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March 21, 2008

Library books are too scary!

Last weekend, a mother asked me to help her find some books for her preschool daughter that might persuade her that all library books are not scary. She explained that for her daughter, any book where someone expressed fear, or there were surprises, or someone got angry, were all very stressful. Even beloved Mister Rogers was scary to this little girl on the days when he covered subjects like "What do you do with the mad that's inside you?

I tackled the subject enthusiastically, but a few shelves of books later I realized just how challenging the problem was for her. Almost all picture books have an arc to them, and most of the time, the peak of the book would be stressful to a very sensitive child. Think of how many books you've read where baby duck wanders away from mama duck, or where the curious dog goes out exploring and gets into trouble! For most children, it's a good, healthy way to have a little tension that then gets resolved at the end.

For this child, though, the stress of the library books became too much for her, and she began to refuse to read anything that came from the library. She was okay with her own books at home, because she knew them already. She knew they would come out happily, so she could bear the stressful middles. But library books are unknown. Beneath all those beautiful covers lurk lost, scared, worried, or angry characters!

Adult readers, I think, sometimes worry too much about kids finding a book scary. But some of us go the other direction and worry too little about it. I realized in looking for safe, sweet books that most of the books I love to use in storytime would send this child screaming from the room--anything by William Steig, say, or Lilly spending time in the Uncooperative Chair once again. So this gave me something to ponder, and also a good idea for a new bibliography.

Here are a couple I gave to the mom, if you ever need some happy, safe reading for yourself or for a child:

It sure isn't easy, being a kid!

Posted by susan at 11:41 AM | Comments (0)

March 7, 2008

Desk blogs

I know it's kind of annoyingly navel-gazing to blog about blogging, but I've been wrestling with our department's blog so it's on my mind.

I'd read before about the benefits of having a departmental desk blog, but it wasn't until Kate Hall at Park Ridge generously opened hers up to the YLA Managers to see that I realized just how useful it could be. With a staff of eleven, we generate a fair amount of email traffic, and at Summer Reading time the volume becomes unbearable. Just one program can generate 5 emails as details get straightened out. You must make a decision with each email of Do I save it? Do I file it? Do I print it out? Do I delete it? Lots of times you don't feel like making that decision at the moment, so the email stacks up and eventually you get the polite but threatening email from Computer Services that your emailing privileges may be cut off if you don't whittle your mailbox down to a manageable size.

With the blog, it's all kept, but it's all searchable. You can give things categories and tags so you can turn up everything on a particular subject. You can add comments to the original post rather than writing a whole new one. And you can have a sidebar with all those pesky wiki URLs and the other info that becomes so hard to track.

The hardest part is going to be getting everyone to check it routinely. An aggregator is only helpful if people remember to check THAT. So if anyone has a brilliant idea for how to build that into everyone's memory, I'd love to hear it, and I'd love to hear about how you are using your desk blog!

Posted by susan at 3:13 PM | Comments (0)