• Lifestyle

    SLJ's Battle of the Books

    Each year School Library Journal created a Battle of the Books focusing on 2014 children’s and young adult literature.  The 2015 judges have been announced and each battle is judged by a different person.  What is really fun (and sometimes frusturating) about Battle of the Kids’ Books is that the…

  • Lifestyle

    2014 CYBILS Awards

    The 2014 CYBILS – the Children and Young Adult Bloggers’ Literary Awards were announced on February 14th – a perfect day for some book love!  And because it was the weekend, a few days got away from me, but I’m finally posting about it today!  For a list of all…

  • Lifestyle

    CLEL Bell Awards

    CLEL is short for Colorado Libraries for Early Literacy and offers resources focused on early literacy skills. Each year they announce the CLEL Bell Awards which includes one picture book winner for each of the ECRR 2’s early literacy skills – read, write, talk, sing, and play. This year’s awards…

  • Lifestyle

    Black History Month Book Display

    As many of you know, this month celebrates Black History and for the occasion, rather than putting up the typical biographies of African Americans, I took the time to create a Coretta Scott King Book Award table display with award winners and honor books galore!  I posted information about the…

  • Lifestyle

    Youth Media Awards – Initial Reactions

    This is one of my favorite days as a children’s librarian.  I know there are those that don’t take much stock in the youth media awards, believing that many of the awards are given to quality literature, yet are not as interesting or accessible to the children reading them.  But,…

  • Lifestyle

    Super Bowl Sunday means…

    Eating homemade pizza with friends and watching the commercials and halftime show. We’ve got the Susie’s for pepperoni, cheese, white and buffalo chicken pizza and I just might make some chocolate chip cookies as well! What I’m even more excited about is that the Youth Media Awards are being announced…

  • Lifestyle

    #SaturdayLibrarian + Programming = Crazy

    We haven’t provided very many Saturday programs in the past, but with more and more patrons requesting Saturday story times, we’ve decided to offer something once a month when a storyteller is working a Saturday shift.  If today’s crowd was any indication, we’ll be doing something a lot more on…

  • Lifestyle

    SharpSchu Book Discussion

    If you’ve never had the privilege or opportunity to take part in a SharpSchu book discussion, than you definitely need to set aside an hour to do so. Each month Colby Sharp from Sharpread and Mr. Schu from Watch. Connect. Read. host a Twitter book discussion – 30 minutes for a chapter…

  • Lifestyle

    Appreciation

    The other day I received a letter in the mail at work (yeah, an actual piece of physical mail!) from a family that has been coming to my story times since about the time I started in my current position almost seven years.  With three girls now, the family is…

  • Lifestyle

    New Collection/Rebranding an Old Collection

    I’ve been posting about our progress as we rebrand one of our collections in the children’s department.  The collection is what we currently call the Bridging Collection, mostly picture books that are for an older audience as well as a catch-all location for materials that don’t fit easily into the…