Category: storytime
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The Freedom to Be Totally Ignorant
“I’m not afraid anymore so go for it.” — Jane Elliot The Oprah episode above aired in 1992. Jane Elliott first did her blue eyes/brown eyes experiment the day after MLK was assassinated. (Note, that transcript contains offensive racial terms.) (If you’re not familiar, in brief, Jane did a lesson in prejudice with her class…
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Hi, Miss Julie’s Loves of Librarianship
Libraries are for everyone Everyone benefits from libraries, whether they use them or not Make every interaction delightful, wherever it happens A degree does not a librarian make Every library its community, and every community its library Libraries are for everyone Libraries are for everyone in your community, whether they are homeless, trans, on the spectrum,…
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Where Do The Teens Go?
Where do the teens go? (saxophone solo) Where do the teens go? I’ve long had a belief that service and programs in the public library, especially Youth Services (if you define Youth Services as 0-18), is a conveyor belt of sorts. We start with children in lapsit storytime, and our ultimate goal should be to create…
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The Librarian Dating Game
I started writing this post in October 2015; finally published August 2016. Once upon a time some librarian colleagues and I presented a program at our state conference talking about how public, school, and academic libraries can and should work together. We formatted it as a game show–The Dating Game, obviously–and had different librarians ask…
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See You Later, Alligator
I’ve just started a new “stop the summer slide” session of Beginning Reader Storytime, the first time I’ve presented this program at my new library (it’s still new to me, really, even after almost two years here). For this community, I made this program drop-in, and the ages are entering K to entering 2nd grade…
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Programming for Preschoolers: Take a Tip from Preschool Centers
When I was still teaching preschool (oh how I love to talk about when I taught preschool) one of the early literacy tactics we employed was to integrate literature and literacy skills into every center. This meant having books with building themes in the block center, books about nature in the science center, having pads…
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Making A Difference
In college, I had a lot of loser mentality left-over from high school, but I struggled against it and actually made many good friends and a wide circle of acquaintances. Even so, there was always a circle of people I never felt cool enough for. But I repressed my feelings of inferiority and went about…