BeA's blog

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Illustrator and author Maurice Sendak was best known for his book, Where the Wild Things Are, which brought him much fame, acclaim and won him the Caldecott Medal, one of the most reknowned honors in children's literature. It also stirred up the world of children's literature by bringing monsters to the fore and taking creativity in children's books to new heights.

Children’s Book Week is a national celebration of book and reading for youth! Visit the site to vote on your favorite book.

Children's Book Week was established in 1919, and sponsored by the Children’s Book Council. Each year, books for young people and the joy of reading are celebrated for a full week with fun book-related events at schools, libraries, bookstores, museums and homes from coast to coast!

All children are born with an aptitude for music, but it diminishes if it is not nurtured.

Discover Science @ Your Library

Join us and the Florida Museum of Natural History for fun, interactive and hands-on science. Museum staff will bring specimens and activities to open the world of science for your preschoolers. Try on dinosaur feet, play with blocks or throw a Velcro insect into a spider web.

Alchemy!

Travel back to ancient times and turn copper into silver, then GOLD.

As part of our Big Read, Patty Lipka from the Cade Museum will introduce tweens and teens to alchemy, an ancient form of chemistry. Participants will work with copper to hammer designs and create pendants. What was once considered MAGIC is really SCIENCE. This event will take place at the following libraries:

Join us for a fun time this Saturday, March 24 @ 11 AM at the Headquarters Library for a puppet production of the Wizard of Oz!

This fanciful production, by the HQ Puppeteers, includes talking trees who throw apples, flying monkeys, confetti, a singing scarecrow, a sassy tin girl, a charming Dorothy and a witch that says, "Cough, quack, moo, cock-a-doodle doo."

It's green, it's glitzy, it's glamourous and full of giggles, you won't want to miss this...because there's no place like your library!

Entertainment for the whole family.

Source: Flickr

Join us as we celebrate the opening of our beautiful new Teen space!

Source: Flickr

March is the time to celebrate and recognize the contribution of women to our world.  Read about the 10,000 Women initiative sponsored by Goldman-Sachs. Also watch the Investing in Women panel discussing the importance of investing in women: namely education for girls and women.

The Library of Congress has a Women's History Month website with great information about the status of women, famous women, exhibits and activites around the county and more. 

International Women's Day is celebrated on March 8 each year in many countries throughout the world to acknowledge the contributions of women to our world. Women have been scientists, adventurers, explorers, politicians, mothers and more, yet it took centureis to recognize the value of their work. Read more about the history of International Women's Day.

Celebrate International Women's Day by reading about some incredible women in the database Biography in Context!

Ask your librarian about books about inspiring women!

Javaka Steptoe entered the picture book scene in 1997 as the illustrator of the poetry anthology In Daddy’s Arms I Am Tall: African Americans Celebrating Fathers.

Every year the American Library Association forms a committee to select at the best contributions to the world of children's literature. The most notable of these medals are the Caldecott Medal to the artist of the best illustrations, the Newbery Medal for the best contribution to children's literature and in recent years they have added the Michael L. Printz Medal for best contribution to young adult literature.

Chinese New Year is the most elaborate celebration of the year in China and in Chinese communities around the world. It lasts for about 10 days and is a time for family, food, fun and fireworks!

This is the year of the Dragon and one important event that you see every year in a Chinese New Year Parades is a dragon dance. A long ferocious dragon dances through the streets and people make a lot of noise and bang on noisy instruments to chase the evil spirits away.

Gene Luen Yang is a comic artist, graphic novelist and educator. He teaches computer science at a high school in Oakland, California. Mr. Yang's interest in comics started in 5^th grade when he started reading and drawing them. It was further inspired in high school after he took a comics class.

Apps for the iPod Touch or smart phone (iPhone or Android) are useful and can also be a lot of fun. I asked around to get some idea of fun apps, that might even make you smarter as they exercise your brain.

Here are some of the answers that I got:

Shazam. This is fun app for music. If you are listening to the radio, hear a song that you like and want to know the artist, tap your Shazam app and it will listen to the music and tell you the song title and artist. Wow!

The Library is getting into the medieval spirit as we anticipate the 26th annual Hoggetowne Medieval Faire.  From January 10 through January 25 in the Youth Services Department of the Downtown Library you can see the amazing medieval creations of local school children. Many students participate in the Medieval Faire art contest and the winners are on display at the library and will be at the Faire.

Source: Flickr

Celebrated and award winning author, Walter Dean Myers was sworn in on January 10, 2012, as the Ambassador for Young People's Literature. His theme for his term as ambassador for the next two years is "Reading is Not Optional." He states that "you can't do well in life if you don't read well."

He wants to get parents to read to very, very young kids, 3 and 4 months old and he thinks it will change the country.

Listen to the interview on NPR.

It doesn't matter what you read, just read! Every day.

Check out a book by Walter Dean Myers:

Picture books are alive and well and to make sure people take notice some authors and illustrators have come together to proclaim November as Picture Book Month.

I've always thought that some of the most amazing art and inspiring stories could be found in picture books. But because they're for children, many people don't even give them a look...which is a huge mistake. The Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art in Amherst, MA actively celebrates children's art and artists.

The Alachua County Library District is pleased and privileged to be hosting the traveling exhibit, In a Nutshell: The Worlds of Maurice Sendak.

This exhibit is one of three developed by Nextbook, Inc., a nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting Jewish literature, culture and ideas, and the American Library Association Public Programs Office, with funding from Nextbook.  The national exhibit tours have been made possible by grants from the Charles H. Revson Foundation, the David Berg Foundation and an anonymous donor, with additional support from Tablet Magazine: A New Read on Jewish Life celebrating the life and work of Jewish artists.

The Alachua County Library District and the Friends of the Library in collaboration with the Center for Children's Literature and Culture and the Hippodrome State Theater is co-sponsoring the screening of the film, The Library of the Early Mind.

This event takes place at the Hippodrome State Theater on Monday, October 24 at 6:00 PM and 8:30 PM, with a panel discussion at 7:30 PM. Refreshments will be served.

School's back in session and now it's time for the real work. Time to compile books, magazine articles and websites for Science Fair projects and research papers.

To help with citing sources, WorldCat has created EasyBib to help you cite webpages, books, newspaper or magazine articles and databases. This tool is especially useful to help you cite websites, which can be tricky. Copy and paste the website into the search box and it will create the citation for you.

For middle schoolers, there is a bibliography site that list how to cite a work with examples, including encyclopedias.

Music is a beautiful way to enrich your child's life. Exposing children to musical experience broadens their auditory horizons and helps their brains make new and different connections. This article discusses some of the benefits of providing musical experiences to your children.

The roles of girls and women continue to change in our world. Women are now world leaders, scientists, athletes and more yet they continue to be judged more on their wardrobes than on their abilities.

There are a lot of ways to prepare our daughters for the challenges they will face as they grow up and find their identities.

Our obsession with beauty and beautiful people wreaks havoc on our children, especially our girls for whom beauty is a major measuring stick.

The Peruvian author, Mario Vargas Llosa, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Read the article from the New York Times.

Vargas Llosa is one of the most significant novelists and essayists in Latin America and rose to fame with such novels as:

Today, most people search for information online. I remember the first time I caught my daughter using Google to look up vocabulary words. She had a dictionary within arms reach, but she said, "This is faster, mom." I can't argue with that.

However, even if we want it quickly, we also want our information to be accurate. That's where your libraries come into the picture. We are on board with information at your fingertips, and we want the information to be correct and from reliable sources. The Alachua County Library District has a nice collection of databases on our Research pages, available to all library card holders.

The official website of the US Social Security Administration is Social Security Online.

This is a valuable resource for information about all of Social Security's program and provides useful online services for the public.

Listed below are some of the useful links:

The American Library Association recently published a report documenting that American are using public libraries more often to find job information, access the internet and apply for government assistance.  In response to this, public libraries have invested in more public access computers and are improving bandwidth for increased patron connectivity.

At the same time, funding for libraries is getting cut and many libraries are closing branches or reducing hours. The closing of libraries limits people's access to valuable resources.

Morningstar is an excellent source for locating information about the stock and mutual fund market and also for getting advice on how to invest your money. The Alachua County Library subscribes to the Morningstar database, which you can access from home with your library card number. This database will help you find mutual fund ratings and investments suitable for your portfolio.

They provide video tutorials on the Help and Education page of the website.

This video gives useful information about changes to rules governing mutual funds as well as advice on investing during time of low yield on investments.

In an effort to raise awareness about increasing breaches of privacy, the American Library Association has initiated the Choose Privacy Week campaign and the Privacy Revolution.

Research by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has found that web browsers can track your web "fingerprints" as you browse the internet. They have set up a website for volunteers to test the security of their internet surfing activity.

Increasingly, individuals are being electronically "shadowed" online, their actions and behaviors observed, collected, and analyzed so that advertiser can "micro-target" customers. This is a $24 billion dollar industry that is quickly growing.

The way we search for magazines has changed a lot over the past decade. Ten years ago, magazine articles were getting scanned and digitized into searchable databases so they would be easier to find.

The library now has a fabulous magazine database called, Masterfile Premier, which gives full text access to thousands of popular magazines including Time, Newsweek, Atlantic Monthly, Sports Illustrated and Consumer Reports. It's easy to search and use and often has the actual PDF scan of the article.