Since libraries are often seen as the heart of the community, offering intergenerational programming can only help to reflect that image. The EPA lists some of the Benefits of Intergenerational Programs, with many being relevant to libraries. Serving multiple needs, collaborating with local organizations, and building social skills for both children and seniors, are among the listed benefits.

One of the first intergenerational programs we hosted at the library was Grandparents’ Storytime. Deciding to make travel easier for seniors we contacted the local Senior Center to see if they were willing to host. Each month the librarians would recruit a few families to visit the Senior Center for a preschool storytime. The center would gather a few regulars to read aloud to the kids, and the librarians would share rhymes and songs to supplement. Inevitably there was always time remaining for all the adults and children to share stories and the occasional joke.

Each year during the One Book, One Community series, the children’s librarians have collaborated with the adult book group to hold a book discussion inviting both age groups. Some years have produced few kid participants, but we have continued to offer the program annually, fully believing in its importance. This year we rebranded the event as a Family Book Discussion and attendance skyrocketed.

Having other staff members who are passionate about intergenerational programming definitely helps in advocating to your administration. The Head of Adult Programming at our library has offered a technology class called Juniors Helping Seniors, where tech-savvy students assist seniors with new technologies. This month she will launch a series called Science Café where adults and kids will build quadcopters and learn the common misconceptions regarding UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles).

As a librarian offering opportunities for kids and adults to collaborate gives each population a chance to learn from one another. Whether it’s tangible life skills, or the value of compassion and community, the library can be the perfect space to grow these relationships.

Here are a few resources for inspiration:

Generations United

Allegheny County Library Association

Penn State Intergenerational Programs

Claire Moore is the Assistant Head of Children’s Services at Darien Library in Darien, CT. Claire can be reached at cmoore@darienlibrary.org.

Children love and can understand poetry’s ability to inspire deep emotions. They enjoy reading or listening to their favorite poems again and again, and particularly when they are being praised for memorizing the words. If you want to motivate your child to get more involved with poetry or even start writing, you should read him or her poems before bedtime and also start writing by yourself, inviting your child to join – there’s no better example for our kids than the example we can give them every day.

Help your child get familiar with the different elements of poems and styles of writing because children are often confused and do not know where to start in writing their first piece. Explain to them the varieties of poetry, help them understand the meaning of words and sentences, their structure, rhymes and vocabulary. Your child will not only enjoy discovering this new limitless world of expression, but he or she will also have fun sharing their creations with other friends and peers.

Here are few suggestions on how to encourage your child to get involved in poetry and start writing poems by him/herself:

·         Since parents are the ones that should set the best example for their children, you can recommend some of your favorite books of poetry and read them aloud together with your child. After reading each poem you both can discuss where the lines end, how the rhythm is created, or how these affect the meaning of the poem or its particular appearance.

·         If there’s a song you and your child both like, you can sing it and write down the lyrics, and then leave your child to write a new poem that can be sung to the same melody while using the structure of the original lyrics as a guide.

·         You can take a walk with your child and on the way you can stop at different places, like the park, or the street corner. Ask your child to describe what he or she sees in a sentence or two, and write down those lines. Later when you get back home, your kid can sit and revise these sentences and maybe turn them into a poem.

·         Introduce your child to the acrostic poem and show him or her how to write one with the lines spelling their own name, or the names of other family members, friends and pets. Later you can also explore other types of poems like haiku, or ‘found’ poems, diamante, etc.

·         Make poetry fun for your child. When on a trip ask your kid to make a series of 5 to 10 pictures and then write a poem including a few words for each photo. Import the images into appropriate multimedia editing software and enhance the slideshow poem with some effects, or maybe add your child’s favorite song. You’ll both enjoy the end result and it will certainly motivate your child to write more and better next time.

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Our guest blogger today is Alex Petryck. Alex is a professional freelance writer who loves to encourage students and help them with their writing. Follow him on twitter @AlexPetryck.

Please note that as a guest post, the views expressed here do not represent the official position of ALA or ALSC.

If you’d like to write a guest post for the ALSC Blog, please contact Mary Voors, ALSC Blog manager, at alscblog@gmail.com.

The phrase “screen time” is not something we should be using anymore, because it’s a misnomer. What most people mean when they talk about the evils of “screen time” is passive media: television. Reading an ebook, videoconferencing with grandma and grandpa, or showing a child a picture that you’ve just taken of them is NOT the mind-numbing, passive time-waster that concerns many parents, educators, researchers and librarians. The fact that something is on a screen does not make it inherently bad, and the emphasis on time is also a red herring. If a child is thoroughly engaged in editing his or her own video, learning a programming language, videoconferencing with a pen pal, or reading/writing/designing an ebook, are you really going to say:

Ok kid! That’s it! You’ve had your *insert random time limit here*! Stop everything you’re doing and come *do some other thing that will require a re-focusing of attention and may not be nearly as engaging*!?

What matters most is the content, and then the context in which it is being used; that’s always been the case, and a change in format shouldn’t have the kind of power to shake the core principles of our profession (i.e. we fight censorship, we don’t engage in it). Blanket statements about the use of “screens” are simplistic and not very useful to anyone. Not all screens are created equal, and we have to stop knee-jerk reactions that lump all sorts of societal and pedagogical concerns into a single assumption; that if the use of a screen is permitted, it’s going to eclipse everything else we do in our libraries.

“Screen time” is often blamed for all sorts of things: ADHD, obesity, Autism, social disorders, parental neglect, and others. I’ve also heard concerns that violence, commercialism and free access to the internet are all dangerous for children, thus access to screens should be strictly limited. I’ve heard people say that there are pedophiles on Facebook, so we shouldn’t be using apps in storytime. (I’m serious! I’ve heard this more than once!) The accusations against “screen time” go on and on, so please; let’s just stop using the phrase “screen time.”

Unless of course, you’re talking about the book.

We do need a new set of vocabulary to refer to these new information packages. I met Warren Buckleitner at Dust or Magic this past weekend and he uses the term “narrative-driven interactive media” to refer to book-like things that exist digitally and have some kind of interactive element. That’s a librarian-worthy conversation that should continue. Digital immigrants like us need to re-examine our assumptions about what the word “literacy” means, and how our libraries need to support the development of early literacy skills for a new generation of people (digital natives) who require a vastly different skill set than the ones we needed.

Check out Chip Donohue’s recent ALSC webinar, Young Children & Media: Libraries in the Multi-Touch, Multi-Screen World and Warren Buckleitner’s Three Words for Digital-Age Parents: Access, Balance and Support for more thoughts on this topic.

And please; let’s have no more talk of “screen time.”

Such would be the ignoble fate of one particular book in my library were it not for the fact that someone whose judgement I trusted implicitly once gave it to me as a birthday present. I was not enthused about the cover either – it is very staid and brown. But oh! The story inside its pages is perfection.

In case you haven’t read the title of this post, the book in question is Michelle Magorian’s 1982 masterpiece Good Night, Mr. Tom. It won the IRA Children’s Book Award the year it was released, and no less than The New Yorker called it “An engrossing and poignant story.” Good Night, Mr. Tom tells the story of William Beech, a young boy evacuated to the country with thousands of other children at the start of World War II. Taken in by a widower named Thomas Oakley who hates everything about being alive, William is initially terrified of his new guardian. Mr. Tom eventually realizes that William has arrived from an extremely abusive home – he is covered in welts and bruises, and his religious mother has packed the belt she uses to beat him should he misbehave. Mr. Tom and William must save each other as war rages all around them.

This is not a light-hearted story. The author does not shy away from descriptions of abuse, nor does she spare details when describing the horrors of the Blitz, which effect more than one character in the novel. However, there is a sweetness and a goodness to this story which balances out its more heartbreaking aspects. Its sense of place is phenomenal. You come to love the characters in the small village, and as the book lasts for most of the war, you also begin admiring their courage and every day heroics.

I was recently talking about this book to one of my coworkers. She looked up the title on Wikipedia and informed me that it’s been adapted four times! It has been a musical (which I must admit I cannot possibly imagine) twice, a play once, and in 1998 it was a TV movie. I started hunting and immediately discovered that the entire movie is available on youtube.

The film is well-acted and well scripted, but since it’s trying to condense so much plot into 90+ minutes, things get left behind. I particularly wished for more scenes of the growing friendship between William, terrified about going to hell, and the Jewish evacuee Zach. Their friendship forms an important layer of the story, and I missed it in the film. However, Mr. Tom is just as I imagined he would be. Gruff and with an accent that can be hard to understand (an accent that is replicated in the text), John Thaw makes a perfect Mr. Tom.

Good Night, Mr. Tom is a beautiful work of historical fiction, with a well-made film to go along with it. I cannot recommend them highly enough.

Brainstorming with coworker and fellow ALSC blogger Elisabeth Gattullo, we began sketching out ideas for the non-fiction section about a year ago. Our goal was to address a problem our patrons had been complaining about forever: how to easily find non-fiction books  for elementary-aged children. We have recognized for quite some time that the traditional Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) was not child-friendly. And frankly, not too parent-friendly, either. We researched how other libraries had reorganized their non-fiction for children, visited a few wonderful libraries and spoke to some truly passionate, innovative librarians who had ditched Dewey. I was incredibly inspired by the librarians at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in Manhattan who developed a Dewey-alternative system called Metis.

Although we seriously considered ditching Dewey completely, we ultimately decided on a hybrid model. We wanted to make our collection accessible and inviting for children and their grown-ups. We wanted our patrons to enjoy browsing non-fiction books in the same way they love browsing through fiction. We also knew that we needed to retain strong findability for users searching for a specific subject or title. This hybrid classification system enables us to refine and adapt DDC in ways that make sense for elementary-aged children. We can group like subjects together (Yes! Animals and pets CAN be shelved side by side!) and address Dewey’s antiquated tendencies to be Euro-centric and misogynistic. We opted to keep the DDC shelf addresses, thereby preserving the one thing Dewey does right: locating specific items in a physical location nearby similar items. For our community of library users, this hybrid compromise was the right decision.

We settled on nine distinct sections:

• Animals
• Create
• Facts
• Fun
• Self
• Sports
• STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math)
• Then & Now
• Traditions

(There are also sections for Kids Poetry and Kids Bios, which had previously been separate collections.)

Infamous nuclear disasters: History (Then & Now) or Science (STEM)? These are the types of questions we ask for each title.

Each section is colored-coded; a small matte color label adorns each spine at the base, clearly identifying its designation. Each of the above sections has the location built into its call number. For example, the call number for the book Penguins by Lynn M. Stone is Kids Animals 598.47 Stone. The “Kids” prefix indicates the general area in the Children’s Library. “Animals” further specifies the section within the Kids collections. The DDC number gives it a precise shelf location. All of this is further aided by the color-coding on the spine labels and signage which enable better findability and browsability.

Since we will be open to the public and the collection will be actively used during this project, we had to plan carefully for the retro-fitting and conversion process. We purposefully chose to do the majority of the work during June and July, when our non-fiction circulation is typically at its lowest. This will enable us to physically retro-fit and scan the vast majority of the books in our collection. We are going through each shelf systematically, handling each and every title and making a decision about which of the nine sections it should live. Once that decision is made (for tough cases we put it to a quick committee vote) we apply the new labels and then scan the barcode into the appropriate record set in our ILS (we use Polaris.) After that each book is placed back on the shelf in traditional DDC order. Once the entire collection is labeled and scanned, we will move the books into their new color-coded groupings.

By the start of the new school year, our more friendly, child-centric non-fiction collection will be complete. We anticipate a strong increase in circulation and general use. Ultimately, we anticipate seeing happy children browsing and searching in the stacks, expanding their knowledge and discovering wonderful new titles.

Feel free to pose questions in the comments section below- this is a work-in-progress and we are happy to share our successes as well as our failures! Learn & grow!

So you’ve landed your dream job—congratulations! It won’t be long before you discover that there will be dozens of projects and materials vying for your funds. Here’s a handy tip sheet that may help you get started:

1.      Set your priorities—and make sure to consider the administration’s priorities for the department as well.

2.      You should have separate budgets for collection development and programming.

3.      Depending on your organization’s structure, supplies, equipment, and continuing education/travel may or may not be included in your budget. Ask whether you have a copying and printing budget.

4.      Once you know what your budget encompasses, you can start planning.

a.       What kinds of programs does your department offer or do you want to offer? Do you have materials (such as flannel boards, a CD player, etc.) for use in those programs?

b.      What do you need for your summer reading program? Does your state participate in the Collaborative Summer Library Program? If so, you can purchase professional full-color materials that will please your patrons and save you time and money.

5.      Keep track of everything you order/spend. A spreadsheet is easily created and can be as basic or detailed as desired. I suggest that you include the following:

a.       Date ordered

b.      Purchase order number

c.       Supplier name

d.      Estimated amount

e.       Invoice number

f.        Actual total cost

g.       Notes (this can include type of item ordered, number of items ordered, etc.)

The above information will enable you to track purchases and reference delivery/non-delivery

6.      For a collection development budget, you may want a separate spreadsheet that is divided into separate pages for each area of the collection. For example, your 2013 collection development spreadsheet might have separate pages for chapter books, picture books, audio books, DVDs, music CDs, ebooks, nonfiction by Dewey, games, and magazines. Each of those pages could then have columns set up as described above.

a.       Are your materials processed in-house? If not, ask what the unit cost for processing is, and include that on your spreadsheet pages, either as a separate column or added into the estimated amount.

b.      Will you need to devote some of your budget to replacement parts (primarily for audio books, especially read-along picture books)? Decide whether that is a separate budget item or comes out of the specific collection area.

c.       If you’ve never ordered materials before, inquire about whether your library purchases from specific vendors, such as Baker & Taylor or Ingram Book Company. They may also purchase directly from publishers or have a purchasing agreement with Amazon. If so, inquire about discounts and shipping costs; these will affect your expenditures.

d.      Check into whether your library belongs to a state or local cooperative that may afford you group pricing and/or discounts.

7.      Review your predecessor’s budget records. Do they make sense to you? Is there anything missing? You may not need to start from scratch but instead tweak the structure accordingly.

8.      Learn all that you can from your library’s financial manager/CFO. The CFO can provide you with their expectations, i.e., what they need from you for their records, and advice about what purchases and expenses belong in your budget.

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Our guest blogger today is Kate Capps, who wrote this piece as a member of the Managing Children’s Services Committee. Kate is a Children’s Librarian & School Liaison at the Olathe Indian Creek Branch Library in Olathe, Kansas.

If you’d like to write a guest post for the ALSC Blog, please contact Mary Voors, ALSC Blog manager, at alscblog@gmail.com.

First, we talked about the science. I had a bunch of the library’s books involving parachutes on display, and I opened the program by asking the children what they knew about parachutes. I filled in their concept knowledge with a few facts from the library resources, then I showed a terrific short video on the science of parachutes from the Boston Museum of Science. After the video, the children and I debriefed about what they had seen and learned and what they could apply to the hands-on portion of our program.

Next came the hands-on STEM work. I had set out a variety of basic materials for the children to experiment with as they created their own parachutes:

• trash bags and 11″x17″ pieces of paper for the canopy
• different weights of yarn for the lines
• scissors and hole punches for construction
• tape for connecting pieces
• paper clips for the basic bottom load weight for the parachute
• magnets for optional additional load weight
• markers in case anyone felt like decorating their paper chutes

With all of the supplies up for grabs, the kids got to work building their parachutes. I walked from table to table asking questions about their engineering decisions: what size and shape canopy? how many lines, and where are they connected to the canopy? should the canopy have a vent, and if so, how big and what shape? The room was pretty evenly split, with half the children working diligently on a single chute while the other half made a few prototypes each. When all was said and done, the children spent about 25 minutes building their chutes. Note: Depending on the age of your participants and the number of accompanying caregivers, you might budget more time for children who may need assistance.

We ended by testing our parachutes. I had set up a ladder behind the program room partition before the children arrived, and when it came time to test our parachutes, I dropped them from the top of the ladder. We all observed how the parachutes worked when dropped with just a paper clip for the load, then again with the addition of a heavier magnet. I was pleased to hear the children hypothesizing about why one shape or size seemed to be more consistent than another and how a vent in the canopy meant a straighter descent. I heard a number of kids say they would make modifications and drop their chutes from the top of the stairs at home. Note: Turns out that parachutes can get snagged on watches, so you may want to take yours off before testing the chutes.

Kids checked out books on parachutes and military paratroopers after the program. They also got to take home their parachutes, which meant ample possibilities for extending the STEM learning outside of the program and the library. That’s always a goal I have for my STEM programs for any age: for children to engage in the topic in the library, but to also maintain an interest in the topic and experiment with it afterward. I would count myself successful with this program.

Have you ever made and/or dropped parachutes with children in your library? Sound off in the comments. I’ll be particularly jealous if you have a multi-story building and are able to drop parachutes from a higher floor!

I look for meaningful books to recommend to parents and caregivers that incorporate the practices into family activities.  Recently published titles, written by experienced educators and designers, offer a wide variety of collaborative activities and ideas to keep everyone learning and having fun throughout the childhood years.  Suggesting titles such as my favorites below gives our patrons ideas to implement at home, and deepens their understanding of our early literacy messages.

In addition to being rich resources for patrons, these books are wonderful titles for us to consult as we create literacy-based, interactive family events and programs for our libraries.  Further, they provide early literacy talking points with examples of how to bring talking, singing, reading, writing, and playing into our patrons’ daily lives with children.

To get the most from these books, be sure to visit the author’s websites and blogs, follow them on Pinterest, YouTube or Facebook, subscribe to their blog posts, and continue to benefit your library customers through their inspiration!

Show Me a Story: 40 Craft Projects and Activities to Spark Children’s Storytelling by Emily K. Neuburger North Adams, MA: Storey Pub., 2012

Neuburger is a teacher, freelance children’s craft designer and blogger at red bird crafts [art + story] and the Family Fun magazine blog, Everyday Fun.  In her book, she describes a wide variety of activities to develop children’s storytelling skills that everyone can enjoy throughout the grade school years. Included with her descriptions and uses for each project are engaging color photographs of the final products, and multiple suggestions for how to involve children individually and in groups.  I want to try her cut and tell storytelling and story stone ideas with our library families and caregivers!

Side by Side: 20 Collaborative Projects for Crafting with Your Kids by Tsia Carson with photographs by Meredith Heuer. Boston, MA: Roost, 2012

Tsia Carson teaches design at Yale University and Rhode Island School of Design, and is the founder and editor-in-chief of SuperNaturale, an alternative crafts website.  Her book offers highly imaginative projects such as a Giant Newspaper Snowflake, Child Drawing Embroidery, and a Living Willow Teepee that would be a year-round setting for early literacy activities planted right outside your Children’s Department.  She provides detailed materials lists and directions, and Heuer’s photographs capture the projects beautifully.

The Write Start: A Guide to Nurturing Writing at Every Stage, from Scribbling to Forming Letters and Writing Stories by Jennifer Hallissy. Boston, MA: Trumpeter Books, 2010

Hallissy is a pediatric occupational therapist with over eleven years of experience and a private practice in Port Washington, N.Y., a contributing writer for FamilyFun Magazine magazine, and blogger about children’s writing development at {the write start}.  Her book is an informative resource for parents, caregivers, and library Children’s Departments because, in addition to the 52 writing activities it contains, she discusses how writing supports children’s overall neurological development, reading and learning skills, and ultimate professional and personal success.  This is my go-to resource for talking about the importance of encouraging children to write, beginning with their first scribbles at about 1-year-old.

Playful Learning: Develop Your Child’s Sense of Joy and Wonder by Mariah Bruehl. Boston, MA: Trumpeter Books, 2011

Bruehl is a classroom teacher, curriculum developer, and founder of the award-winning website, Playful Learning  where she offers an abundance of online classes for families at the Playful Learning Ecademy.  The combination of these resources from Bruehl will keep you up at night exploring her ideas for what to do next with your youngest library patrons.  I value her book in my work because she describes the developmental stages of learning to read for children ages three to eight, and her many suggested activities support each stage, as well as children’s writing, math, science, and social skills. She suggests specific age appropriate children’s books to inspire each activity, as well as enriching websites to extend the learning and fun.  Learn how to make twig or clothbound books here, and create a library program!

What are your favorite resources to inspire daily early literacy moments for your patrons?

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Our guest blogger today is Laura Baldassari-Hackstaff.  Laura has her Master’s in Library and Information Science from the University of Denver, and is a Youth Librarian at Douglas County Libraries in Colorado.

Please note that as a guest post, the views expressed here do not represent the official position of ALA or ALSC.

If you’d like to write a guest post for the ALSC Blog, please contact Mary Voors, ALSC Blog manager, at alscblog@gmail.com.

The 2014 ALA Annual Conference is scheduled for June 26 – July 1, 2014 in Las Vegas, Nev., and the 2014 ALSC National Institute is scheduled for September 18 – 20, 2014 in Oakland, Calif. The same proposal form is being used for both conferences, but in the application you are able to select which conference for which you would like to apply. Be part of these exciting professional development opportunities by submitting your program today!

I have been pondering a change in the organization of the book collections at my library since attending the I Want A Truck Book! session at ALA Annual last year and reading Tali Balas Kaplan’s Done with Dewey blog post. There is a lot of discussion going on about the end of Dewey and there are many people who believe it is just a matter of time. Are we holding onto something that doesn’t make sense or are we giving up on a system that has worked and can continue to work?

After visiting the School of Engineering and Arts I am troubled by the options. There are so many ways that libraries are organizing collections, which one is the best for my community? Is it one of the systems I have heard or read about or a system which has not yet been invented? Which brings me to the next question: If we all dump Dewey for different systems of organization, how will kids move from one library to the next and easily find what they need? For that matter, will kids and parents be frustrated by two different systems within the same building?

There are many more questions than answers for me at this point, but I am encouraged by the success of my colleagues. Where are you with DDC?