So instead of a party, I followed along on twitter this morning. Gosh, was that exciting. Even from far away I could feel the excitement as the tweets were flowing in. I had done a lot of reading in preparation but I knew I hadn’t read everything. I definitely had my favorites that I was hoping would be honored. I had spent a lot of time reading various Mock Award blogs, which are so much fun by the way! My favorites were Someday my Printz Will Come and the Heavy Medal blog.

And so the winners are:

Printz Award for excellence in young adult literature: Where Things Come Back by John Corey Whaley. Guys, I was seriously so stocked that this book won! It really deserves it. I read it just a few weeks ago and absolutely LOVED it! The coolest thing is that this book was honored with TWO awards this year; it also won the Morris Award for best debut book! Go out and read it now! The Printz honors I wasn’t so excited about. I had actually just tried to read The Scorpio Races by Maggie Stiefvater and I could not finish it. I really tried. I gave it 50 pages and didn’t want to give up so I gave it another 50 pages but I still couldn’t understand the appeal after 100 pages so I had to put it down. If someone can tell me why they love this book, I would love to hear it! Of the other three, I really want to read Why We Broke Up by Daniel Handler. Jasper Jones by Craig Silvey and The Returning by Chrsitine Hinwood sound good too and I’ll probably read them eventually.

The Caldecott Award for most distinguished picture book goes to A Ball for Daisy by Chris Raschka. This picture book is truly excellent. It tells a charming, heartwarming story about a dog and his ball and it does it all without any word! This was a great choice for our winner this year. Grandpa Green by Lane Smith was one of the honors. This is another really cool book you will have to check out. The illustrations are fantastic and beautifully detailed. I still need to read Blackout by John Rocco and Me….Jane by Patrick McDonnell. I am a little sad that I Want My Hat Back wasn’t honored, but also I’m not very surprised that it didn’t. These books are all excellent as well.

Finally, we had the Newbery Medal for the most distinguished contribution to literature for children. This one I wasn’t so thrilled about. I had a lot of favorite books for middle readers and none of them were selected. The winner is Dead End in Norvelt by Jack Gantos. I haven’t read it but it sounds pretty funny I guess. There was one honor book I could get on board with, Inside Out and Back Again. If you’ve been following this blog you know I love that one! The other honor book was Breaking Stalin’s Nose by Eugene Yelchin, so I guess I’ll be reading that one soon also. Mostly I was super sad that Okay for Now and A Monster Calls were not honored at all. I’m not surprised about Okay for Now, a lot of people had issues with some of the plot, but the fact that A Monster Calls was not honored at all, by the  Printz or Newbery really shocks me. I can not think of a more distinguished book I have read this whole year. Though I guess I shouldn’t be surprised because there were some questions if it was eligible because it was also published in England and the age range was kind of right in between both awards. But still, if you were to ask me what book is the most distinguished contribution to literature for children and I would say A Monster Calls without hesitation. Wonderful, wonderful book.

The Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee. Adult Scientific Nonfiction.

I am really fascinated by medical/scientific nonfiction books for some reason.  This book is a history or ‘biography’ of cancer. It is a fascinating history! I really loved that the author tied the history in with his own stories and experiences working as an oncologist to make it more readable.  Mukherjee has a wonderful way of making even the most technical details easy for the average reader to understand. I am so glad I read this book and I came away with a much greater awe for science and also for the mysterious and scary thing that is cancer.

Okay for Now by Gary D. Schmidt. Ages 9-12. (I listened to the audiobook read by Lincoln Hoppe).

I really hope this book wins a Newbery! I think it totally deserves it. This book tells the story of 14-year-old  Doug Swieteck. He recently moved with his parents and brother to Marysville, New York. And he doesn’t like it. But with the help of a new friend, Lil Spicer and a book of Audubon prints Doug comes to love this new town as well as learn how to grow into the type of person he wants to be. There is a ton going on in this book but Gary Schmidt weaves it all together into a story that will have you crying and laughing and in the end, cheering.

A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness. Ages 10 and up.

This is a book that stays with you. This is a book that left me speechless. Conor is a young boy dealing with the fact that his mother has cancer. Dealing with the fact that his mother is dying. But it is also a book about hope, and about the power of stories in our lives. There is a monster who comes to visit Conor. The monster will tell Conor three stories, and then it will be Conor’s turn to tell his own story. The writing in this book is amazing, and so are the darkly beautiful illustrations. I will never forget this book.

Inside Out and Back Again by Thannha Lai. Ages 9-12.

A story told in verse. A 10-year-old Vietnamese girl immigrating to the United States with her family after the Vietnam War. Ha relates her travels her new home and her difficulty adjusting to the new life and surroundings. I was so impressed with how well Lai is able to say with so few words through the voice of Ha and her poems. This is a moving book and one that is filled with hope.

Girl in Translation by Jean Kwok. Adult Fiction. (I listened to the audiobook read by Grayce Wey).

This is another immigrant story, though a very different one. Kimberly Chang immigrates to the United States with her mother as a young girl from Hong Kong. They live in heartbreaking poverty as Kimberly’s mother works in a Chinatown clothing factory and Kimberly becomes a star pupil at school with her bright intelligence. They must work hard for everything they have, but Kimberly is determined to make a better life for herself and for her mother.

Also, I must add two more books: Beauty Queens by Libba Bray and Delirium by Lauren Oliver. They both receive honorable mention.

The Magicians by Lev Grossman. Adult Literary Fantasy. (I listened to this on audiobook read by Mark Bramhall). I am almost done listening to the second book in the series now (The Magician King) and I have to say I may like it even better than the first. But we’ll have to wait and see how it ends. So, The Magicians is about Quentin Coldwater, a highly intelligent young man who feels restless and unsatisfied with his life. Then he discovers that magic is real and is admitted into Brakebills, a college for magicians. And then he also discovers that Fillory is real, the land he loved and read about as a child (think Narnia) and gets to go there, but it isn’t quite as fun and rosy as it was in the books. This book is so perfect for anyone who loves Harry Potter and Narnia and Middle Earth and all things fantasy/nerdy. A beautiful, if sometimes dark and gritty, homage to the great fantasy stories I love.

Wonderstruck by Brian Selznick. Ages 9 and up Illustrated Historical Fiction. This is a new book by the author of The Invention of Hugo Cabret. You’ve probably heard of the movie Hugo, out just this year. I haven’t actually read the book yet (I know, it’s on my list!) but I can tell you that Wonderstruck was amazing. The book interweaves the stories of two characters, Rose and Ben. Rose’s story is told only through full-page illustrations. You have to see these to believe them. They are so realistic and Selznick’s ability to tell a story without any words is amazing. Rose and Ben live in two different eras and their stories tell of two different quests but the ways they are connected will just leave you in awe.

Hereville: How Mirka Got her Sword by Barry Deutsch. Ages 9 and up Fantasy Graphic Novel. The subtitle of this book is seriously: “Yet another troll-fighting 11-year-old Orthodox Jewish girl.” I love it! Mirka doesn’t want to knit, she doesn’t want to spend all her time learning to become a good Orthodox Jewish wife. She just wants to be a dragon slayer! This lovely humorous graphic novel tells Mirka’s story. This book is cool for so many reasons. The illustrations and layout of the book were just really cool. I loved the strong-willed female protagonist. And it was a really cool glimpse into Orthodox Jewish life, which I really don’t know a lot about. Even though the story is clearly fiction with a lot of fantastical elements, I think it is great to see this culture represented in children’s literature. This book is great for anyone who craves a little more adventure.

I Want My Hat Back by Jon Klassen. Ages 4-8 Picture Book. I gave a review of this book previously on this blog, Lost in the Pages. Check it out. On here, let me just say, I’m so glad this book is getting a lot of love this year because it totally deserves it! If you like your picture books with a little bit of cheeky humor that appeals to both young children and adults, this is the perfect book. Even if you don’t have any children in your life you should read this book. It’s that good. Honestly. My favorite picture book of the year.

My worries were mostly about myself as a teacher. I know I look kind of young. I even am kind of young for a second year graduate student. Would a class of college students take me seriously? Would they even listen to a word I had to say? Do I have anything to offer them? The answer is a big fat YES! These were college Freshmen, brand new to academic research, of course I had a lot of knowledge to share with them! And it truly is a miracle, but mostly, I’ve found out, when a person is standing in front of a classroom and talking, people listen to you. They just do and it’s awesome. I even talked loudly which made me so proud of myself.

So we ended up having tons of fun. I was able to show of Gale’s wonderful resource, Opposing Viewpoints in Context, which is awesome and I think everyone should know about. People are always so impressed when I show this to them. Even the instructor didn’t know of it. It has a really pretty and welcoming interface, it is very current and up-to-date, and it gives students a great overview of their topics on social issues and a good idea of what people are talking about right now.

I also demonstrated EBSCO’s Academic Search Premier of course. There are so many good opportunities in that resource to discuss the differences between scholarly, peer-reviewed sources and newspaper and magazine popular sources. Academic Search will give you results in both, but I love that in the results list there is a little icon letting you know what type of resource it is. This is something I hope to remember to emphasize in the future. And there is always the option to limit your search to the type of resource you want as well, which is very helpful.

There were a few things I wish I hadn’t spent so much time on. I got a little too in depth showing them how to use the library’s catalog, when really they weren’t looking for books for this assignment anyway. Also I think my discussion of Boolean searches was a little advanced for first semester Freshmen. I think just getting in there and getting familiar with using the resources was enough for them without adding confusion about Boolean searches. I will remember in the future to only talk about that with upper division classes.

I was so glad for the opportunity to introduce the library and the library’s resources to these students. Even if all I did was put a friendly face to the library, that is a good thing. Now hopefully at least they won’t find the library as intimidating as they did before. I hope they learned that the library is relevant to their lives as college students and that they will continue to use library resources throughout their college careers. Isn’t shaping young minds just the best feeling ever?!

1. There is a reason librarians use songs, rhymes, fingerplays between stories! They work like charms at getting the children’s attention and refocusing them. They are so ready for the next story afterwards. It really makes a world of difference. And “Open Them, Shut Them” is amazing for starting your program. It turns a loud, chaotic room into a room of kids ready to listen. Which is exactly what you want.

2. Kids react differently to stories at different ages. When I read Go Away Big Green Monster by Ed Emberly to the 2 year olds from the day care earlier this week, the room was silent as they anticipated what would happen on each page. Totally different story with some of the older school-age kids at the storytime last night. There were two boys sitting right in front who thought the whole book was hilarious  and laughed through the whole thing. I wasn’t really expecting that, but it did feel good to be able to make kids laugh and it was a lot of fun!

3. You can pull a Halloween costume together out of anything. Seriously, anything. I realized as I was driving over that I should have planned a Halloween costume for the storytime, or a witch hat or something! No fun if all the kids show up in costumes and I don’t have anything. So I scrounged in our closet when I got there and came up with some Halloween garland and a few awesome bat and spider decals. Perfect. I tied the garland around my waist and stuck the bats and spiders to myself with tape. It was silly and fun and the kids loved it.

I had such a great time sharing Halloween stories with the kids last night! It made me feel like a real legit librarian to have such a large group and to be able to keep their attention for a full 30-40 minutes! I am so going into the right field. I have so much fun doing things like this!

I was excited to read Inside Out and Back Again by Thanhha Lai because it was not a book I would normally read on my own. I was looking forward to reading something different. Ha, a 10-year-old Vietnamese girl, tells her story in a series of journal entries written in free verse. The book spans one tumultuous year of Ha’s life in 1975, as the Vietnam war ends and she and her family flee Saigon for the United States.

I am not often drawn to novels written in verse, though usually once I start reading them I am enchanted by the language and completely drawn into the story. That is exactly what happened as I began reading Inside Out and Back Again. The book starts out slow, as we are welcomed into Ha’s home in Saigon and the stage is set for the war that is drawing closer. As soon as the option to leave their home is presented, I was hooked. Would they leave everything behind for a chance at an unknown future?

Lai’s verse packs a great intensity and imagery into the sparse language. It is truly beautiful to read how much she can say with so few words. Many of the short poems and phrases stick in my mind long after reading them. The imagery of the papaya tree Ha had to leave behind at home and the ripening papaya that is Ha’s favorite food weave through the pages as a symbol of hope and renewal. Which is how I felt as the book ended, so full of hope. Even through the difficult parts of the story, as Ha is bullied at school and her family shunned and discriminated against in their new home, as she struggles to learn English and adjust to her new surroundings, Ha is always able to cling to this hope. And because of that, we the readers do to.

Lai writes in an afterward that the story of Ha was similar to what she experienced as an immigrant to America after the Vietnam War. For all the children who have experienced similar situations, I am so happy that this book has been written and that it is receiving so much Newbery buzz. It truly deserves it. I can wonder if this book will be widely read by children, but for some reason that doesn’t bother me so much, because I know that the children who do seek out and read this book will be richly rewarded with the moving experience Lai has given us through the story of Ha.

We made owls and spiders. The owl idea I borrowed from my public library’s Crafty Creations program last week. I thought they were so fun and simple and such a big hit with the preschool age. The spider I got from our office manager and a lot of the other residence hall libraries were using it. But when the little kids tried to do it, it was more of a challenge for them to do one their own. I probably won’t do this one again with such a young group. But they are still super cute, aren’t they?

After the crafts were all done the kids even asked if they could watch a movie. Overjoyed, I put on “It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown!” The great part about these programs is that these families are usually already friends and it is a great way for the parents to get together and talk while the kids are participating in the activity.

My only concern is the language barrier. I believe all of the families that attended last night spoke Korean as their native language and some did not know a lot of English. It made communicating with some of the parents really hard and I feel so bad about it. I’m wishing I could learn Korean, but I know that isn’t very practical. Maybe a few phrases.  Any suggestions for programming for families when there is a language barrier? What can I do better?

First of all, fifth graders are an age I don’t work with a lot, so that was a great change. It is also a really fun age! They were all so smart and it was great to see them scattered about the library, working away. The other cool thing was seeing all the variety in the fascinating famous Americans they had chosen to study. Yes, some of them chose topics so out there it was a little difficult to find good resources for them, but they were each so passionate about their choices that I could tell they weren’t going to give up in the face of a little challenge here and there.

Helping them with their questions gave me such a thrill and reinforced how much I can get excited about information literacy and sharing that knowledge with students. It was so heartwarming to my little librarian heart to see these fifth graders learning to use reliable databases and knowing how to look something up in an index.

In the afternoon, it was time to shift gears as I headed over to my little on-campus library. Today was our first day care visit and I was really excited. There is a day care in the same building as our library. We are trying a new community partnership with them and invited them to come into the library once a week for a visit and a short story time. The class was a group of 12 two-and-a-half-year-old children. I was a little nervous that they would be too young to enjoy the fall stories I had picked out, but it turned out that the story time went like a charm.

They were really enthralled with my choice, Fall Leaves Fall by Zoe Hall. They were able to relate to all of the fall experiences of the children in the story and it made for great talking points throughout the book. Crunching leaves, jumping in big piles of leaves, gathering leaves to look at them and study them, they really latched on to all of that. My second pick was a great fall classic, Apples and Pumpkins by Anne Rockwell. I have fond memories of reading this story myself as a child. It is not ideally suited for a read-aloud, as the illustrations are quite small and there isn’t a lot of story. But the fall experience is there and it is quick enough that it held the children’s attention.

I interspersed the stories with a few songs and rhymes. “Open them, shut them,” “Leaves are falling all around,” and “Two apples in the tree.” These were also pretty good hits. The story time was followed by about 10 minutes of letting the children pull and look at books on their own in the library. They really seemed to enjoy this, though I did feel bad for all the re-shelving my student assistants had to do!

The best part was at the end, after all the children had put their jackets back on and were getting ready to go back into the rainy weather to walk to their center, the teacher asked, “Can we come back next week?” And my answer was a resounding YES!

For my presentation, I wanted to try using Prezi. It is an online presentation software that just recently entered my radar and I’ve been dying for an excuse to try it out. I was happy that our C-YA meeting was the perfect chance to do that. Prezi is a really cool departure from the slide-based metaphor of presentations. If you think about it, it really makes sense. How many outdated metaphors do we cling to long after they no longer make sense? Slide presentations when it’s been decades since anyone used an actual physical slide. Card catalogs when we’re no longer limited to those tiny 7.5 by 12.5 cm cards? When everything has moved online, it makes sense that we start letting some of those old ideas go.

Hence, Prezi. It isn’t your standard, linear, bullet point presentation. It zooms, it twists, it goes in circles, basically it flows. You can make a pretty good point that it more closely represents though processes, especially when it comes to brainstorming and creative planning and such. It shows connections and relationships. And really, who I am I kidding, it just looks really really cool.

So, in the spirit of emerging technologies (which is fitting considering my topic), I made a prezi. And you should totally click on the link above and check it out. You can even use it to start making your own. I had a lot of fun with it. While I’m sure I still have a lot to learn, for the most part it is really intuitive.

I had a lot of fun with the topic as well of course. I am really starting to get sucked into the blogging world and it is SO MUCH FUN! And much credit goes to Abby the Librarian and her wonderful blog. I got a lot of ideas from her CYPD handout on a similar topic, which she presented with Melissa from Mel’s Books and Info. Thank you so much! I just wanted to post the link today, more thoughts on this topic to come later this week, as well as my favorite blog discoveries so far!

And it always feels like Christmas when a new truck is brought down, full of brand new books for us to look over. Sometimes I can even fit in a quick read of a short picture book or two. Today I thought I’d highlight a few I read recently that I thought were a lot of fun.

I Want My Hat Back by Jon Klassen. Ages 4-8. Candlewick Press, September 2011. Copy from my public library.

This book is a rare find among picture books. It has a broad appeal to almost any age group. I think most adults would find it quite funny, and children as young as 3 or 4, while they might understand it on a different level, will enjoy it just as much.

The story features a large, expressionless bear and other forest creatures. This bear has a bright red hat that he loves very much. But one day it goes missing and so he asks the other animals in the forest if they know where his hat is. The story is told completely in dialogue and much of it happens in the pictures and between the lines of the text. Most of the humor lies in the bear’s deadpan expressions and the subtleties of knowing when someone is lying.

The book ends with a surprising but hilarious twist. This is where I must place some caution, however, because the ending is not for every parent or every child. Someone might get eaten at the end of this book, and I know that isn’t for everyone. But it is also laugh-out-loud funny and is a rare bit of humor that is equally funny to both children and adults.

Is Everyone Ready for Fun? by Jan Thomas. Ages 3-6. Beach Lane Books, September 2011. Copy from my public library.

Three cows come to visit Chicken, ready for lots of fun. Unfortunately for Chicken, this fun involves jumping on her couch. And then dancing and wiggling and it just won’t stop!

This is another book told purely through dialogue. The illustrations are silly and lively and full of action and expression. Young children will certainly relate to the three cows, who continue to find clever ways to use the couch when they are told, “No jumping on the couch!”

This book is perfect for 3 and 4 year olds, who will surely find it very funny. It would also make a fun, humorous read for a preschool or toddler story time.

You Will Be My Friend! by Peter Brown. Ages 3-6. Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, September 2011. Copy from my public library.

Lucy the bear wakes up and announces today she will make a new friend. And then she persistently struggles to achieve that goal, with slightly disastrous results. She is loud, exuberant, and big. She is so heartwarming and enthusiastic, readers will feel for her and her troubles.

The illustrations are cartoonish and give the book a very fun feel. The bright colors and rounded shapes match Lucy’s attitude perfectly. The theme of friendship is one children will relate to and the predicaments she finds herself in are sure to bring laughs. The book ends happily and readers will be eager for more books staring Lucy the bear.