Is your child entering kindergarten this fall? If so, they won’t want to miss our 7th annual Welcome, Kindergarten! storytime. Children will hear special stories about going to kindergarten read by local kindergarten teachers, sing very lively songs and finish off the afternoon by doing a very special craft. Kindergarten book list and Countdown to Kindergarten calendar with fun activities to do just before school starts are included.
Registration begins August 7 at the library or by phone, 517-351-2420, ext 6855.
My new favorite website is Quora.com Quora is a place for people to post questions and receive responses from some of the most fascinating people in the world. I know, you are thinking "Wait, doesn't Yahoo! Answers do this?" Yes, it does, but badly, and is made fun of so often and so viciously online that I'm not even going to provide any links for you to follow. Plus, many of the "questions" posted to Yahoo!
Librarians are trained to locate information using a variety of techniques and are also trained to evaluate information in order to make sure that it's reliable. Here are a few of the more basic tricks that we use to help locate items. The techniques that I'm writing about will work for a patron using our Encore library catalog, but these tricks (with some tweaking, perhaps) also apply to searching catalogs and databases in general.
Books and Authors is an excellent database for finding books for casual reading. Organized in a friendly layout, with its book entries accompanied by recommendations, summaries, and reviews, this database excels in helping people locate works of fiction and popular nonfiction. You can find the database by following the link here. Also, you can get to the database by clicking on the "Research" button on the East Lansing Public Library's website. Once there, click on the "Alphabetical list of all databases" link and then on the "Books and Authors" link.
Our 6th annual Welcome Kindergarten!event took place on August 22. Thirty-one kindergarteners came for a fun-filled story time featuring local kindergarten teachers Julie Cawood, Emily Dunn, and Nancy McFee. These energetic teachers read stories and led the children in action-packed songs. Before leaving the children were invited to create a cute project that related to the last story, Eliza's Kindergarten Surprise.
To view photos of this event on the library's Flickr account, click here.
Is your child entering kindergarten this fall but was unable to attend our program?
The East Lansing Public Library has many picture books about getting ready to go to kindergarten that you can share with your child. Click here for our Welcome, Kindergarten! booklist.
To read a helpful article about getting your child ready for kindergarten on the SchoolFamily.com site, click here.
July 25th was the monthly meeting of the Out of this World book group. Our selection was Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time. The general consensus of the group was that it wasn’t a spectacular book. We didn’t find anything particularly wrong with it, we just weren’t as taken as we thought we would be by a Newberry award winner.
The problem, I believe, is that we were looking at the book with adult eyes. For myself, I remember first reading the book around the age of 12, and I thought, then, that it was amazing. Here, in Meg, was a character that I could truly identify with, who won the day, not in spite of, but because of her flaws. Now, over two decades later, I have read enough, and lived enough, that Meg, especially when she has her tantrum near the end of the book, just doesn’t have the same stature to me. It’s sort of the same feeling as when I read The Catcher in the Rye, which I read around the time I turned thirty: I just didn’t see what all the fuss was about. Both books, it seems, hold more power the earlier in your life that they are read. Please feel free to share your opinions in the comment section, or better yet, tell us in person at our next meeting.
The ELPL's first-ever Reader's Theater was a huge success! Thanks to the help of 2010 Michigan Teacher of the Year Rob Stephenson and his family, and our own Miss Karrie, participants were invited to act out some favorite stories. Jan Thomas was the winning author - her stories lend themselves to being silly, having fun and lots of expressive reading! Rebecca and Ed Emberley'sChicken Little was a hit as well. Plan to be a part of our next Reader's Theater on Tuesday, August 7, 10:30-11:30 in the North Foyer Meeting Room. Families welcome!
A parent attending Reader's Theater with his children shot some great video footage of the program - check them out:
on Mon, 6/17/2013 
the "questions" posted to Yahoo!
on Fri, 7/27/2012 
