World Read Aloud Day: March 9, 2011

This morning on the School Library Journal's facebook feed, I read that today, Wednesday, March 9, is World Read Aloud Day. What a great day to read to your children or come to a storytime at the library!

There's a good article at LitWorld's webpage explaining all the details and reasons behind a World Read Aloud Day: http://www.litworld.org/worldreadaloudday/ . Last year, in their first year doing this, they reached 40,000 participants in 35 countries! There is a form online where you can register your family as participants and get counted.

The benefits of reading out loud to young babies and children are numerous. Many pre-reading skills and a love of reading can be learned by simply reading to them.

If you don't have any children at home, try reading aloud to someone at a nursing home who cannot read for themselves anymore. Or if your children or grandchildren are far away, why not tape record yourself reading out loud a few bedtime stories and send it to them? If you would like to read aloud to them directly, try calling and reading a story or using Skype to show them the pictures at the same time. Grab a book and start reading out loud!

Looking for a fun and FREE way to celebrate the holidays together as a family? What are you doing this Monday or Tuesday night? You should come to our Family Christmas Program on Dec. 6th or 7th. It's held in the auditorium where we usually have storytime, and it looks like a lot of fun! The puppet play, "Santa and the Three Bears," is a really cute take on the story, "Goldilocks and the Three Bears."

You do need to register ahead of time so we can set aside your tickets. These shows fill up really fast! Here's a link with all the details: http://www.massillonlibrary.org/node/812
Or give us a call in the Children's Department at 330-832-5037. I hope to see you there!

Looking for new books? Try Dear Reader

Massillon Public Library offers this really cool feature on their website that I've been using for awhile and thought you might also like called "Dear Reader." Once you subscribe it will deliver an email with descriptions of new children's books in the library. Once a month, you'll get an email with a list of several good children's books to try, a picture of that book, and a little blurb describing the story. Then if it sounds good to you, there is a link right next to the picture that you can click to see if this book is available in our catalog. That makes it really easy to request that book and pick it up in our library the next time you stop in!

You can check this out by clicking here for all children's books (including chapter books, easy readers, etc.): http://www.massillonlibrary.org/node/472
or here for Picture books for chlildren: http://www.massillonlibrary.org/PictureBooks. From the library's home page, you can also click on the heading "Kid Stuff" and then select "Picture Books" or "Books for Kids" from the drop-down menu. Signing up is as easy as providing your email address!

If you like this feature, you can also subscribe to other categories too. The "Dear Reader" link off the home page allows you to choose book selections from best sellers, romance, mysteries, and many more categories. Try this link: http://www.massillonlibrary.org/booknews.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving! I hope all our library families have a wonderful, turkey-filled holiday! While you're preparing that turkey, I leave you with this song. It's a great one to sing to kids while dancing around the kitchen---as long as you don't mind being silly. Happy Thanksgiving!

Fat Turkey's Song (tune: "Did You Ever See a Lassie?")

Oh, gobble, gobble, gobble,
Fat turkeys, fat turkeys.
Oh gobble, gobble, gobble,
Fat turkeys are we.
We walk very proudly and gobble so loudly,
Gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble.

And if you're looking for a story before dinner, I highly recommend Alison Jackson's "I Know An Old Lady Who Swallowed a Pie."

Yummy in my Tummy

Now here's a story time that you can sink your teeth into! Starting the week of November 1st, when the trick or treat bags are (hopefully) still full of candy, we'll be talking about FOOD and BAKING and getting ready for Thanksgiving in our preschool storytime sessions. With a theme called, "Yummy in my Tummy" our programmers will present stories and songs about the five senses, children cooking in the kitchen with their favorite adults, and nervous turkeys trying to run away and hide from Thanksgiving cooks.

In Yum Yum! What Fun!, Katie and James are having too much fun cooking up something delicious to notice all the strange guests who stop by. What if one of those "guests" decides to snack on them instead?
Poor little Pea is not allowed any vegetable treats for dessert until he eats all of his sweets in Little Pea by Amy Krouse Rosenthal. Kids who refuse to eat their veggies will relate to Little Pea in this fun twist on this age-old dinnertime problem. We'll also see what would happen if gorillas left the zoo in search of a good lunch in Gladys Goes Out to Lunch by Derek Anderson.

And just in time for Thanksgiving meals, storytime goers will watch the flannel board story of I Know an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Pie by Allison Jackson. First she downs a jug of cider to moisten the pie (which really was too dry), then an entire squash, followed by a bowl of salad--and the whole darn turkey! Oh me, oh my!  (Although I have to admit I'm glad to hear "Oh me oh my!" used in this flannelboard story instead of the original "Perhaps she'll die" in the book. I've always been superstitious about saying that out loud when reading to the kids!)

There will be plenty of gobble, gobbles from our little preschool turkeys in songs and stories. Hope to see you at story time!

Operation Record a Story

This sounds like a great idea! Operation Record a Story lets kids hear their deployed military parent read a bedtime story to them. Publications International is donating 5,000 books to the USO and United Through Reading, who will then help military members record themselves reading the book for their children. Recording sites are located on Navy ships and at overseas bases, including those in Iraq and Afghanistan, and at select USOs worldwide. Their kids will receive in the mail both the book and a dvd of their parent reading that book out loud to them. Then they suggest that the other parent or caregiver record the child enjoying the dvd and send it back to the military parent so they can see how much it was appreciated.

Isn't that nice? The simple act of reading a bedtime story to your children, one of the most important things you can do with your child in terms of reading readiness (and just good bonding time!), can be so difficult when that parent is deployed for a long time. This makes it easier to maintain that important bedtime ritual. I imagine everyone in the family would enjoy seeing that dvd, don't you?

The titles include ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas, Sesame Street: Together at Heart, Dora the Explorer and Guess How Much I Miss You. There is a fact sheet (pdf) at http://portal.pubint.com/pubint/RAS_Video_panel/Op_RAS_Fact_Sheet.pdf.

Who's Afraid of a Scarecrow?

Right now in the beautiful fall season, with all the leaves turning bright colors and the corn fields turning into seas of brown stalks, he might be hard to find. But soon, after the corn stalks are cut down from the harvest, you'll see him out there again, guarding the fields from birds and animals who wish to eat the crops. It's the scarecrow! And this week in our new storytime sessions, we pay honor to the lonely scarecrow who protects his fields no matter the weather.

Who could be afraid of a scarecrow when we listen to adorable stories such as The Little Scarecrow Boy, written by the beloved author Margaret Wise Brown? In the middle of a field stood a scarecrow who hoped that the animals and birds would be his friends, and guess what? He got his wish in the story of Lonely Scarecrow by Tim Preston. The verses written in many books can actually become a song or action verse, as we discover in the board book, I'm a Dingle-Dangle Scarecrow. The non-fiction selection, Scarecrows, by Calvin Harris, uses beautiful illustrations to help us understand how helpful scarecrows can be to our farmers everywhere!

The theme "Scarecrows" also gives the children a chance to learn their body parts through songs and rhymes about our floppy scarecrow friends and through creative movement and music as we pretend to walk and stand like a scarecrow: straight one moment, floppy the next!

This week's storytimes begin Monday, October 18. You can still sign up your children for one of our storytimes by calling the Children's Department at 330-832-5037. Hope to see you there!