Why would you ban inspiration?

So it's not even September but I'm kicking off Banned Books Week rather early with some personal thoughts.

We pride ourselves in the freedom of speech, press, religion and the right to assemble. The First Amendment, a core to our nation’s principles.  Yet when it comes to kids and minors, they are treated as second class citizen even though they as citizens also have this right. 

Kids are often raised in the religion their parents choose for them.  They have to go to school and learn what government decided what’s acceptable to teach them at the time. A group of assembled teenagers is often treated as a loitering trouble-making mob.  I know that children obviously can’t be trusted to make all their own choice because they are learning and growing.  But it’s ridiculous that they are still denied certain freedoms. What freedoms you might ask? Books.

People still try to ban books all across the United States, yes even here in the land of the free. How can we encourage children to expand their minds and explore the wonders of books, when knowing that out there are people who are ready to take books away from them based on their personal preference. These are books aren’t just ones with adult themes, but children’s books; a medium directed towards theses growing edger minds.

I’m not a person without any morals.  I agree with the reasoning that a kid under 18 shouldn’t be allowed access to an adult book store to purchase sexually graphic material.  Yet I work in an environment where a member of the public is allowed to tell the staff what should and should not available to children. In fact, they expect their request to remove a Roald Dahl book will be carried out.  (Personal account, this has happened to me) We are struggling to get books into the hands of under-privilege kids to encourage not just their imaginations, but literacy: a life skill. We graduate kids from high school who are unable to read. Parents, teachers and other partners in educations are under the stressed deadline of living up to state and federal standards of reading comprehension, projecting these rigorous expectations… on third graders.  If we are in such a volatile situation, is it not absurd to remove books from library shelves, a free and many people only access to books?

Why do we live in a country where books are banned but guns are not?

Every citizen has the right to bear arms. While there are laws of who can buy guns, there is nothing on the books that states people can’t fire guns (for sport and entertainment, not crimes) Anyone can fire a gun. I could let my child fire a gun and there is nothing to stop me. Now, I do not own a gun therefore I will take a neutral stance on gun control. I don’t think I have a high ground being a non-gun owner telling someone who is legally allowed to purchase weapons what to do with their property.

I’m just pointing out the insanity that people think they have the right to ban books and not guns.  You can’t walk into a gun store and tell them to stop selling guns because you don’t like them. Even if you had a really good reason such as guns kill people and guns are dangerous weapons in the wrong hands. But you can walk into a library and raise hell that your kid read a book with “bad language”  Books like Bridge to Terabithia, The Perks of Being a Wallflower and others are being eliminated from libraries and school curriculum because certain citizen find them offensive. Yet, a 9 year old is allowed to handle a machine gun without any proper training. Something that fires real bullets, can kill and obviously we have seen the tragic result from that situation in Arizona this week.

People have died for their belief in books, it’s true but a physical books is not often use to end someone life, unless you decided to beat someone in the head repeatedly with Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix .

We give our children guns that kill and deny them books to read. Things that destroy versus things that inspire. If we believe in the values of the 1st and 2nd amendment, it is nonsense to try to take away one thing and not the other or take away any right! I'm not saying ban guns. I'm saying don't ban books or guns.

Perhaps we should be afraid of books. They do contain dangerous things inside them.

Ideas.

“And ideas are bulletproof”- V for Vendetta

Storytime from the Liberry: Colors

Still catching up on posting my storytime outline from summer and it's almost Labor Day!

Fizz Boom Pop! A Color Storytime for Toddlers.

I love color storytimes. They are my favorite. I always repeat them, and I always look for something new to do or read at each one. This year, I'm going to do individual color storytimes to spread out my love of colors through the year. I'm a amateur artist so I enjoy anything about colors, coloring or art and sharing my passion with others

BOOKS:

Wow Said the Old by Tom Hopgood
Freight Train by Donald Crewes

Other favorite color books I like to read aloud are...
Sylvie by Jennifer Sattler
I Spy with My Little Eye by Edward Gibbs
My Many Colored Days by Dr. Suess
I dream of an Elephant by Ami Rubinger

Everyone seems to have a love affair with Brown Bear, Brown Bear. My opinion is meh. Even if it's not the most "engaging piece of literature", my kids and grown ups love it and they repeat all the words so if it gets them involved, so much the better.

Activities:

Flannel Board- Dog's Colorful Day This worked so well as a flannel story. This book is one I might have passed on because of it's length for the toddlers. Bonus-It is really easy to make, even for the artistically challenged.

Monsters Love Colors- This came from one of my favorite blogs, Storytime with Miss Tara
I created my own coloring sheet and ordered a set of crayons for each kid. While some followed the directions, most kids just colored which calmed them down while the listened to the story. Even when my voice got loud and I wanted them to get excited, they just kept on calmly coloring.

Sidewalk Chalk- This is one of my favorite activities to do at the library. But for some reason every summer, the weather always spoils our plans. It's either raining or the hottest day of the year! So I was stoked that I actually had a mild evening to go out and let the toddlers be creative. (It was during that "polar vortex" this summer)

Not only did we have traditional chalk, I also made sidewalk chalk paint and fizzy ice chalk.
Some lessons learned.

1) I used muffin tins as paint trays and mixed my paint in cleaned out Gatorade bottles before hand  and poured them in; which saved the hassle and long process of mixing each individual color in the tins

2) The paint will look beautiful with all the vibrant colors for about 1 minute after you let the kids loose to paint. The constant dipping and mixing colors left it looking rather grey towards the end of our playing and the kids seemed to loose interest once the colors lost their luster.

3) Make.Ice.Chalk. It is the easiest thing to make, perfect for summer play and the kids LOVED it! If you live in warmer climate weather, it perfect for hot days year round. I made it following a recipe from Growing a Jeweled Rose which mixed in baking soda. So when the kids got to spray it with vinegar, it fizzled adding a bit of science to our artsy fun. The kids found this mesmerizing, It was the most popular thing they played with and we had to make sure everyone got a turn. We had lots more left over so we used it at  another program and our wrap up party where it was another huge success with older kids. Buy a lot of vinegar to use  (and ignore the complaints from your co-workers :P) I went through a whole gallon and I still ran out on the last day at our party. Thankfully, vinegar is cheap and since the rest of the items to make this are common household ingredients, it's budget savy for your kids' programming fund. If you have Liquid Watercolors, use them over food coloring, since they are washable and while they stain fingers, they will wash off hands with soap and water easily. Good news for kids and grown-up.

Warning for Parents: This activity will make it very difficult to get your strong willed toddler to want to leave the library. They will want to stay! Sorry for the grief, but I won't apologize for fun!

Toddler Sensory Bin Roundup

I had mention in a previous post that we did sensory activities on the weekend for our toddler population this summer. This was a HUGE success and we quickly realized that even though we aimed the activities at kids ages 2-4, it was popular with the whole family!! Even parents and teenage siblings were getting in on the fun.

We had a general set of rules for playing with our bins (Not leaving children unattended or taking items out of the bin and carrying them to other parts of the library) Our staff was also made away that while it wasn't their job to babysit everyone coming to play with the sensory bins, they should keep a watchful eye out to make sure our materials were being used with properly. This was important because our materials were out in the open. While we had a drop cloth and worked to pick up any major messes when they happened, we didn't have a contained play area. We had to make sure that our young patrons got along well with the materials in the sensory bins as well as respecting the other areas and patrons of the library. Not an easy task, but I'm safe to report no one smashed play dough into the reference computers or dropped an armload of paperbacks into the water bin! I would just stress with everything getting your co-workers on board with a project like this or at least aware of what's happening, otherwise you might end up with cranky co-workers.

We had six weeks of sensory activities on the weekend. We covered the Five Senses: Touch, Smell, Sight, Sound, Taste and had a water table for our last week.

Touch- We had two bins of Moon Sand and Cloud Dough, along with shovels, cups and other sculpting material- More about that here, on my first post about our sensory bins this summer.

Smell- I had a bin of Scented Rainbow Rice and some Kool Aid Playdough. The rice idea came from Growing a Jeweled Rose which used the Duncan Hines Icing flavors to scent the rice.  Just one tiny Pinterest fail.For some reason one of colors of rice got moldy when I was making it so I had to throw it out so there was very little pink in the rainbow. I had used the rice bin the night before in my toddler storytime. A good number of activities were recycled from storytime, which was the night before I set up the sensory bins for the weekend. We had four colors/scents of playdough and I don't think they lasted 10 minutes before all the colors got mixed up. I loathed having other kids mix up the colors or playdough or clay when I was a kid >:( Still do I guess.

Sight- We made up an I spy bottle with leftover rice, lots of odds and ends from our craft supplies and a 2-liter bottle. We also had several other discovery bottles that focused on colors, shapes and density. Great information about making your own Science Discovery bottles over at Laguna Preschool.

Sound- Again I used leftover from Toddler Storytime. I had plenty of rainstick crafts as well as a bin full of egg shakers, bells and other noise makers. We also had a built your own shaker station using those little 8 oz Soda bottles. This was our own hiccup. Many of the older kids filled up the bottle all the way with the intend on taking supplies home, instead of  just using a little to make them shake. One of my co-workers had to ask a girl to please not take two bottles filled with pony beads. So the make you own shaker station lasted a day.

Taste- A challenge. We didn't want to make anything edible because of the risk of allergies and other dietary needs. Our simple solution, play food which is always a treat for our kids because we don't have a play kitchen or imaginative play area like some library do.

Water- I think this was the one kids and parents had the most fun with! We had a sink or float table with more odds and ends available to for kids to test in the water. Grown-ups where very interactive with the kids asking them to make guesses on what would sink or float and why! Also the kids were very creative and vocal with their critical thinking.

We also had handouts with sensory activities for kids and parents to try at home as well as a give-away (a container of playdough, sticker, etc.) Looking back, I would skip all that! We had signs telling patrons to ask for these items at the desk, but they were too busy enjoying the experience to care. Which is the point. So handout are a noble effort, but in hindsight a waste of time(and money). For the next round, we are going to have play for all, so we will probably not call it Toddler Sensory Lab anymore, but a more generic and welcoming name.

Our efforts hopefully created many positive experiences for families visiting the library that they can connect with when they think about using the library again. Not everyone has the luxury of crafty stay at home moms/dads who can make them oddles of sensory bins to play at home. But I'll keep researching the digital stacks of Pinterest to bring more sensory activities to my patrons in the future.

There is help and hope..even here at the liberry

Along with the rest of the world, we are paying tribute to the passing of a great man, Robin Williams here at the library. Usually we have displays when someone from the literary world passes away. However today's memorial I placed in the Teen section. We actually have one juvenile biography left about Robin Williams in the building with the sad subtitle-overcoming adversity.

I don't know how some little kids would react to knowing the voice being a beloved Disney character (as well as several other memorable roles, too many to count) has passed away but also tragically took his own life. But suicide is a very real issue for all people including adolescents. Depression has been in the lives of my family, co-workers and friends. Along side our display, I have discretely placed copies of the number for Suicide Prevention in case anyone need to take one.

Suicide Lifeline- 1-800-273-8255 (24 Hour Services)
Suicide Prevention Resources (Courtesy of Reddit)

Dinosaurs and Sharks

...and all the exciting things kids love.

So Summer Reading comes to a close at my library (outside expressing sadness and longing, inside dancing for joy) and before we look ahead to fall (or for me next summer!) I have a few fun things to attend to in the month of August.

Sharks 

Shark Week- August 10th-17th

I don't have Discovery Channel and I'm not a big fan of sharks but you can't deny the joy that Shark Week brings to so many (and of course all the useful information) I have a series of passive activities planned for the week for any one stopping into the library to enjoy.
Monday-Coloring Pages
Tuesday- Make a Shark Book (to fill with shark facts)
Wednesday- Craft
Thursday- Don't Wake the Shark Game
Friday- Shark Puzzles
Saturday and Sunday- Under the sea Sensory Bin

 Most of the ideas and activities came from Kid Zone

And of course Books! Looking for a great shark book to read aloud? I adore I'm a Shark by Bob Shea

Dinosaurs

I always go on vacation right after summer reading (whether a long weekend or maternity leave) and I always worry about how the library looks when I'm gone. I know I should just shut up and enjoy my vacation but the thought of bare bulletin board and walls just drives my artistic mind crazy. We usually leave some of our summer reading decorations up for the slow trickle of kids who are late collecting prizes. But the main board that displays our events is the first one to go blank and there is nothing to replace it with unless I do it. So I kicked myself to get something made and put up before I go on vacation so I can spend nights dreaming of the beach and sunset and not of a blank brown wall starring back at me with shame!

Aw...look at those cute dinosaurs. And who doesn't love dinosaurs (even this jaded librarian) My confession is that all the time I was working on the orange T-Rex I kept thinking of "We're Back" that stupid dinosaur movie from 90's which I probably watched a dozen times too many as a child...

And as a result, I have this lovely ear worm stuck in my head...

(Tidbit: The screenplay for this film was written by John Patrick Shanley....yes the same guy who wrote Doubt that won the Pulitzer Prize. I guess you have to start somewhere?)