking of – not the easy kind, not the kind that comes without consequences.) The Real Boy is the story of…
“What kids need and deserve is to feel respected – not just by their classmates, but also by teachers and school leaders who ought to have faith in young people’s ability to read, think, and decide.” – Meg Medina Yesterday, I wrote a short review of Meg Medina’s Yaqui Delgado Wants to Kick Your Ass…
