If You Love Your Family and You Know It… Write a Song!
I have a confession to make – I have a love and a knack for writing parodies. In the post-Weird Al/ Adam Sandler/ Jimmy Fallon era, this might be seen as a shameful skill. But – apparently not where story time is concerned. There are zillions of songs for every occasion that are prefaced with “To the tune of…” Row, Row, Row, Your Boat, Mary Had a Little Lamb, etc. etc. The list goes on. Whoever wrote “Row, Row, Row, Your Boat” should have had the tune copyrighted for all eternity. Pure Genius. Anyway, for our Family Day Baby Goose time, I found myself running short on Activity songs and rhymes. So I turned to my absolutely always, every week, or in a crisis song: “If You’re Happy and You Know It” and … started writing. Here is the result (and YES it’s hokey):
If You Love Your Family and You Know It
(Tune of “If you’re Happy and You Know It”)
If you love your family and you know it
Clap your hands!
If you love your family and you know it
Clap your hands!
Mommies, daddies, sisters, brothers
And oh, so many others
If you love your family and you know it
Clap your hands!
If you love your family and you know it stomp your feet (repeat)
Grandmas, Grandpas, sisters brothers
And oh, so many others
If you love your family and you know it,
Stomp your feet!
If you love your family and you know it say: “I love you!” (repeat)
Aunts and uncles, sisters, brothers
And oh, so many others
If you love your family and you know it
Say “I love you!”
ZOMG Amelia Bedelia is Failing the Women of Tomorrow! (But she still is a good Level 3 read…)
As previously mentioned, I’m trying to think of a way to better shelve Easy Readers. So, in the process, I’ve been pulling various reading levels of material to look at their record to confirm that they could be located by a keyword search for “Level 1″ etc. Some, but not all. Nerts! Clearly, I’ll have to think more creatively about the shelving issue, but in the meantime, my eye falls on Amelia Bedelia and the Baby by Peggy Parish. I’ve owned and loved the book as a child, so I pick it up and read it.
Oh, loveable, nutty Amelia Bedelia… she does everything literally and with childish glee. In reality, quite possibly someone with a screw loose, but in fiction simply a kind soul with a whimsical outlook on the world. For those of you who don’t know Amelia Bedelia, she is a child-like young woman of nondescript age, who wears maid’s attire. She’s hired for odd jobs and inevitably screws them up by taking the written instructions of her clients completely literally. For instance: “Draw the drapes” – she literally draws them. “Dust the sitting room” – she sprinkles baby powder around to dust it. And a particularly ingenious addition (not in Amelia Bedelia and the baby) , ” marble the counter tops” results in the meticulous placement of marbles on… what else? A counter top! It’s the most hilarious edition of “While You Were Out” EVER. So the clients come home, see what she’s done to their homes, possessions, and children and flip out. I mean, they are upper-middle-class suburban family. They hire some help, and the help destroys their home! Of course they’re pissed off! So what happens then? Litigation? Incarceration? Occupational therapy for Amelia Bedelia? Well, not really.
During the course of the book, Amelia always manages to cook something. She is a phenomenal chef. Strawberry tarts, steak, lemon meringue pie… she might not be able to follow simple directions, but she has internalized literally hundreds of recipes. The outcome of every story is that no matter what she manages to screw up in the course of her day – she will always be redeemed to her employers by way of her cooking.
Hilarious stories for young children? Yes. But reading it as an adult I can’t help but think that it is… ridiculous, not necessarily to the point of harm, but gives one pause. First there’s the outfit. French maids clothing? Seriously? Maybe suitable when Peggy Parish started writing these but now? Also there’s the very realistic fact that whomever this person would be in real life, she would hardly be considered capable to work or possibly even live independently! Then there’s her modus operandi – the well-cooked meal. So, the message seems to be, even if you completely destroy a household and endanger children – if you cook a good meal, it’s all good because that’s what women should be able to do. o_0 ?!?!?!
But I kid, I kid. I’m being too harsh – the point of children’s literature is to expand the imagination and the character of an idiot savant who wears a french maid’s outfit is pretty charming… She also teaches the subtle nuances of homonyms. At any rate – if you’re being asked for a series of engaging level 3 reads, this is a good one. 
Maybe you can engage your young readers’ minds in a discussion of female archetypes in literature! Ha!
When in Doubt…
For our “story time on demand” story times (the MPL “there’s a lot of kids here -better offer story time” initiative) I’m finding this book (We’re Going on a Bear Hunt by Michael Rosen, illustrated by Helen Oxenbury) to be an absolute hit! I’m about to take it into Ontario Early Years circle time with me, so it’s on my mind. I find that a lot of parents want to borrow it after story time is over! So… if you need to do an off-the-cuff story time – here’s a best bet.
- We’re Going on a Bearhunt
Winter Baby Goose 1: A tentative new beginning
Ah, another season, another round of Story Times. I’m still fighting the good fight with Baby Goose, our story time for 0-2 years. Although now with our new out in the open story time design that usually means I’ll get kids from newborn on up. This bother some people – with my 0-5 story time, I’d say it’s pretty par for the course.
Anyway, this time we’re reading:
Snowballs by Lois Ehlert
A Winter Day by Douglas Florian
and Ten in the Bed by Penny Dale (board book form).
As well as the standard reference rhymes and songs. A particularly cute one I pilfered from my coworker:
Where did you get that little red nose? (point to nose)
Jack Frost kissed it, I suppose (nod head)
He kissed it once. He kissed it twice.
Poor little nose! It’s as cold as ice!
So… we’ll see how this new season goes.
Lvl Up: User-Friendly Easy Readers
So Easy Readers (not to be confused with Easy Riders)… they’re thin, often used, usually beat-up books that circulate a lot. Bad for shelf reading, hold pulling, and kind of a pain the bibliographic backside of everyone who has to deal with them on an administrative level, shall we say.
So, what are people looking for easy readers really looking for? I’d say… levels. In assistance to us, most publishers of “easy readers” have split their books up into various levels of reading development from “see spot run” to full paragraphs of compound words that still retain a certain size of type and no indentation (or so I’ve been led to believe). Usually they number these levels 1-4 – (Frog and Toad fall into about a level 2-3, to give you an idea) – but different publishers have tried to get a jump on the competition by formulating different crafty gimmicks. There’s Green Light Readers from Harcourt, the funnily named “Bananas” series from Crabtree Publishing, and the list goes on. Some have 3 levels, some have 5… some just have colours! So it makes it a little difficult for the ambitious librarian really find crosswalks to make decisions on what colour of banana counts as a Level 3 read, (I personally think it’s Red Bananas, though others may disagree). So this is my project, if the Children’s Services Committee chooses to accept it – making navigating Easy Readers more intuitive for parents and children. We’ll see how that goes.
As a final side note: For older readers just graduated from Easy Readers, the Nibbles, Bites, Chomps series is a good, canned way to help parents guide their kids along the road to reading without much serious readers advisory effort. This recommendation is kid-approved (it was, after all, a kid who brought the series to my attention), and librarian tested. 
Stats and stuff… a restatement of purpose.
Huh. I just saw my stats and people are looking at this much more than the big ole “O” that I had expected. Hurray!
One of my original misgivings about blogging in general is that it seems sort of narcissistic to assume that I have anything more to say about a single topic than anyone else and who really cares? Does anyone really see my posts anyway? Like Henry Rollins says (about message boards, not about blogging) “putting more content on the Internet, like we need more of THAT.” Am I just putting more content on the Internet that our children need to slog through finding their little nuggets of information in this monstrous amorphous heaving mass of electro-data?
Not to say that I think all blogging is a waste, some people are doing it well – the academic bloggers and library gurus… “Joe the Blogger,” too. After reading a blog about the “canon of academic blogging” somewhere I became horribly insecure about self-publishing – what if it doesn’t sound intelligent enough? I guess it’s time to restate my purpose, which is to provide support to those who, like me, have found themselves in a position for which they’re not quite prepared; to reassure them that it’s okay… and to share resources, thoughts, etc. with people, librarians, parents, what-have you, on the way. Canon be damned!
And it looks like…people are looking, so maybe I’m doing some good?
A Library is a Data-base, too! Sort of.
Just got done with Parents as Partners: Homework Help on the Net – my bibliographic instruction course for kids grade 4-6 and their parents. It’s free (yippee!) but for some reason that means that I usually get a far lower enrolment than on paper. So, 5 kids enrolled, 2 showed up. One of the little girls, Cheri, was very sweet and enthusiastic, but her dad didn’t come with her (which is sort of the point) and the other girl appeared SO very angry to be there, but her mom was full of questions and made the class fly by. Altogether, a success!
I usually have problems explaining to kids (as well as parents) the concept of a “database.” Parents have been taught by most teacher that print = good, electronic = bad. While kids and teens also need convincing that an article from, say, ProQuest is, in fact, an authoritative resource and will “count” towards their homework assignment as “not a website.”
As a side note, in a public library heavily used by university students (York University, Ryerson, and University of Toronto are within spitting distance… not to mention Seneca College) I often get frustrated by the teacher who assign complicated, multiple-source assignments, but say “print only.” We simply don’t have that many print resources, and those we do have are easily depleted. Yargh!
But I digress…
So, my goal is to convince them both that what they’re doing is not quite the same as “the Internet.” My latest try: “imagine crumpling up an encyclopedia… and then putting it in a computer!” didn’t quite make it through translation. Trying to explain the concept of “e-resources” to a 9 year old is sometimes very hard. So tonight I tried “the library is a database, too… but one you can walk into. The ones on the computer are like little tiny libraries in the computer.” seemed to get the message across better and I was starting to get excited, but then the little enthusiastic one said “So like Google?”
o_0
Baby Goose: Welcome to My World of Inadequacy…
This fall brings about a whole new challenge: BABIES. After MPL’s new “out in the open” mandate, we have two separate baby times, Baby Goose (out in the open) and Books and Babies (the closed-off original version of the program). Lois, the full-time library assistant at Angus Glen, is the source of all this programming originally. As in, she personifies “Mother Goose.” So she was pretty upset when management harpooned her original program, for the “out in the open” version – something that is… “inadvisable” to do with babies.
As a disclaimer: The Out in the Open initiative is incredibly successful in our branch for other programs like Tales for Tots (Ages 2-5) and Family Story Time (All ages). Markham, as a community is full of (and growing with) many new families who are generally newcomers to Canada. This initiative was created with the intention to promote library services to people who might not normally seek them out, such as newcomers. Yes, it has the best of intentions, but all early childhood literacy studies show that for infantliteracy, you basically need to keep them in lock-down so they can properly focus on going the 15 miles from Wibbleton to Wobbleton.
So, I compromised with Lois, she is doing a paid program in the room, as well as one section of Baby Goose, and I’m doing the other one. I’m learning fairly quickly, but a baby story time is a beast the kind of which is very different from a regular preschool story time, which I enjoy very much. 30 min. of rhymes and songs? The parents are the main audience? You depend on their participation for the babies to enjoy it? For realz? It’s tough.
I’m not completely un-prepared, Ontario Early Years, the early literacy program for which I’m a liaison is 0-5 years, with a fair amount of babies… and I have seen people do Baby Goose… but so far (2 programs in) I’ve come away with a sense of inadequacy and embarrassment. We’ll see what works and what changes! At least the babies seem to like me.
Here are some of the songs and rhymes I’ve been using:
The More We Get Together (You can make this song muccccchhhhh longer by adding verses like “the more we sing together/read together/share together” etc.)
Open Them, Shut Them (Extra verse: Creep them, creep them, creep them creep them/ Right up to your cheek/ Open up your little eyes and through your fingers peek)
We’ll see how the other sessions go…
