Grade-Level Reading Lists

This time of year, we sometimes get patrons who are asking for good books they can buy as presents for their nieces, nephews, and grandchildren. They may not see them often and may wish us to recommend books by grade level because they don't know what the children are currently reading.

Well, help is at hand! While we have fewer paper bibs and lists in the libraries, there are grade-level reading lists on Tales' Treehouse.

This is a great resource to share with grownups. To get there, go to the Treehouse, click on Swoop the Owl, then on Great Books. You'll see "Books by Grade Level" on that list.

We want to make sure there's a good mix of genres and interests on each list. Go have a look and see how we've done so far. If you have titles you'd love to see included, send them to Alyson Corcoran!

Developmentally Appropriate Technology

An article written earlier this year in the New York Times by technology expert Warren Buckleitner, editor of the Children's Technology Review.

He uses the developmental stages of psychologist Jean Piaget to help make decisions about what technologies are appropriate for children at different ages.

Read it and let us know what you think. Does this match up with what you experienced as a child, or what your children experienced? Do you have different ideas? What about technologies that the author didn't discuss? Where would you place them developmentally? Does this have implications for children's collections and programming?

Places to Go, Things to Do

This time of year, families often start looking for special things to do with their kids, either to celebrate the holidays or to enjoy time together while school's out. In addition to pointing them to our online calendar and the Dewey, and reminding them that storytimes are on hiatus Thanksgiving week and at the end of December, here's a couple other resources we can use to help them find out what's going on.

Kids Pages has a nice list of holiday events. It says "for November" at the top, but many of the listings include December dates.

Colorado Parent has a December calendar, as well.

Families (and you, too) can also use YourHub.com to find out about local happenings. Go to YourHub.com, and select your state, community (Denver Metro), and Neighborhood (Aurora, Centennial, Littleton, Glendale, Sheridan, etc.); click "Go to Your Hub." From there, you can click on Events on the left menu.

You'll get a weekly calendar with all events, but you can limit in a number of ways, including by "Children." Also, once they get this far, families can sign up to get an RSS feed of local events.

What other resources do you use to help families find things to do?

Facts on Fiction

Tool time!

I just came across this site earlier this year as I was working with a patron. It was a mom who wanted to know if there was a site for books that told parents what the content was (like Kids In Mind) does for movies).

Ta-dah! Facts on Fiction! What I appreciate about the site is that it is not "rating" the books as good or bad (which some of these sites do) but just providing the information and letting the parents make the call.

Another nice non-judgemental site is Common Sense Media, which provides parents with information about movies and TV, but also books, games, music, and web sites.

Anybody have another resource like this that you like to use?

One of my goals...

Something I'm interested in is how to make our collection for parenting issues and topics stronger and more accesible. I am a patron of the Lone Tree library in Douglas and am so impressed with their collection which they've named HIP (help in parenting). They have all the potty training, dealing with death, manners, new siblings, going to the doctors etc. picture books all in one place and all the parenting materials intended for adults all in one place. It is incredibly helpful and I've used that collection often.
I'm not crazy about how we currently shelve our parenting material at Smoky...some of it is in the sad, outdated parent collection we have, some in picture books and some upstairs in adult non-fiction.
How are other libraries handling this? How can we improve it?