Booktalk: Unfortunate Children Who Find Weird Stuff In Their Walls!

I'm pretty comfortable doing storytimes at this point, but finding themes and formats to engage older elementary and early middle schoolers can be tough for me. UCWFWSITW (as I shall henceforth abbreviate this booktalk) is my fallback, as it's been a show-stealer every time and the kids always check out a chunk of the books I display. It's a great twist on smart kidlit because it marries realistic fiction themes to fantastical settings.

Booktalk/Read-Aloud: Unfortunate Children Who Find Weird Stuff Living In Their Walls! (or, Extraordinary Worlds in Ordinary Places)

Age group: 4th-6th grade (reasonably mature 3rd graders can also handle it)

Background/Introduction: Everyone knows that ordinary-looking wardrobes are connected to magical lands, and unassuming train platforms can lead to adventure in other worlds. But what else is hidden in the everyday objects around you? The books I'm going to tell you about today all feature quirky characters who fall on hard times - usually orphans or outcasts - and end up living in strange houses that lead to other worlds. You'd be amazed what you can find in your walls, for instance. Haven't you always wondered if that scratching you hear at night is a mouse... or a boggart?! (Here I usually make a scritching sound on a book or a table for the mouse, then startle them with the boggart bit. Unless they're 5th and 6th graders; then I cop to a certain amount of sarcasm.)

Display/Booktalk: I set up a table with selections from the following series. I spend maybe 30 seconds on each series, describing the plot briefly and leaving them with a "dangling carrot." (Here plot summaries are included, courtesy of Novelist, for my colleagues.)

• Spiderwick Chronicles by Tony DiTerlizzi and Holly Black - This popular series features siblings who move into an eerie old house and find a field guide that reveals their home is infested with creatures - some of whom are out for evil. It was recently made into a movie so it is a natural connection point with kids. Five books in the series, plus numerous spinoffs, including an eye-grabbingly illustrated "field guide."
  
• Green Knowe Chronicles by L.M. Boston - Tolly comes to live with his great-grandmother in an ancient house and becomes friends with three children who lived there in the seventeenth century. As the series progresses, they find various magical artifacts in the house. Six volumes in this series.
  
• Pure Dead Magic series by Debi Gliori - When their father is kidnapped and danger looms, the Strega-Borgia children, their mysterious new nanny, and a giant tarantula use magic and trips through the Internet to bring peace to their Scottish castle. Six books of Lemony Snicket-esque insanity.
  
• Ulysses Moore series by Pierdomenico Baccalario - After moving from London to an old mansion on the English coast, eleven-year-old twins discover that their new home has twisting tunnels, strange artifacts from around the world, and a mysterious, locked door. This series currently has four volumes.
  
• Underland Chronicles by Suzanne Collins - A boy sets off to rescue his baby sister from the Underland, inhabited by rats, spiders and cockroaches, which is under his New York City apartment via an air duct. Five books in this series so far.
  
• Orphan stories by Barbara Brooks Wallace - Though not exactly a series, these books (Ghosts in the Gallery, Peppermints in the Parlor, etc.) are parodies of the "orphans in strange houses stumbling upon creepy creatures and ghosts" genre.
  
• The House with a Clock in Its Walls by John Bellairs - A boy goes to live with his magician uncle in a mansion that has a clock hidden in the walls which is ticking off the minutes until doomsday. Bellairs has written many other books of this type.
  

I also throw the following on the table because their style or content relates them somewhat (mostly I just want every kid to have the opportunity to check something out!):

• 100 Cupboards by N.D. Wilson
• Horns and Wrinkles by Joseph Helgerson and Nicoletta Ceccoli
• The Mysterious Benedict Society by Trenton Lee Stewart
  
• Series of Unfortunate Events books by Lemony Snicket
• The Castle in the Attic by Elizabeth Winthrop
  
• The Game of Sunken Places by M.T. Anderson

Read-aloud: After I zip through the booktalks, I read aloud a fantastic picture book for older kids, Neil Gaiman's Wolves in the Walls. This book is like a graphic novel in picture book format, with really interesting collage-style illustrations by Gaiman's usual collaborator Dave McKean. Since the book is funny as well as creepy, it sucks the kids right in. Even the most stubborn pouters end up joining in on the great refrain, "If the wolves come out of the walls... it's all over!" I sometimes crinkle tissue paper in my hand to imitate the rustling sound of the wolves.

For older classes, I sometimes forgo Wolves in the Walls in favor of reading aloud from Neil Gaiman's Coraline, about a girl who finds a mysterious door in her house that crosses into another dimension, where she meets evil versions of her mom and dad. This book is genuinely spooky - gives me shivers every time. I got an ARC of the graphic novel version of Coraline at ALA Midwinter and passed it around last time I did this booktalk; after I was done, the boys huddled around it for almost 15 minutes, pointing out the grossest illustrations. Now that's success!

Additional uses: If you didn't want to do this as a booktalk/read-aloud, it works just as well as a display. You could use a slogan like, "What's in YOUR walls?" and make a working paper doorway with a creepy creature hiding behind it.

Feisty Bear and The Little Connies

West Oak Lane had a wonderful time kicking off our Family Storyhour program last month. Feisty Bear from The Little Connies came out and shared interactive and fun stories about sharing and caring.


A shot of the action. Here, Connie Bear called on the assistance of one of the parents.

Feisty Bear showed up on time for the event and brought along her own little sound system and a CD for the program. She was great with the kids and was able to keep the room under control--which is no easy feat when dealing with a room of 1-10 year olds! Feisty Bear also left a copy of The Little Connies cd, which is full of toe-tapping, sing-along songs.

Two things I try to do with every program, whether it's something I put on myself or something presented by an outside performer: snacks and displays. Snacks as part of a program can be easily explained--EVERYONE loves snacks!


I went a little crazy and made up individual baggies of pretzels and candy. This was, however, a special night! Cookies and juice normally suffice--as long as everyone keeps the food in the meeting room...

Displays for programs can be a lot of fun. For this particular program, since it was a family storytime, I focused on picturebooks that are popular both in my branch as well as in general.


Here's another crowd shot, but check out the 35+ books on display!!!

If you're looking for a fun, interactive, and affordable library program, I definitely recommend The Little Connies!!!

A Few Suggested Titles For a 3rd Grade Boy Interested in African American Fiction

If you look in the FLP online catalog (the website/public one) and type in African American Fiction you’ll get a large list, but not too large that you can’t pick a few children’s titles out. PS: The last one on this list may be too old, content-wise, for the patron in question (a Third Grade boy).

My Father’s Dragon. Ruth Stiles Gannett.
A volume that's sure to be treasured for years to come, this 50th anniversary edition of a children's classic contains the three tales of "My Father's Dragon: Elmer and the Dragon, The Dragons of Blueland", and the title story.

Rescue on the Outer Banks. Candace Ransom
Sam Deal and his horse, Ginger, help an African-American lifesaving crew rescue shipwreck victims off the coast of North Carolina in 1896.

Junebug. Alice Mead.
An inquisitive young boy who lives with his mother and younger sister in a rough housing project in New Haven, Connecticut, approaches his tenth birthday with a mixture of anticipation and worry.


Hot City. Barbara Joose.
Mimi and her little brother Joe escape from home and the city's summer heat to read and dream about princesses and dinosaurs in the cool,…

Scorpions. Walter Dean Myers.
Reluctantly taking on the leadership of the Harlem gang, the Scorpions, Jamal finds that his enemies treat him with respect when he …

(sorry: no cover images on this one...kind of in a rush today. I'll come back and fill in later.)

Story-Hour oops

I thought I'd share something funny that happened to me today that illustrates how experience is helpful, since I have no idea what I'm doing yet and if I were more seasoned then this little oops wouldn't have happened. I've been doing a Pre-K storytime at one of my local elementary schools, and at the teacher's request I've been using books that relate to their theme of the week. I went to do one today, and I brought my three books, and when I got there the teacher told me that she'd just read one of them to the kids yesterday. So I smiled and laughed and tried to read the other two slowly.

What I should have done, I realize now, is had either an extra book along just in case or just something little memorized to take up a bit of time in the case of the unexpected happening. I'm probably not the only one that this has happened to, so if anybody has other anecdotes or tips for avoiding this kind of situation, do share.

Reader's Advisory

Readers' Advisory – Use this label for RA strategies and particular recommendations, as well as book talks. For example, “Here are books I have recommended to kids who want more wizards and magic now that Harry Potter is done,” or "I had a great RA experience when book talking to a small group of 4th graders today!"

After-school

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SRG (Summer Reading Game) – Use this label for posts relating to programming, outreach, prizes, ideas, or questions related to the Summer Reading Game. Example: “Here are some suggestions for making your SRG school visits easy and fun…” If you're suggesting a website for activities or a resource for additional prizes, please use a second label as appropriate.

Children's Programming

Children's Programming - Use this label for all non-storyhour programs. This includes book clubs, outside performers, chess clubs, and any programming that is librarian-generated.

Guidelines and labels

Some of our labels have now been defined and posted. You can browse labels on the left hand side of the screen or you can read what we've added so far by clicking here. Please remember to use labels for your posts. If you think we need to add a label, please contact Heather S. so that we don't have any labeling redundancies. There remains a considerable amount of labels that have yet to be posted; please be patient as we get those posted.

Guidelines for posting are still in the works and much of that information was established in the initial "Blogability" email sent out to interested parties. Still, bear in mind that this blog will, for the foreseeable future, remain a children's librarian blog. So, teen and adult interests should be reserved for another forum.

Collection Development

Collection Development – Use this label for resources or questions about your library's collection of books and other media. For example, "I recently pruned and weeded all my jSeries books. Here's how I went about it..."

Games

Games - Use this label to discuss the use of games in your library, whether board games, traditional games like chess or checkers, or video games. For example, "The other day I whipped up a Dance Dance Revolution Tournament when the kids were bored. Learn from my mistakes!..."

Lapsit

Lapsit – Use this label for programming for babies 6-24 months and their parents, including infant storytimes.

Storytelling

Storytelling - Use this label for discussing storytelling techniques, resources, or favorite examples. Do not confuse it with the Storyhour label, which is used for reading books aloud within the context of a storytime program. Storytelling refers to a more organic art form that sometimes incorporates improvisation or costume and often originates from a particular oral tradition.

Displays

Displays – Use this label for visual displays of books or other media you have created in your library, or for useful displays you have seen elsewhere.

Resources

Resources – Use this label for general print resources well as people, e.g. "Liz is a great resource for Lapsit programs!" Use the label Websites in addition to this one if your resource is online.

Storyhours

Storyhours – Use this label for regularly scheduled storyhours (also known as storytimes) at your library when outlining a favorite storytime theme, discussing why a storyhour didn't work, etc. For example, "Today's Earth Day-themed story hour was particularly successful; here are the books, fingerplays, songs, and crafts I used."

Outreach - Preschool

Outreach – Preschool - Use this label for discussing outreach visits and strategies for preschool locations (daycares, HeadStart, etc.).

New York Times - March 16, 2008
Ideas & Trends
Start Writing the Eulogies for Print Encyclopedias
By NOAM COHEN
IT has never been easier to read up on a favorite topic, whether it’s an obscure philosophy, a tiny insect or an overexposed pop star. Just don’t count on being able to thumb through the printed pages of an encyclopedia to do it.
A series of announcements from publishers across the globe in the last few weeks suggests that the long migration to the Internet has picked up pace, and that ahead of other books, magazines and even newspapers, the classic multivolume encyclopedia is well on its way to becoming the first casualty in the end of print.
Back in the 1990s, Encyclopaedia Britannica led the pack in coming to terms with the idea that the public no longer viewed ownership of the multivolume compendium of information as a ticket to be punched on the way to the upper middle class — or at least as the oracle of first resort for copying a book report.
Sales of Britannica’s 32 volumes peaked in 1990, but in the next six years, they dropped 60 percent, and the company moved quickly to reinvent itself online. In 1996, Britannica eliminated its legendary staff of 1,000 door-to-door salesmen, already down from a high of 2,000 in the 1970s, in the face of competition from Microsoft’s Encarta encyclopedia for home computers.
Jorge Aguilar-Cauz, president of Encyclopaedia Britannica Inc., a private company based in Chicago, said that the print edition was still profitable, but that sales were just 10 percent of what they were in 1990. Customers are mostly schools and libraries.
It was only last month, however, that the publisher of Germany’s foremost multivolume encyclopedia, Brockhaus, took similar action, announcing that in April it would be putting online, free, all 300,000 of its articles, vetted by scholars over 200 years of print editions. (Brockhaus hopes to make money by selling ads on its site.) At the same time, the publishing house said it couldn’t promise that it would ever produce another print edition, something it has done regularly since the encyclopedia appeared in Leipzig in 1808.
Publishers in Denmark and France, too, are rethinking the commercial viability of their encyclopedias. A one-volume French encyclopedia, Quid, lost its publisher last month, and may only survive online. The largest publisher in Denmark, Gyldendal, has decided that the subscription plan for its online encyclopedia is misguided (it stopped a print edition in 2006). It plans to come up with another way to support itself.
“There is some kind of sadness,” said Nicole Weiffen-Aumann, a spokeswoman for Brockhaus, “but on the other side, many people are happy, looking forward to our new product — both things you can find in our company.” She added: “There are many people that say, ‘When I was very young I bought my first encyclopedia from Brockhaus, and there will be no next edition, I can’t believe it.’ ”
The Encyclopedia Americana still has good sales in print volumes, said Greg Worrell, president of Scholastic Classroom and Library Group, but the company is focusing on its online outlets. He said it was still determining a print plan, but added, “the likelihood is there will not be the 2009 multivolume print version.”
To scholars, the ready access to updated information online is a net gain for the public. But that doesn’t mean that they can’t mourn the passing of a household icon — a set of knowledge-packed books on their own reserved shelves that even parents had to defer to.
“I remember in my own childhood in the 1940s, early ’50s, I and my parents would sit around the table and look at the encyclopedia together,” said Larry Hickman, director of a center at Southern Illinois University devoted to the education pioneer John Dewey. “In the old days, the Encyclopaedia Britannica or the World Book encyclopedia was regarded as authoritative,” he recalled, laughing as he agreed, “That’s why you would copy it for your book report.”
But Mr. Hickman said that parents and children can have the same discussions “seated in front of the computer, the electronic hearth, as I like to call it.” And he said that losing a set of books considered infallible was actually a good thing for developing critical thinking.
Yet, as encyclopedia publishers struggle, the Internet age has become a golden one for the newer kind of encyclopedia.
An ambitious project to catalog online all known species on earth — with the even-more-ambitious title the Encyclopedia of Life — went live last month. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, a project that began online in 1995 and has never been in print and never will be, is chugging along with nearly 1,000 entries that are vetted by an academic board of more that 100 scholars for a total of 10 million words.
And then there is the behemoth Wikipedia, a project that has no board to vet articles and is created by thousands of volunteers, with more than two million articles in English and an additional five million in a babel of other languages.
Wikipedia is regularly among the top 10 most visited sites on the Internet throughout the world — maybe in part because there’s a lot more there than meets the needs of the average term paper. The superabundance of less-than-prized information on the site has led to a phenomenon called “wiki-groaning,” which involves comparing the length of seemingly disparate articles to humorous effect. Lightsaber Combat beats out Modern Warfare, for example, and John Locke, the character from the TV show “Lost,” edges out the other John Locke, whoever he was.
Encyclopedia publishers, while taking swipes at Wikipedia’s unreliability since it can be edited by anyone, have clearly adopted some of its lessons. They are incorporating more photographs and suggestions from readers to improve online content, and they are committed to updating material as facts change.
Britannica says it updates an article every 20 minutes. Even the Stanford Philosophy Encyclopedia will make changes with relative speed. When a law was passed on voluntary euthanasia in the Netherlands, “our entry was updated within a couple of weeks, at the latest,” said Edward N. Zalta, a senior research scholar at Stanford and principal editor of the online encyclopedia. “It may have been a day or two — we don’t do it as quickly as Wikipedia, but in a timely way.”
In essence, the Internet is justifying the hubris of early compilers like Linnaeus, the father of taxonomy, said Edward O. Wilson, the expert on insects at Harvard who spearheaded the Encyclopedia of Life and serves as honorary chairman. “There were so few species to deal with, only in the thousands,” he said. “He and his disciples thought they could do the rest of the flora and fauna of the world. Boy, were they wrong.”
In the intervening centuries, Professor Wilson said, science was taken over by specialists. But by allowing specialists to pool their knowledge on a Web site, he said, the Encyclopedia of Life will be able to come close to the dream of a compendium of all the known species in the world.
“Once we get all the information in one place, think of the impact this will have — available to anybody, anywhere, anytime,” he said.
Asked about his own experience with encyclopedias, Professor Wilson said, “I grew up in Alabama — we didn’t have things like the Encyclopaedia Britannica in our home.” What he did have were field guides. “All the field guides — for snakes, butterflies, turtles. Back in the 40s, I had my butterfly nets, and I was right up to date through my guides,” Professor Wilson said.
He added: “There are nerds that say we will have something the size of a field guide, and punch in something. Maybe I am hopelessly old fashioned, but a kid with a knapsack, and a Boy Scout or Girl Scout manual, printed, a field guide on snakes or butterflies, printed, is the best combination in the world.”
Mr. Aguilar-Cauz of Britannica is counting on that sort of nostalgic allure to keep at least some encyclopedias on bookshelves and not just hard drives. He envisioned the print volumes living on as a niche, luxury item, with high-quality paper and glossy photographs — similar to the way some audiophiles still swear by vinyl LPs and turntables. “What you need people to understand,” he said, “is that it is a luxury experience. You want to be able to produce a lot of joy, a paper joy.”

edited to add tags