Diversity in Children's Books

I didn't know it was this bad....

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Storytime From the Liberry: A Whale of a Tale

A toddler storytime about whales?  Hey why not?

A Whale of a Tale

Probably a rather obscure topic to teach to 2 and 3 year olds, but something I wanted to tackle right from the start when I took over storytime from a coworker.  My inspiration and title of the program oddly came from the film 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (yes the old Disney live action one) Well not so much the film, who only highlight for me are Peter Lorre and seal but the song in the beginning of the film, sung by Ned Land (Kirk Douglas)

Inspiration such as Baby Beluga, songs and rhymes came later. You can also combine this theme with ocean animals in general, sailors or pirates. I use sailors in mind because I already have a story time devoted to just pirates. If you are looking to incorporate Ready to Read skill, I pair this storytime up with Singing. You can play noises of whale calls and explain that whales talk by singing and they sing loud so others can hear them from far away. So let’s sing loud and clear today

BOOKS:

If you want to see a Whale by Julie Fogliano

A rather quirky  non-linear books, but very charming with great illustrations! I adore this team’s other book “And Then it’s Spring” I cut down some of the length and asked my storytime friends to be sure and tell me if they see a whale. Many of them got very excited about trying to find it.

A Big Guy Took My Ball by Mo Willems

I am on a desperate crusade to get my toddlers (and their grownups!) to appreciate the humor of Mo Willems. This one is great because of the change to do three voices. Elephant, Piggie and the great big voice of the whale.

Baby Beluga by Raffi

Ahhh son, this is my jam! I was born in the mid 80’s so I was a toddler right as Raffi was making it big. My parents apparently dropped some serious dough to get me tickets to his concert when he came to town. They let me place this tape on loop and sang all the songs with me. Even to this day when I hear the song Baby Beluga, I hear it in my father’s voice still singing to me.

You can use this as a song or with a book if you have a copy. I’ve sung along with the recording in the past, but I decided to ditch that this time and sing it a cappella. If you sing it with the recording, heads up you’ll be flipping pages real fast and have to deal with an awkward break in the middle.

Kavna, the inspiration for "Baby Beluga" Sadly, she passed away in 2012 at age 46.

Way Down Deep in the Deep Blue Sea by Jan Peck

Lots of sea creatures to see and repetitive text. I encourage my friends to wave hello and good bye at every animal we meet. Also I handed out puppets of sea creatures (“our reading buddies”) and would look out if I could see the octopus or the shark in the crowd when we read about them.

Sailor Boy Jig by Margaret Wise Brown

This is such a great book for movement, but my branch has one of the very few copies left. (*Clutches it for dear life*)

Febraury Displays

A somewhat slow Saturday at the liberry. We've just come out of another round of polar vortex and school being closed for two days. Today's its a balmy 37 so everyone is out in enjoying the day! (probably wearing shorts, it is Ohio)

Perfect day for setting up new displays!
Since no old men are snoozing the chairs in front of the teen end caps...

Get "Matched" with a Good Book

Valentine's Day made this a no brainer. A great idea is the "Go on a blind date with a book" but we just did wrapped books for Christmas. I made up match.com profiles for the currently popular teen characters from books (Hunger Games, Divergent, The Fault in Our Stars) My color scheme kinda of matches The Fault in Our Stars coincidentally.  I also had to do some research see what a match.com profile actually looks like, since I've never used an online dating service!

Here is a great Pinterest board full of "Go on a Blind Date with a Book" ideas

Storytimes from the Liberry: Mad About Hats (Toddlers)

Social Media, blogs and Pinterest have helped me so many times as a librarian, I couldn’t count. 

So in an effort to share and share alike, I’ll start posting my own ideas for storytimes here on my blog. Please feel free to share, use and adapt for your storytimes at your library, childcare or home. Library books are free and sharing the love of reading should be free too.

For reference, I run the toddler storytime at my library and my age group is 2-3 year olds ( everyone seems to have a different classification for toddlers) So the idea posted here are geared towards that age group and are often packed into a fast pace 20-25 minute session

Mad About Hats

Inspiration: Being a child of the 80’s-90’s I was addicted to Care Bears and one of my favorite silly songs was from “Care Bears Adventure in Wonderland” sung by the Mad Hatter himself “Mad about Hats”

To this day it is an inside joke in my family. If you ask “Do you like hats?” or mention hats in a conversation , my mother and/or myself will reply “I’m Mad about hats!” (that’s the insanity talking)

Hats was a theme I knew I wanted to tackle and it was one of the first story times I created. I repeated it in January after two years and some sprucing up.

BOOKS:

Do You Have a Hat? By Eileen Spinelli
A longer book to start out, you can skip a few pages to shorten it. I've read this one before but I switched it out for this next one

Under my Hood I Have a Hat by Karla Kuskin

Okay, so the hat is a small part of this story, but it is an adorable book to read for winter.  Kids can really relate to the clothes and the simple text. It's fairly simple to ask kids at this age if they wore a coat, hat, mittens today and what color they are.

The Hobbit, there and back again to my childhood...

The Hobbit was a big part of my childhood, but here is the weird part.

I never read the novel.

I read the graphic novel adaptation a few times but what mostly fueled my knowledge of the plot was the 1977 animated film. I also decided I needed to read the novel as part of my “classics Bucket list” and also before I saw the second installment of the Peter Jackson movies. (So I won’t be those types of people who watch the movies but never make an attempt at the novels) However the animated film is probably one of the main reasons I never wanted to pick up the novel until now.

Simply, The Hobbit terrified me.

I grew up at the dawning age of VCRs and readily available children’s films. My parents had three “kids” movies on Laserdisc and the Hobbit was one of them. (the others  were Watership Down and Pinocchio which also terrified me in their own ways) But the Hobbit was sheer terror on the boogeyman level for me as a little kid.  I still watched it but when the goblins literally popped out of the black frame, I covered my eyes. The spiders (shudder) and Smaug with his dog like face that didn’t really even look like a real dragon. Oh yes Smaug was the stuff of nightmares. I was convinced that Smaug was going to steal me from my bed while I slept, eat me, and then steal my jewelry box.

The Lord of the Rings film and the of course the first installment of the Hobbit I viewed with a different aspect. I found them entertaining, using the strength of adventure and thrills to uplift their audiences. So I was curious when I started reading the book, if the (oh so handsome) faces of Richard Armitage and Martin Freeman would be the images conjured in my imagination as I read.

They weren’t.

Opening the book and reading the words that sounded so familiar but I actually had never read before, I was sucked back to those original images of hooded dwarves and shadowy forests and I had been accustomed to as a kid. No sir, no archery antics of Orlando Bloom or jokes of James Nesbit to amuse you here. I read this book and didn’t feel the sweeping excitement of adventure. This journey is simply, and hardly unexpected. In Middle Earth, if you are small everything will try to kill you or eat you. I knew this as a child, when I was small. I recognize this as an adult (who is still very short in stature) We all love Gollum and doing our best my precious impersonations, but do not forgot, Gollum is a creature who was planning to eat Bilbo (a creature of his own size) if he wins a game of riddles. That’s messed up. The goblins sing songs about burning the dwarves alive in trees as they light to fire. And The Hobbit is sometimes classified as a children’s book. WTF?

 (Those miserable goblins songs are now stuck in my head)

I will say I enjoyed the novel in a different way then I enjoy the films. The films are defiantly more action, adventure and feel good while the books is much more danger, peril, uncertainty and good God how has Bilbo not being eaten yet?

I’m also still terrified. This book frightens me.  This book didn’t help me conquer my childhood fears; they cemented them. Black water, giant bears, Gollum’s underlying cannibalism, giant spiders, Mirkwood. And Smaug (still terrifying)

The Greatest Adventure is what lies ahead.... oh and death watch out for that too.