Recommended Title: "Hug Machine" by Scott Campbell

The holidays can be a wonderful time to share books with your kids - but sometimes it can be hard to choose something that everyone will like. Speaking from personal experience, it's also often hard to find seasonally relevant picture books that are non-denominational AND well-written. For me, there's one go-to book that gets to the heart of what this time of year is all about without being too cloying, too sweet, or too specific.

Click on the picture to find this book in the Stevens Memorial Library catalog!

Hug Machine by Scott Campbell is a snapshot of the life of a young boy who's on a mission to spread joy and happiness though his hugs. He's excitable, relatable, and enthusiastic about his mission, proclaiming over and over, "I AM THE HUG MACHINE!" He hugs crying babies! Mailboxes! Spiky porcupines! Nothing he encounters is not worth an earnest squeeze.

I like this book for a few reasons. For starters, it's very silly, and uses a lot of active language to help the story feel action-packed. The illustrations are sufficiently detailed to offer new discoveries with every reading. It's also one of the only stories I've read about sharing kindness and affection that has a young boy as its protagonist. Our hero Hug Machine is definitely demonstrating the "E" in "RAISE" throughout this book!

This is Scott Campbell's first work as an author of children's books; previously, he illustrated Kelly DiPucchio's Zombie in Love and Zombie in Love 2+1. I'm a big fan of these books, so if you like his artwork you should definitely check them out - they are, however, decidedly more gruesome than Hug Machine.

Recommendation Snapshot:

Ideal Audience: K-4th grade (it's pretty short but would work as a discussion-starter for older grades).

Ideal Time of Day/Year for Sharing: holidays, Valentine's Day, bedtime

Worth Owning?: The art in this story will stand the test of time, I think, and the story makes for a great gift idea!

Parent Enjoyment Level: On a scale of 1-10, I'd put this at a solid 8 - it's cute without being saccharine, and will probably result in you getting lots of hugs! 

We're "Thankful" for November Library Lessons

Hey there, library detectives! We're more than half-way through November, and there's a ton of exciting stuff going on in the school libraries! Over the next few weeks, the grade level lessons will start to change as we get into more grade-specific library learning, but for now we're still making sure that all the grades have the basic foundational knowledge to help them move forward in their learning.

Kindergarteners

The kindergarteners have continued to learn about the basics of books and the library, and we've started to try and coordinate the books we read in library with what's happening in the classroom. In a few kindergarten classes, that's meant talking about what Being an Author means - what is their job? Can anyone be an author? Our first author was Marc Brown, and we read one of his Arthur books!

Click on the image to see this title in the Stevens Memorial Library catalog!

I've mentioned this to a few classes, but! I'm hoping to encourage more kid-author work by letting students know that any book that they write themselves (using a craft book, or even just paper and some staples!) can be put into our libraries. If you know of any kid-authors that would appreciate having their book in an actual library, let them know about this great opportunity!

In some kindergarten classes, they've been talking about animal habitats and informational books. In those classes, we've read an example of Fiction and one Informational Book all about animals!

Younger Grades (K-2)

In the younger grades, we've been talking a lot about what happens in the library - but we haven't talked too much about what happens when you take your books home. It's important to be explicit about the expectations we have about the care and treatment of our library books.

The "NO NO NEVER" Box

Note: this isn't our exact box - ours is a little less "piratical"! 

The "No No Never" box is full of things you should never have around your library books at home - things like water, candy, scissors, glue, markers, a baby (a picture of a baby, that is!) and a puppy (a stuffed animal!). We brainstorm why you'd want to protect your library books from all of these things, and the kids have a lot of fun with it! If there's time, we read one of two books:

Click the image to find this in the Stevens Memorial Library Catalog!

OR

Click the image to find this in the Stevens Memorial Library Catalog!

Older Grades (3-5)

At this point in the school year, it's important that the older grades start to get familiar with using the chromebooks in the library. They'll be using them throughout the year for research and class projects, and the 5th graders will be expected to know how to find online resources once they get to middle school, so starting them on technology early in the year is crucial.

For most classes, we've just practiced logging on using the student ID and password assigned to each student. Then, we practice going to the Elementary Libraries website and finding our Online Databases page.With the 4th and 5th graders, we've explored the Gale databases a bit, and even gotten a chance to do some practice research! 

Using the chromebooks will be something we do throughout the year, so it's important that the students remember their username and password so we can spend less time logging in and more time learning! 

After the students become familiar with using the databases and online encyclopedias for research, we'll begin our discussion about Online Safety and Digital Citizenship. 

.....

Well, that's all for now, library detectives - see you soon!

Big Changes!

This week I'll be posting a November update on what we've been doing in the classes (spoiler alert: it involves the new chromebooks!), but I thought I'd share some pretty interesting news.

Photo credit: Kara Larcome, 2015.

In December, we'll be switching up the library schedule in order to maximize the library instruction time that every grade in every school has access to. Classes that don't have library time on the day I'm at your school: never fear! Switching up the schedule will free me up to meet with more teachers, do more collaboration, and focus on curriculum-centered library learning that will help our students be independent researchers! 

Stay tuned for more updates on this pretty big change.

See you later, Library Detectives!

October Review!

Woah, we're flying through the school year, with October already behind us! We had a great month in the elementary libraries - we went on scavenger hunts, we read silly stories, and we firmed up what we know about the differences between Fiction and Nonfiction.

Kindergarten - Grade 2

With the youngest library detectives, we're starting the year off with practicing how to use the library and our books. In order to learn how to be responsible for our books, and take care of them properly, we first need to know the Parts of a Book.

First, we read Here Are My Hands by Bill Martin, Jr. and John Archambault.

Click on the picture to find this title in the Stevens Memorial Library catalog!

We got a chance to move our bodies a bit while reading this book - when we heard the word "hands" we waived our hands in the air! When we heard "feet" we stomped our feet!

Afterwards, we talked about the parts of our bodies and how books have parts to them too. We talked about how the covers help protect the insides of the book just like our skin protects us. We talked about how the book's title can tell you what kind of book it's going to be (a happy book! a scary book!) just like a person's face can tell you what kind of mood their in (grumpy! excited!). We talked about how both people and books have spines, and that spines help keep us standing straight and tall. Book spines also have the secret code so it's important that when we put library books back, the spines are always facing out! 

Next, we talked about the rules for the inside of the book, where we learned that you have to read the words on the page...no matter what! That's when we read The Book With No Pictures (click on the link for a recommendation!) by B.J. Novak.

Grades 3-5

In the older grades, we've been making sure we're experts in what constitutes fiction and nonfiction before we move on to how to use both kinds of books in our daily lives. It's challenging, not only because of the language ("non-fiction" sounds a lot like it should mean "not real"), but because it seems like our older grades have trouble distinguishing historical fiction (fiction that uses real facts to tell a made-up story) from non-fiction (real facts, nothing made up).

First, we reviewed what Fiction and Non-fiction mean - what are the parts of a fiction story? What about the parts of a non-fiction book? After a review - including reinforcing what we know about the SECRET CODES - we had our first Fiction & Non-fiction Challenge!

See those piles of books on the tables at Kittredge? They're part of the challenge!

Early in the morning, I covered up the spine labels (a.k.a. the Secret Codes) of a bunch of books, and placed piles in the middle of the tables at each library. After our review, students broke into five different groups, and each group had to make a pile of the books that were fiction, and the books that were non-fiction - all without using the secret code! They had to look inside the books (because you can't judge a book by its cover, after all!) to determine what kind of book they were. It gave us an opportunity to talk about historical fiction, biographies, and a few other genres that were a bit tricky! By the end, the kids were feeling more confident than ever about knowing the difference between fiction and non-fiction.

Next up: Kindergarteners start to learn about authors, younger grades learn all about book care and the "No No Never" Box, 3rd grade starts a discussion about online safety, and the older grades discover all the amazing resources our libraries have online!

See you later, Library Detectives!