The SurRural Librarian

If you’re lucky enough to have a book budget for next year, then your thoughts might soon be turning to Collection Development, or as it’s known in the real world – Shopping!

I love that spring cleaning time comes right before the start of the next fiscal year, because now I can take that stack of School Library Journals out to the hammock and start tearing out the pages. I do eventually use the computer for most of my collection development tasks, but I love good old print for the ease with which I can lay on my back & swing without having to squint to see my screen in the sun.

Of course, I have to do the usual statistic gathering – collection evaluation, finding out new units the teachers are doing next year, deciding which percentage I can spend on picture books, but for now – the field is wide open. And I just love browsing when I know I’ll have money to spend.

Here are some of my favorite (possibly non-traditional) ways to look for books to buy.

A trip to the Eric Carle Museum Library. If you are any where near Amherst, MA, I highly recommend traveling to the museum and spending some quality time with their picture book collection. You can peruse to your heart’s content and they have a magnificent collection of new & old picture books. Bring something to take copious notes with!

Your local independent book store. Again, spend hours browsing & reading and take notes. I always let the booksellers know who I am and what I’m up to, it’s a nice way to connect and I don’t want anyone to feel weirded out by the adult hanging out in the kid’s section all afternoon. Booksellers, like librarians, are an opinionated & quirky bunch, so you’re sure to find different books than you would on the shelves of box stores or the covers of publisher catalogs. And yes, I also lurk the stacks of my public libraries.

Blogs. This year make sure to check out Fuse 8’s Top 100 Picture Books Poll Results for any titles you might be missing from your collection. Elizabeth Bird has done a wonderful job of detailing each book in this top 100 list. She’s got links to super book talk resources like videos and gorgeous pictures from the books.  This list is compiled from her reader’s top 10 lists, and I find it an interesting slant on the usual.

Some of my favorite independent blogs for book reviews are:
planetesme.blogspot.com
hiplibrariansbookblog.blog-city.com
abbylibrarian.blogspot.com
6traits.wordpress.com
And check out the fabulous Vintage Kids Books My Kid Loves for other titles you might want to dig up used on Amazon. www.vintagechildrensbooksmykidloves.com

Let children mark up your catalogs. I let my 7 year old go crazy with a marker in my stack of journals, flyers & catalogs, just circling the books she thinks look interesting. Getting input from kids on the title & cover-appeal of books is a great help when you’re deciding which will fly off the shelves. I’m planning some class time where I give each student 10 stickers with their name on them and a stack of catalogs, and ask them to choose ten books they think I should buy. That would be a fun end of the year activity. We could work in some math too. Or you could just leave them out on the tables year-round.

Vermonters who use Titlewave will be glad to know that they have the DCF, Red Clover & GMBA lists built right in. Thanks Grace!

OOh, I’m very happy about this.

As part of its fifth annual Pegasus Awards, the Poetry Foundation has selected Mary Ann Hoberman as Children’s Poet Laureate. Hoberman inherits the two-year position, which comes with a $25,000 prize, from Jack Prelutsky. The purpose of the award is to raise awareness of poetry among children.

You do realize The Seven Silly Eaters is just about the most perfect read-aloud ever written, don’t you? Yes, yes it is.

Since school started, I’ve been reading like crazy. Here are a few titles that are must buys for the year.
Chains by Laurie Halse Anderson is fabulous. Isabel is a rare character, a slave from the North. Her story brings so much life to the time period, so much depth to the sketch of history students at this age receive – how many of your students do you think realize there were so many slaves in NYC, or even that the city was occupied by the British during the war? Because of the popularity of Speak, I already have readers lining up for this book, which may not have been the case with another author. I’m sure this book will land in the hands of students who don’t usually read historical fiction, and I hope they surprise themselves by how much they enjoy it. With the promise of a sequel to come, this might be just the gateway book I’m looking for! (I posted this review on The Picnic Basket.)

Toy Dance Party by Emily Jenkins
I haven’t even finished this sequel to my favorite book in the whole wide world, but I love it already. LOL funny. Truly, I’m buying a case for the birthdays!
Chester by Melanie Watt
Ha ha ha ha. This book is already a big hit with my primary students. I drive a carpool of them, and listened to one read it to the others on the way home the other day, they just love it. With Scaredy Squirrel & Chester, Melanie Watt is a power house for these kids, best thing to happen to picture books since Mo Willems.

Owly by Andy Runton
The Owly books are a blockbuster. I have kids in every grade lining up for them. I keep all my graphic novels in baskets now because they circulate so often. Owly doesn’t even have its own basket – they are never in the library long enough. Completely wordless & way cute, these are the best thing to happen for early & reluctant readers in a while. I can’t believe how much the kids love these.

Other huge hits that my library couldn’t do without right now are Bone, Ivy & Bean and Amelia Rules.

OOh, pretty. Françoise Mouly (New Yorker art editor) and Art Spiegelman (her husband, acclaimed cartoonist) came out this spring with TOON Books,  comics for early readers! I have a feeling these are going to be a big hit at my school. The covers on these babies are beautiful and judging by the sample pages on their (great looking) website, the insides are mighty fine too.

Considering every comic/graphic novel I have for the under-10 set is falling apart, I’d better lay some of these in for fall.

has entire picture books online! I’ve bought many picture books (based on reviews) that have turned out to be dogs. I always check Amazon to see if they have a “Search Inside” version – but often they don’t. This is even better – you can check out the entire book. The selection is pretty small now, but I hope they keep it up. A handy collection development tool, and it’s fun watching the pages turn.

Here in Vermont, we’re having a perfect storm of book awards. Voting for this year’s books and lists for next year are popping up all over.

The DCF committee is now offering online voting (yay Steve!) and their super new list is up too. (pdf) They’re going to get big props from my kids for including Diary of a Wimpy Kid. It probably won’t completely make up for the lack of Rick Riordan books, but it’s a start.

The 2008/09 Red Clover list is online.

Librarians need to send in the votes for both the DCF & Red Clover awards by Friday, April 11.

The Green Mountain Book Award tallies are due May 2nd, forms for reporting can be found one their site. The new list isn’t online yet, but was sent out to the listservs. Great books. (Sarah Vowell – wow!)

13 Little Blue Envelopes by Maureen Johnson
Assassination Vacation by Sarah Vowell
The Astonishing Adventures of Fanboy and Goth Girl by Barry Lyga
The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Vol. 1: The Pox Party by M.T. Anderson
Black and White by Paul Volponi
The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
Bucking the Sarge by Christopher Paul Curtis
Crank by Ellen Hopkins
Dairy Queen by Catherine Murdock
Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel
His Majesty’s Dragon by Naomi Novik
Inexcusable by Chris Lynch
It’s Kind of a Funny Story by Nick Vizzini
Miracle in the Andes: 72 Days on the Mountain and My Long Trek Home by Nando Parrado with Vince Rause
The Plain Janes by Cecil Castellucci

With a new movie coming out every six hours based on a children’s book, I have learned to ignore the hype. So, it’s got to be a big deal for me to pay attention to another one. Ok, well, here’s a big deal.

Did you know that Spike Jonze (Being John Malkovich, Adaptation) and Dave Eggers (A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius) have written a screenplay for Where The Wild Things Are?
Wha?

Footage from the film may or may not have been leaked online this weekend. Frankly, don’t care. I just want this thing now. I won’t post images here (big studio meanies are on patrol), if you Google them, there are plenty. They look gorgeous.

The Kindergarten and Primary classes greatly enjoyed Max’s Words by Kate Banks, a Red Clover book. We took inspiration from Max’s huge piles of words cut from magazines to sort our own collection of words (much thanks goes to the kindergartener at home willing to help with the cutting). Students came up with their own sorting schemes, including number of letters, first letters, vowel sounds, even width of font. The results look like nonsensical ransom notes. (If you’ve got the time, get the students to cut out their own words.)

The book is a great read-aloud and the project was a fun & simple literacy lesson. Yay, Red Clover!

Flotsam, by David Wiesner, Red Clover book and recent winner of the Quill award was a real fun read with the primary grades. First, we went through the book together (Wordless books are a challenge for read aloud. What works for me is letting each student narrate one page as I project it. Elmos are fabulous for this. )

Then, inspired by the wonderful illustrations and the fun ideas in the book, we made some great art.

We made our own versions of under-the-sea fantasy worlds and took photos within photos over time, like those in the book. It was really fun helping the kids figure out where they would be in the finished product. The last kids often said – aw, we’ll be so tiny! Then, after some thought they’d realize it went backward, and the most recent photo was the largest.

Oh, and there’s a beautiful book trailer at this site that might come in handy for anyone booktalking Flotsam.

I’m still disappointed by the spotty information I’ve found on graphic novels for k-8, but this new pamphlet from ALA has some interesting tips on shelving and challenges.

Graphic novels: Suggestions for Librarians
 (pdf)
ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom has prepared a downloadable PDF booklet (with artwork by Sergio Aragonés), in conjunction with the National Coalition Against Censorship and the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, that offers tips on how to develop a graphic novel collection, ways to deal with challenges in libraries, and where to shelve them….

I first heard of Neil Gaiman from the students at the college where I used to work. I bought the Sandman series for that library and won instant approval for being so cool. Of course, I hadn’t read them and still haven’t (it’s easy to impress when you’re a librarian. You just buy stuff and the kids love you. You don’t even have to read it.) But now I’ve got a huge pile of Gaiman for grownups next to my bed, waiting for me to have a second’s break from YA.

Why the sudden interest, you ask?

The Dad I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish is about as close to perfect as picture books come. I’ve been raving about it to everyone who will listen. (Your turn!)

Goldfish is the bomb. It’s hilarious. It’s one of the books that’s a perfect storm of excellent writing and fabulous illustrations. My four year old and I crack up just listening to it in the car on my iPod. But the pictures – bam! So funny. Dave McKean, what a guy.

I’m also searching for the time to read Coraline with my 5th graders, and can’t wait to try out The Wolves in the Walls with the 3rd graders who keep asking me for “darker” books. (Really they do. They want books on Black Sabbath too.)

Gaiman is one of the few writers who don’t underestimate the intelligence of kids. I just love how he doesn’t lay everything out, he leaves you something to ponder. Why does the dad just keep reading his paper? Why the Queen of Melanesia? Why does his kid sister mumble when his mom comes home? (An excellent example of an illustrator and author working together.)

I’m sure Gaiman’s not for everyone. As in many of Raold Dahl’s books, his grownups are often clueless. The dad in Goldfish, and the parents in Coraline, might as well be mumbling like the parents in the Peanuts TV shows. The books are dark, and sometimes a little bit scary.

Like I said, perfect.

I’ve been reading Farfallina & Marcell by Holly Keller with my first & second grade classes for a couple years and I like it more and more. It’s an easy read for the age group, so it eases them back into sitting still and listening to a story. And it’s got a caterpillar changing into a butterfly, which gives the kids a chance to revisit last year’s monarch studies.

But what makes it right on target for a first day of school read is the way it leads into good conversations about friendships. The characters are consistently considerate of each other and treat each other well. When they meet again after each has grown and changed, neither recognizes their friend at first. Which gives us a chance to look around at our pals and see how much we’ve all grown, plus reminds us to play nice.

And what kid wouldn’t like saying Farfallina out loud?

I like it. It’s another of the millions of titles that seem to have flown under the radar, so I like to share it.

Follett is emailing offers of free copies of The Library Lion. I saw this book on the Eric Carle Museum’s new book shelf the other day. I can’t wait until Booklist reviews it.
A lion walks into a library. (So far so good). And there’s the uptight librarian Miss(!) Merriweather who’s only concerned with…rules. Is the lion breaking any library rules? No? Well then he can stay, as long as he’s quiet. I do believe I even spotted a card catalog. Ah, the good ol’ days.

You know, I wouldn’t be so annoyed by this book if I weren’t so turned off by these frequent attempts by publishers to suck up to librarians. How many mediocre kids books about librarians do they expect us to by? They know we’re all out here, thinking about what books to read to the little kids on the first day of school. They know we’re the ones with the book budgets. And who wouldn’t love a charming little book that told a good story as well as introducing the concept of library to little kids? Well, you know what, I would. So publish one!

Oh, and Follett includes a darling little plush lion. Let the love fest begin.