My husband discovered this gem while browsing the bookstore the other day, and I was hooked from the first page. I did decide to wait and buy it on the Kindle because it was much cheaper, but I'm loving it as my first book of the summer. It's informative, funny and so perfect in how it addresses how relevant librarians truly are today. The author, Marilyn Johnson, is not a librarian, but I like that someone outside our field felt strongly enough to write a whole book about how we are anything but obsolete. An interesting side note is that she became interested in librarians after writing a book about obituaries--she found that librarians tended to have these really interesting lives. Not surprising.
Summer vacation has started, and the iPad arrived at my parent's house. Less than 48 hours old, let's just say that it's getting a whole lot of use in our household, and I know it's going to be amazing for elementary students when I get back to ISB in August. When I'm using the iPad, I'm looking at it from two points of view--the mama view and the teacher view.
Things I Am Loving from Both Perspectives...
1. It's smaller than I imagined but the perfect size for kids. Fits them nicely and not too bulky.
2. There are so many free apps or ones that only cost $.99. I've added a bunch and am trying them out one by one. There are lots of ABC apps for the younger ones and I found a Greek Gods one for the older readers.
3. My favorite app so far is Miss Spider's Tea Party. It cost $9.99 but is worth every penny (my daughter is reading it at this very moment) because the artwork is spectacular. You can either watch the story as a movie with words on the bottom or read the story yourself but with lots of interaction as you read. In addition, there is a matching game as well as a painting program. When there are more of this kind of book available, I'll be thrilled!
4. It's incredibly intuitive. Amazingly so. My 3 year old is navigating it almost seamlessly after only a short time. We are both trying to work on our sharing skills with the iPad.
5. One way to save a bit of money is get the free samples of chapter books for students. The covers look very cool sitting on the virtual bookshelf, and my thought is that kids can get a preview of books we have in the Hub and then check out the paper copy. A little taste to get them hooked.
5. One more free book (or at least a few chapters of the book) is Alice in Wonderland. Again, the illustrations are spectacular. As my mom said, "It's simply magical."
Alice in Wonderland
Lingering Thoughts/Concerns/Paradigm Shifts/Adjustments on my Journey
Because the books are so interactive, I found my daughter quite distracted by all the buttons to push while I was reading Miss Spider's Tea Party to her. It is set up so that there are different actions on each page-a teacup shaking, an ant stomping its foot-but all of these are controlled by the reader. She was more interested in pushing all the buttons and wasn't really listening to the story. At first this bothered me, but then I let go and realized she was having a blast. And that's what reading is about-having fun. This is where my own thinking is changing with things like Tumblebooks and now the iPad. Balance is everything to me, and I feel strongly that there is a place for both paper books and digital books.
The future is incredibly exciting for books and for us librarians. I have this gorgeous vision of kids entering the library with their own iPads in hand. They will choose books and check them out from me, much like Netflix is done on computers now. Once the due date arrives, the book is then deleted from the iPad.
Just think--no chasing down kids for overdue books!
A few months ago, International School of Bangkok's very generous PTA offered to donate a Kindle to our Learning Hub. And while I think the Kindle is a great reading tool, the iPad offers much more to a larger community of readers. I could easily picture a small group of students huddled around an iPad more than I could the Kindle, and the PTA agreed to the change. Since it is not yet available in Thailand, I had the iPad sent to my parents' house in the U.S. Lucky me gets to familiarize myself with it this summer, add apps, order some books and somehow figure out a way to fairly share one iPad with a whole lot of students during recess time.
Still on a high from the summer reading workshop, a friend stopped me the other day to pitch an idea:
What if I held a tandem workshop on summer writing, but from the perspective of setting up a family blog and providing this fun, authentic opportunity for kids to continue their writing over the vacation?
Needless to say, I loved the idea and set out to find Chrissy, our soon-to-be tech gal in elementary. She was keen as well and we dove right into the planning.
Keeping it simple, we focused on three things:
Why? (why would you blog? what kind of blog will you have?)
How? (getting them set up from the ground up--we used Wordpress because it's the platform our students will use in school)
What? (what will kids and parents write about?)
Creating the list of cool things to blog about was fun and gave me ideas for my own family blog this summer. Our main goal here was to really encourage the family aspect of the blog. What kinds of memories are families creating and wouldn't it be awesome to have them all written down as a digital scrapbook? Why not all take turns writing a post?
Here's what we came up with:
1. Places You Are Visiting
2. Good Books You've Read
3. Day Trips
4. Reflections (my favorite part of the day)
5. Top Ten (things to do on a rainy day, restaurants in my hometown, ways I annoy my brother during the break)
6. Best and Worst of the Summer
7. Artwork
8. Photography piece (how to start noticing things more)
9. A Day in the Life of...
10. In My Own Backyard (science, flowers, wondering--use video for this)
11. Visitors
12. Mapping Out Your Special Place (draw a map of finding small moments in the map)
13. Things To Do In Our Town
14. Food
15. Small Moments
We had about 25 interested and engaged parents in attendance this morning. The workshop was fun and parents gave us tons more ideas about what they want to learn next.
Wow! Our Percy Jackson day was a huge hit. Over 100 kids descended upon the Hub after school, where the organizers and I (as Medusa!) met them at the door with a ticket showing all their choices. Something we found that worked really well was promoting the event about 2 weeks before it happened--it really created a buzz of excitement. I literally had kids stopping me in the halls to tell me how many days were left before Percy Jackson day. My advice to anyone hosting their own character day is to keep it simple. I did at first, but then about three days before, I started to panic and think the activities weren't exciting enough to hold their attention. A sweet 5th grader was talking with me, and I asked his advice about the various Greek god and goddess coloring sheets in one center (I thought it would be boring). He kindly told me that kids don't really care--they just want to be together and having fun. And during the event, he sought me out to give me a big "I told you so" when we saw that the coloring center was filled to capacity!
The students and I are already planning next year's Celebrating Characters We Love events. Garfield is one they are thinking will be fun. Whatever will I wear?
I've used the Skype An Author network three times this year, and each time has been nothing short of amazing. Ten minutes of time with an author always seems like it's going to be too short, but it ends up to be perfect.
This morning, a 4th grade class met with the fabulous Bruce Hale. He was funny, down-to-earth and instantly connected with the kids. Plus, we were all cracking up at his jokes and anecdotes.
In 10 minutes time, we had a bunch of great student questions answered and even got to listen to Bruce read the first part of one of his books. Hearing the words from the author himself is magical, and I become downright giddy when I see authors talking about their work. It was easy to see that Bruce would be a great visiting author at a school--another reason I love Skype An Author. To get a taste of what an author would be like as a potential visitor is invaluable.
The second we finished, a ton of kids ran to check out his Chet Gecko books. Thanks, Bruce Hale!
I loved talking with parents yesterday about tips on how to keep kids reading over the summer. Every time I think reading with kids is pretty straightforward, I am reminded that parents still welcome all the advice they can get. One of the ideas I talked about as a fun idea for summer was to create book baskets with your kids. Here are some tips I shared with parents on how to do that:
For Younger Readers
1. I don't use any bookshelves for my daughter's books; instead we use various baskets. They are placed in many rooms in the house (1 in the living room as in the above photo, 2 in her room and 1 in our bedroom) so we never have to go far to find a book. Plus, baskets look lovely.
2. I keep a bunch of books in the closet and 'freshen' the basket every now and then. My daughter helps me with this, and even at the age of 3, she knows what she is tired of having in her basket.
3. I add a few non-fiction books to give her a variety of choices. She tends to not gravitate towards these herself, so I put these books on the outside of the basket to hopefully capture her attention.
4. Definitely put some beginning chapter books in there, even for the wee ones.
For Older Readers (I tied this into how we set up our classroom libraries and how easy this is for kids to make book choices)
1. Take all the books off the bookshelf and dump them on the floor. Kids love this part!
2. Have all your empty baskets lined up.
3. Start looking at the books with your child. What do you notice goes together? Begin making categories like "Books with Strong Girl Characters" or "Science Books" or "Books That Crack Me Up." The ideas kids have are great, plus it's using the math skill of classifying.
4. Make the tags either by hand or on the computer. Place the baskets wherever your child can have easy access to them.
The author, Marilyn Johnson, is not a librarian, but I like that someone outside our field felt strongly enough to write a whole book about how we are anything but obsolete. An interesting side note is that she became interested in librarians after writing a book about obituaries--she found that librarians tended to have these really interesting lives. Not surprising. 
A few months ago, International School of Bangkok's very generous PTA offered to donate a Kindle to our Learning Hub. And while I think the Kindle is a great reading tool, the iPad offers much more to a larger community of readers. I could easily picture a small group of students huddled around an iPad more than I could the Kindle, and the PTA agreed to the change. Since it is not yet available in Thailand, I had the iPad sent to my parents' house in the U.S. Lucky me gets to familiarize myself with it this summer, add apps, order some books and somehow figure out a way to fairly share one iPad with a whole lot of students during recess time. 
My advice to anyone hosting their own character day is to keep it simple. I did at first, but then about three days before, I started to panic and think the activities weren't exciting enough to hold their attention. A sweet 5th grader was talking with me, and I asked his advice about the various Greek god and goddess coloring sheets in one center (I thought it would be boring). He kindly told me that kids don't really care--they just want to be together and having fun. And during the event, he sought me out to give me a big "I told you so" when we saw that the coloring center was filled to capacity! 
