Our Kids

Jacket cover–Our KidsDuring my travels last week, I whiled away quite a few hours in airports and airplanes reading Our Kids:  The American Dream in Crisis by Robert Putnam.  In it, he talks about the growing opportunity gap between economic...

ALA High Points

Tree of inspiration This year, I was extremely fortunate to be able to attend the American Library Association Annual Conference in San Francisco.  It was the first time in 10 years I’d been to this extravaganza of librarianship.  Apart from a few brief cases of...

All You Have to Do Is Ask

Kids in Prescott visit booths of local heroes to find out what they doMany thanks to Becky Arenivar, Programming Specialist in Prescott for this inspiring guest post:This year’s SLP theme, Every Hero Has a Story, has been a super enabler for collaboration at the...

Changing-Table Initiative of ALSC

3 of the posters available to download and printIn order to help encourage parents and caregivers to talk, sing, play, read and write with their young children, the Association for Library Service to Children created some gorgeous posters that are available to...

SummerTeen Free Virtual Conference

Just what you need to keep you going this summer–a FREE conference that requires no travel.  School Library Journal is sponsoring a free virtual conference about serving teens, SummerTeen on August 13, starting at 10 am Central Standard Time.  It...

When In Doubt, Go to the Library

I had the opportunity to attend National History Day festivities in College Park, Maryland last week.  Wow, if you ever need some great inspiration about some amazingly dedicated, smart, interesting, and enthusiastic teens, this is a terrific place to get it....

Travel flannel board kits

Thanks to Valerie from Ladysmith for this great idea/guest post!For our Earth Day storytime, I wanted our craft to be something that we could make reusing materials we already had at the library. We have many DVD cases that can’t be used for circulation...

Abstinence-Only?

I was just listening to a recorded ALSC webinar by Cen Campbell (founder of the Little eLit blog).  She made an analogy that made a lot of sense to me.  She suggested that no matter how we feel about kids spending time interacting with screens, sticking to...

May Reading Goals

Whoops!  This got away from me this month!Each month, IFLS librarians (and any other blog readers, for that matter) are invited to read a book written for kids or teens in a certain category.  These can be recent books, or ones that have been on your list...

Trains on a Track Preschool Activity

Thank you to Valerie in Ladysmith for sharing this guest post:A proud artist/engineer shows off his train tracksFor our train themed preschool storytime this spring, we made a really neat interactive craft. It’s just a paper plate with a design drawn on it,...

Last-Minute Resources

Okay, just in case you are madly trolling the Internet, looking for some last-minute resources to help you with Summer Library Program planning, or if you want to have something in your back pocket if your original plan falls through:TeachingBooks.net has a whole...

Music Music Music resource

Photo credit:”Discovering Music” by Craig Rodeway https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/ Zero to Three recently put together a lovely PDF for parents and caregivers, talking about the effect of music on very young children, including...