A Lesson In Understatement

They Were Strong and Good by Robert Lawson

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


Lawson's illustrations sometimes undermine the reverential tone of this book.  When he says that his mother's mother did not like sailing on the sea, he provides a drawing of her very expressive backside as she hangs forlornly over the side of the ship. 

Despite the stereotypical representations of mammies and indians, this book would make an excellent model for kids to do their own family biographies in the same simple declarative style.  I know I was bored by my parents' old time-y stories.  Surely, today's youth can recall some of the stories they themselves have endured.



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Suspect Sympathy

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


People's imaginations never cease to amaze me.  Perhaps "amaze" isn't the exact word.  Terrify? Stun? Disgust? Repel?  I'm sure there are really bad people out there, even without Larsson providing statistics.  But, you know, I don't have to read about what they do.  The book was well-crafted (although the series of photos showing the girl's change of expression was pretty hokey) and kept you interested.  I liked the lead characters - they were fully conceptualized and realistic.  Larsson manipulated the reader beautifully, alternating between plot lines to build dramatic tension that really got my blood pressure up and me to want to read on and on and on into the night (but I didn't - I set it down right at a most critical point, the sentence ending in "hell," and let Malcolm Gladwell lull me to sleep reading from one of his books). 

But I don't think I'll be reading another one of these. 

The nice thing about mysteries, in general, is that there is a rent in the universe and someone repairs it, somehow, by the end.  All is restored to normal.  It's a safe thrill.  I just don't want to get my thrills from stories about the abuse/torture of women, children, or pets - especially when it gets graphic (I guess I must think abusing men is fair).  This is where I start worrying about people's imaginations. 
I just think people enjoy writing or reading about abuse too much.  Even when they add retribution - especially retribution in kind.  I can't blame those long, dark, Swedish winter nights for Larsson's imagination when the real life tortures of the "Disappeared" in Argentina are thrown in the balance.  What does it take to imagine torture or abuse and then write about it?  I don't have an answer.  I guess I just don't have the imagination.



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And I Thank Hitch For This Book ...

  Hitch 22: Confessions and Contradictions by Christopher Hitchens

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


This was an e-book from Jasmine Overdrive.
Why I had not heard of Christopher Hitchens before being introduced to god Is Not Great is beyond me.  I read gING in a day (staying up all night with my heart in my mouth because he was not pulling any punches) and suddenly Hitchens is on my radar.  In this memoir, Hitchens exposes his life, owns up warts and all, with more modesty than apology.  In fact, he takes as much pride in his communist/socialist past, it seems, as in his newly minted American citizenship, which required a Bosnian Muslim cabdriver in the US to knock him off the fence. 
Hitchen's life makes one (by that I mean specifically me) feel like they have gone nowhere, seen nothing, met no one, and accomplished buggerall.  And I moved to Manhattan and tried to break into theatre.
 
Hitchens was a journalist who actually used English and I'm sorry I was not exposed to it soon enough.  I don't totally agree with him in the gING book - although I am a fellow atheist, but I could have used that sort of writing on other topics to put some besom in me at a younger age. 

Now suffering from the same cancer that killed his father, Hitchens is a figure of quiet and, if not steely, perhaps platinum composure.  I wish him the best.

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When Is a Curtain Not a Curtain?

  The Lion and the Stoat by Paul O. Zelinsky

My rating: 3 of 5 stars



 Now that the poetry thing is over, I can start back putting my reviews here. I'm sure you all missed them.
Zelinsky has put together (having adapted some of it from Pliny the Elder's Natural History) a fine story about competition, ego, and art.  The lion and stoat are artists who compete with each other on three separate occasions.  In the end they decide to not compete with each other any more ... at least not in art.  The illustrations are charming as well - especially the "nude" tigers.

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Vengeance Is Mine

  Verdi With a Vengeance: An Energetic Guide to the Life and Complete Works of the King of Opera by William Berger

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


An entertaining book - both light-hearted and serious by turns, this book shows a real love for the "King of Opera."  I have to admit that I read this whole thing just to get to the material on one of my favorite operas, Falstaff, which would be his last one.  The historical information on Verdi himself was an easy read, but the in-depth review of each and every opera dragged out, especially over operas I was not familiar with.  Although I am familiar with quite a few Verdi works and can picture them in my mind's eye or ear when reading about them, there are still plenty I've never heard, much less seen.  This, therefore, is not a book for sitting and reading through the whole thing as I tried to do.  I recommend reading Verdi's background and then dipping into the operas as needed.  This would require purchasing the book to have on hand.

Berger also recommends some recordings and has some pointed (but amusing) remarks to make about how some opera singers perform or, perhaps, how fast some conductors move it along, but I'm afraid that regardless of what anyone else says, the first version of any opera you see or listen to will almost always be your gold standard and rarely will you find any to surpass it.  [And I will grant you that Maria Callas was an outstanding actress and a great singer - but she still sounds like she's singing with a mouthful of fruit which, to me, means she is singing for herself and not us.  She did not sound like that on her earliest recordings, so I can only imagine that she developed that muffled, fruity sound later when she was an undisputed diva and no one had the nerve to tell her what it sounded like because she was beautiful and talented.  Then, of course, she also proceeds to do what she likes with her roles.  Thus endeth the rant.:] 

I love operas the way I love cats: with a passion that allows me also to laugh at them.  This, I am sure, has caused some not slight consternation from Baltimore, MD (Where I was the only one laughing at Bardolpho - I suppose everyone else was reading the damn supertitles) to Newberry, SC (where my husband and I almost hurt ourselves when don José polished his rifle and then his sword to Carmen's Habanera).  Books like this key into my need to study and laugh.  Perhaps I should just buy the damn thing.

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Elizabeth Bishop

"In the Waiting Room" - something I can relate to again, with just a long succession of unsettling imagery: a dentist office, the dead man in the National Geographic ("long pig" being a euphemism for a cannibal's treat), pain, war, and the painful recognition of the conflict of your individuality with womanhood or even general humanity.  We are not just ourselves, but we are everyone else as well - for good or bad. 
A dentist office is just the worst setting I can imagine for a poem, putting anyone's "teeth on edge."  The familiarity and adventure in National Geographic are made eerie with the dead man - and then the yelp creates a confusion of Self with Other.  It was very unsettling ... but in a good way!

Rex Libris

I, Librarian
This is just soooo much fun!

Langston Hughes

Oh, what pleasure! Simple and comprehensible! Moving because there is something deeply emotional to say. Six line verse blues poems. Music from the heart's blood. Thank you, thank you, Langston Hughes. Where do I start? I loved all of them. Some are funny (Morning After) and some are brutal (Song for a Dark Girl), but they're good and they're plain-spoken and meaningful.

iPads 'Stead of Libraries

This was an interesting idea ... close down the public libraries and give the library card holders a free iPad. The contributor says that all the books are then free. Perhaps that's not quite accurate, but even if they were, is it a good idea?

It was from the UK, but I thought about it for our library here in the US. We have about 30,000 users in our county (times $499 for an iPad) which would run us almost $15 million ... for a one-time purchase? That's more than the new library would cost, but perhaps Apple would give us a deal on the massive order. And I imagine a huge run on library cards if holders got a free iPad.

Now, what about on-going costs? The iPad runs on $15/mo. The public library ... oh, that's tougher. We used to get $2 per capita/yr, but now it's about half that. I don't have the figures in front of me, but my 1300 sq ft house contributed $13/yr to the library. It said so on the bill.

And the library comes with human beings you can talk to (if you haven't annoyed us too much) in real time about what book or information you really need. We don't run on batteries or the mains (but cookies help). And we have printers and a fax machine. Try to run that off your iPad.

Nice try, but until these devices and their support get cheaper, the good ole fashioned library is still a better deal.

Hart Crane

I chose the Rip Van Winkle section from The Bridge for no real good reason. It's sad when a poet has to write copious notes about his own work to make it understandable. I found Walt Whitman's description of America much easier to follow. Rip Van Winkle carries happy childhood memories for me, so I risked having it ruined. But the mention of hurrying off to school with Pizarro and Cortes reminded me of my sister's favorite school poem: "Where we walk to school each day/Indian children used to play." And we are off on a time travel into Crane's past where lilacs provide a switch for his father to whip him and he recalls a fleeting smile from his mother that was never shared with him. Yikes! The Catskill daisy chain in May that is now Broadway was nice. Bits of this make you think Crane has potential, but wading through the whole of The Bridge is just too much of it.

Note of shameless self-promotion: My husband's last cd, Back In the Day, used Rip van Winkle as a theme. Buy it here!

T. S. Eliot

Oh great, the footnotes for this contain more material than the verses! Sheesh, and I thought Moore was annoying. Needs more cats. The Waste Land seems a pastiche of ... of ... well, I was going to say of other poems, but it seems to be a hodge-podge of imagery, memories, conversations, etc. that cry out for the sort of "close reading" that they now claim turns young people off from the enjoyment of literature entirely. It put me in mind of the aftermath of the Great War. That might not have been his intention (although I gather death was the inspiration), but that's what pops up in my little mind (probably the reference to the arch-duke and the expectation of the man returning from the army - Poor Albert!).

Marianne Moore

Gosh, how I wish we were back to Walt Whitman. What the introduction of the editor calls "wide-ranging diction" I call academic esoterica - I was particularly annoyed by the reference to "Bach's Solfegietto," although I liked the sound of the poem. The meter of "To a Prize Bird" was nice as well. I think I like the sounds of her poetry better than the imagery. I was all prepared to really like "A Jelly-fish" and in the end I was disappointed it didn't sting the author's arm ... good and hard.

I marked a few as being of relative interest for content. "The Past Is the Present" was marked for the description of unrhymed Biblical verse, which I will try to keep in mind as I traverse the Old Testament. "Hebrew poetry," I quote her quoting someone else, "is prose with a sort of heightened consciousness." I try to be aware of the aspects of verse in a foreign language that have been translated and may have lost their original beauty in the interests of accuracy. Translation is a tightrope walk.

Before I Get On To

... Marianne Moore, I'd like to quote some Billy Collins. Can't help it. I just enjoy his stuff so much:

Introduction to Poetry
by Billy Collins

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem's room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to water-ski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author's name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin by beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.

This reminds me of when I was teaching Spanish and the beginning students were still stumbling through the idea of conjugation (of which there is precious little in English). "Just keep stumbling around in the dark room," I told them, "soon your eyes will be accustomed to the dark and you will see a crack of light around the door. Grope around and find the handle! Then you can open that door and step out into the light and it will become clear to you!" And they laughed at me.
One day, one girl said, "Oh, Profesora! I think I see the light! I think I see the light!" and started getting all excited. Or maybe she was just kidding.

The World's Most Dangerous Job

If there is any way to judge the value of a poem, it's probably the reaction it provokes, by imagery or emotion. It would be easy to find a poem by Robert Frost that reinforces the idea of the idyllic life of a farmer. Even easier is finding a poem outlining the horrors of rural life. Small wonder he gave it up and moved to England.

I can't even read this again, it was so powerful. It's called "Out, Out -" [on page 247] of the Major Voices and Visions anthology] and I wasn't even able to finish it, but the imagery clung to my thoughts and disturbed me the rest of the day.

It makes no sense, however, to mention a poem affected you profoundly and then not talk about it because it's just too painful to think about, so I'll add some tiny bits I gleaned from other Frost poems.

Frost seems to like the phrase, "the long scythe whispering to the ground" - which he used twice, just in this book. I have to say, I like it too. It has a nice cadence that calls to mind the swinging action and sound of the scythe (my dad used used one and the scythe does make this shushhhhh-shushhhhhing when it swings through the grass, very much like a whisper - a nice change from the gas-powered machinery prevalent today).

Another phrase was final line from "The Wood Pile," "the slow smokeless burning of decay" - which I also found evocative. It called to mind piles of wood chips that "cook" even in winter and give off steam. Something that I like about Frost is that he often has a story to tell, and I like a good story. In the case of "The Wood Pile" it's a conundrum. Why was this neatly stacked pile of wood left behind? Even better, it's a mystery story! Why does the farmer's wife just run off in The Hill Wife? Boredom? Is it related to a poem printed earlier (but not from that group) about the couple breaking up over the difference between how they handled the death of an infant? What was Frost's married life like? Inquiring minds want to know!

Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening - this photo always reminds me of that title:

Okay, that poem wasn't in this collection, but every time I see this photo I think of it. Anyway, that's all for Frost. I have lots to do and miles to go before I sleep.

A Narrow Fellow

It's all I can do to not mention That Song in reference to Emily Dickinson's poetry. I read an article in Vanity Fair decades ago and shortly afterward got into an argument with a roommate who said all of Dickinson's poetry could not be sung to That Song. Then I proceeded to sing all the examples she dug out to That Song. Consequently, I have happy memories of Ms. Dickinson and go around singing "Because I would not stop for Death he kindly stopped for meeeeee!" But the same might be said about Edna St. Vincent Millay ... or José Martí, and about as accurately. In other words, not terribly.

Still, I have trouble relating to the content of Dickinson. I did see a lovely one that resonated with me immediately:

986

A narrow Fellow in the Grass
Occasionally rides -
You may have met Him - did you not
His notice sudden is -

The Grass divides as with a Comb-
A spotted shaft is seen -
And then it closes at your feet [Yipes!]
And opens further on -

He likes a Boggy Acre
A floor too cool for Corn -
Yet when a Boy, and Barefoot -
I more than once at Noon
Have passed, I though a Whip lash
Unbraiding in the Sun
When stooping to secure it
It wrinkled, and was gone -

Several of Nature's People
I know, and they know me -
I feel for them a transport
Of cordiality -

But never met this Fellow
Attended, or alone
Without a tighter breathing
And Zero at the Bone.


I think that concludes rather nicely - with that flash of iciness at the ribs (in my case, anyway) that suddenly coming upon such a "narrow Fellow" brings. The meter is irregular and takes some fudging to sing to That Song, stretching that final "Aaaaaand" to it's chilling climax. Great fun!

Song of ME ME ME!

Walt Whitman was slow going. As much as I understand that his use of the first person was to represent America, the "Song of Myself" still reeks of a towering ego (and he does refer to himself in it as "Walt" so I think the "It's Really About America" dodge doesn't hold water). You'd need a towering ego to think you are speaking for an entire country, even in reference to its diversity.
I also needed a dictionary to read this, as he seems to mix esoteric language with childishly made-up terms ("omnific" versus "foofoos"). His spelling is bad ("extatic") and he has a tendency to exaggerate, especially with numbers ("decillions" "sextillions" "quintillions"). So the words egocentric, hyperbolic, and epigrammatic spring to mind. "Song of Myself" is an onslaught, but I was still able to tease out little bits that I liked.

I guess the grass is itself a child .... the produced babe of
the vegetation.
Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic,
And it means, Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow zones,
Growing among black folks as among white,
Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff, I give them the
same, I receive them the same.
And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves.

...

Whoever degrades another degrades me .... and whatever is
done or said returns at last to me.
And whatever I do or say I also return.

...

I hear the trained soprano .... she convulses me like the
climax of my love-grip;
The orchestra whirls me wider than Uranus flies,
It wrenches unnamable [sic] ardors from my breast,
It throbs me to gulps of the farthest down horror,
It sails me .... I dab with bare feet .... they are licked
by the indolent waves ...
[Hmmm, they're starting to pall on me now. I like the euphemism of the "love grip," which I find funny while it probably horrified his audience, but I totally agree about the trained soprano.]

...

And the running blackberry would adorn the parlors of
heaven...
[The blackberry is the rose that bears fruit. It lives on the fringes and brings sweetness to life, as well as a touch of bitter. There's no bitterness, though, that a touch of salt can't assuage.]

...

I think I could turn and live awhile with the animals ....
they are so placid and self-contained.
I stand and look at them sometimes half the day long,
They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,
Not one is dissatisfied .... not one is demented with the
mania of owning things,
Not one kneels to another nor to his kind that lived
thousands of years ago,
Not one is respectable or industrious over the whole earth.

Yeah, I must have dropped my tokens, too, Walt, speaking as one who is demented with the mania of owning things - and not even real things anymore. I don't have room for real things. Now I own virtual things and fritter hours of my time searching for more.

I would enjoy this more if it weren't so ponderous. I'll continue to read Whitman, but I'm relieved to be able to get on with Dickinson and sing all her poems to "The Yellow Rose of Texas."

They Call Me "MISS Coraline"!

Coraline by Neil Gaiman


My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Nicely drawn. Good story. I was just reading some graphic novels today and saw it hiding behind Beowulf Glad I saved it for last! Heh, I have some button eyes in Second Life that I think are cute (see above picture), but now they seem a bit more sinister. Good thing I read this in the daytime! I've been acquainted with Russell's artwork (in collaboration with Gaiman) in Neil Gaiman's Murder Mysteries, a very very very creepy book, especially the framework story! This story brought all that horror back to me.

Coraline is bored with her parents and her life, but when presented the opportunity of a life of endless amusement and devoted and doting parents, she chooses the chance to be bored on occasion. The mirror existence turns nightmarish and she embarks on a mini-quest to escape her "other mother," the Beldam. She will submit to having the button eyes sewn on if she can't locate her parents (in a rather obvious place, I thought) and the souls of three other children who were duped before her. All she has to help her are her courage, the cat, and a talisman: a rock with a hole in it. Oh, and those three kids.

And I wonder if that well is deep enough ...

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POST Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc

The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley


My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This book has all the elements of the usual mystery story, but somehow seems to surprise. I didn't yell at this book once. The only quibble I have is that, unless someone in the de Luce family was an insane horticulturist that brought a sprig back as a specimen from a trip to North America, plants that produce urushiol don't grow in Britain. Okay, maybe it was a mango tree, but it sounded very much to me like it was poison ivy.
Aside from that, it was great fun! Flavia, the 11 year old chemist, is confronted with a mystery when she finds a man dying in the cucumber patch. [Note: I thought that type of poisoning was supposed to be instantaneous.] She must solve the mystery because her father has been detained, helping police with their inquiries and being fitted up. He, in turn, is covering for someone else.
Can Flavia exonerate her father before either the real murderer or one of her sadistic older sisters gets her? Read on!

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What's the Point?

The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell


My rating: 2 of 5 stars
I am in the position of having two interests that need marketing, my job and my husband's business. When I started doing programming at the library, we couldn't do enough. Storytimes were increasing to satisfy demand. Now, there are times when no one shows up. There are a number of reasons for this, one of which is, unbelievably, that there are still people out there who don't know what the library does despite newspaper, radio, and posters. All this talk of viral marketing seems like the last hope - but none of it seems to work. And Gladwell's book seems to explain why.
There are just three factors to tip something over the edge: the influential few, stickiness, and context. There was some context we had no control over. The rules for transporting children changed and became much more stringent. Home Child Care people were no longer able to bring their charges to a storytime. We still had a few of the larger corporate facilities that could transport, but fewer came. If the smaller ones can't afford it or aren't able, you cut out a huge audience. And if the kids can't say they went to the library that day, the parents stop thinking about it. We are doing outreach to the bigger groups, but it isn't the same.
We finally have someone in our department who is a connector. This can help. I'm not sure what could be sticky about library programming.
This book started off being exciting, but I lost that interest as I went on (and it's not that long of a book). Eventually, I was only vaguely interested on how demonizing cigarettes and other drugs has absolutely, positively not worked and just glanced over the rest.

Thinking further about marketing needs here, while a new library will raise our profile, that's a factor that will lose its sheen after a while. [I'm still annoyed by the patron who said, "No offense, but this is the most depressing library I've ever been in." I've been in lots more depressing libraries than this. I thought our children's room was pretty colorful and had lots of interesting features!] If the general public is anything like me, they go home and stay there. It's just too exhausting to go out again. If their kids aren't lobbying to go to the library, very few will venture out of the cocoon. While we have an annual library card drive for the youngest kids in school, how many of those actually come in once they've received their card? We have anecdotal stories of parents being dragged in by a kid that's just gotten a card, but if all the kids who received library cards since I've been typing them up have come in, why are there any books on these shelves at all?
It's stickiness. We need to work on that.

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Early Literacy Re-Training!

When I signed up for this, I was sure it included some Mother Goose On the Loose training, which I hadn't had, but was glad to have some of the Every Child Ready To Read re-training in any case. MGOTL was not in evidence, but a worthwhile day was spent on ECRTR. This is at least the third time that I have been trained in this and I think it's great stuff. It's nice to have it refreshed and because you have new people with you, you get more ideas on how to use it than just a presenter can provide.

The class was presented by Susan Bard who was very energetic. I'd have been more energetic myself if some of the songs and movement things we did weren't making me dizzy. I had dinged my forehead on the bathroom stall door (something another librarian also did shortly after I was settled down with my feet up and a bag of ice on my head) which served mostly to keep me awake all day.

ECRTR is designed to make it easy and palatable to share early literacy tips with parents and caregivers during storytimes. Bite-size, manageable pieces of information are coupled with modeling during the storytime so that parents are "indoctrinated" in best practices practically without realizing it. The resources are also available online (also in Spanish) for those who didn't have a throbbing forehead to keep them awake - but, honestly, these classes are so much fun you don't want to miss any of it.

Recommendations of great storytime picture books and audio abound. Those I particularly noted were:

Cha Cha Chimps by Judy Durango
Shark in the park by Nick Sharratt
Dinosaur Roar by Paul Strickland
Pío Peep by Alma Flor Ada and F. Isabel Campoy
Flower Garden by Eve Bunting
Bark George by Jules Feiffer

Audio
Diaper Gym
Whaddaya Think Of That by Laurie Berkner
Toddlers Sing Playtime (actually, recordings of toddlers singing creeps me out)

Babies have 100 billion little brain cells to work with when they are born. They develop connections (synapses) primarily through sensory experiences. They will make more of these connections with higher seratonin levels, which come about from pleasurable experiences. Connections are inhibited by cortisol, which is released under stress, such as neglect and abuse, but they can also be stressed by the unreasonable expectations of the parent, childcare provider, or even the crabby librarian with the big lump on her head. Little kids have short attention spans and are apt to try to get up and walk around. It doesn't mean they aren't still listening. We need to let parents/caregivers know at the start that a little wiggle is okay. If a child gets bored, he can be removed, but he can also come back if he's settled down.

Kids get all these sensory experiences and then the ones that aren't experienced over and over are eventually pruned, which helps organize the brain. Those paths revisited can be early literacy skills that the child will need to learn to read and read with ease later. Before you can read, you need to know the words; the more words the child hears, the more will be recognized when seen printed, so talking to the child is important. Before you can read, you need to recognize shapes, because letters come in shapes. Shape recognition is good for babies. Letter recognition can begin with toddlers. And all this needs to be fun, not drills with flashcards. You don't need to be able to read to provide these early literacy skills to your child. You don't need to speak English - because all that knowledge is commutative from one language to another: hearing separate sounds/phonemes, connecting sounds with the shapes of letters, how a book works, etc.

The parents are the first and best teachers. They spend the most time with the children and the children model their behavior based on the adults they see the most - for good or ill.

None of this synapse connecting can wait for school. These are skills a kid needs to know before she gets to school:

Print Motivation - enjoying books and reading
Phonological Awareness - hearing the distinct sounds in words and being able to play with them
Vocabulary - hearing the words so when they are seen in print, there is recognition
Narrative Skills - knowing stories have a beginning, middle, and end; following sequences; describing an activity
Print Awareness - recognizing print in the environment, being familiar with books
Letter Knowledge - recognizing one letter as distinct from another and knowing it can have more than one form (upper/lower cases, for instance).

Alphabet knowledge at entry into Kindergarten is a strong predictor of reading ability in 10th grade. Children from lower income groups have 25 hours of contact with picture book reading compared to over 1,200 hours for middle income children. 60% of kids are going to find learning to read difficult. As librarians we are in a position to make that process more fun by providing great materials and modeling best practices for the benefit of the caregivers. Encourage the parents to allow the children to pick out their own books and be sure to let them choose some non-fiction books as well as story picture books.

Now, that's all the general stuff. Let's get down to specifics that I needed reminding on!

Remember, only one early literacy skill per storytime! And just mention it briefly, paraphrased from the "What Can I Say" list in your own words, about three times during the storytime. That's all you have to do. It helps to write it out ahead and practice it.

Talking uses four parts of the brain and in a small child this can take some time because the neural pathways are still being built. Be sure to give 5 seconds response time to a young child. If there are older siblings, they might want to butt in, but let the young one finally get the answer out.

Use dialogic questions - you know, the ones that don't have yes or no answers. This isn't the best idea during a story if you have a group, but works well one on one. With a group you can ask that kind of question at the beginning or the end of the story, as in Bark, George - you can ask What happened, Why is George saying hello instead of barking, Where's the vet?!

Read to kids the books you like. Read books the kids like. Read books with movements. Be a Fierce Dinosaur! Be a meek dinosaur.

Never substitute an easy word. Use the "rare words" - and define them as you go along. If it's an object, point to a picture of it. If it's an action, act it out. Give a synonym: That's another word for _____. Let parents know, "You may have noticed there were some rare words in that story ..."

The early literacy skill of the week could be put on a handout that they take home after the storytime (the one, maybe, that you have the song lyrics and fingerplays on so that the caregivers can sing along) and/or that sits out for the general public all week. Remember to invite the caregivers to take part at the beginning of storytime so that the shyer children will feel secure in participating (and so they won't sit gossiping in the back, which is sometimes a problem in my storytimes).

Here's a nice way to start: hold up a picture of a clock and say, "Thank you for coming on time!" And remind them to turn their cellphones off. Do this each time to be consistent.
I have a little song I sing:
I went to the storytime [can substitute "puppet show"] with my mom
But she left her cellphone on.
The cellphone rang and she took the call.
Now we're not allowed back in at all!
Then I have the kids pretend to turn off their "cellphones" and put them away in their pockets. They actually enjoy doing this and there's usually an adult who goes "OH!" and scrambles for the cellphone. There is hardly anything more annoying than someone whose phone rings, she answers it, and says, "Oh, we're at storytime at the library!" and keeps talking.

There was a nice sheet on Challenges and Problem Solving, but there was nothing in there about the distraction of a child throwing up and then a clean-up committee coming in to take care of that. I decided that I didn't have anything more interesting than that prepared so we watched them until they were done and then went on with the storytime.

If anyone has a chance to attend one of these workshops, I highly recommend it. I even recommend going again and again.