Month: May 2012

Posted on

Audiobooks–A Family Experience

If your library is part of the NH Downloadable Books Consortium, I hope you are promoting many of the children’s audiobooks in the collection.  You may want to encourage families facing long car trips to check out this service.  Books can be dowloaded to an MP3 or to an ipod (or both) depending on the particular title.  Many cars have adapters that make it possible to plug in an MP3 device so that a family can listen to the audiobook together.  Of course, some families may want to give individual children their own devices so that everyone can listen to a different book.

Here are some titles of interest to families of children in the early elementary grades (K-3):

Charlotte’s Web, Stuart Little, and The Trumpet of the Swan all by E.B. White

Cricket in Times Square by George Seldon

Judy Blume, Collection 1–Freckle Juice and The One in the Middle is the Green Kangaroo

Ralph S. Mouse Audio Collection by Beverly Cleary

Ramona Quimby Collection by Beverly Cleary

For upper grade elementary children (Grades 4-6), try these:

Dead End in Norvelt by Jack Gantos

Flush by Carl Hiassen

Gamer Changers Series (middle grade sports series by Mike Lupica)

Ghost Night by Cornelia Funke

Love that Dog by Sharon Creech

One Dog and His Boy by Eva Ibbotson

Another place to point parents to for free downloadable stories is Storynory, which offers original stories as well as some classics such as fairy tales and Alice in Wonderland.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Posted on

Where are your juvenile nonfiction books?

At the recent Small Libraries Summit, one panelist mentioned that her library interfiled juvenile and adult nonfiction books.  She said her community and staff liked the arrangement.  Adult patrons could find titles of varying levels (and with richer pictorial works)  shelved together and thus avoid the stigma of looking for materials at a lower reading level in the children’s department.  At the same time, children who were advanced readers could find all the material on one topic in the same place.  It also made shelving easier for staff.  Materials were still catalogued and labeled as either j nonfiction or (adult) nonfiction, but they were put in the same collection area.

Whether or not you should adopt this kind of practice depends entirely on what makes sense for your community and for the physical space in your library.  In small libraries with children’s and adult areas close together physically, it certainly seems advantageous to put all of these informational books together.

Some libraries, however, have very separate children’s and adult areas that are often on different floors.  In these cases, it may be problematic to interfile nonfiction.  Also, if shelves in the adult area are high, many nonfiction books may be inaccessible for many children.  In addition, only including fiction in the children’s area sends a subtle message that these types of books are what kids should read, and this may inhibit those children (especially boys) who read only nonfiction.  If it’s “out of sight” in a children’s area, a young nonfiction reader may not see the children’s area as a place for him.  In addition, more and more of the nonfiction being published is recreational, rather than strictly informational.  More children are seeking nonfiction books not for school assignments, but for reading pleasure. Putting these recreational nonfiction books written for children in the adult nonfiction area may make them harder to find.

In the articles I read on this subject, nearly every writer cited the advantage for the adult reader as the greatest benefit of interfiling juvenile and nonfiction.  As children’s librarians, I think we can certainly see advantages for young readers, but we also must weigh lots of other factors in deciding whether this arrangement makes sense.

Posted on

E-Picture Books–Easy? Electronic?

This week at the State Library you can preview new titles in children’s and teen fiction and nonfiction.  Some of the books on display include picture books, which represent a shrinking percentage of the children’s book publishing market.  Librarians around the country lament this trend, and many factors exist for the increasingly fewer picture books being published.  Are picture books just too expensive to produce?  Are parents by-passing this format in their quest to get their children to read more “advanced” books?  Are parents simply unwilling to spend time reading with their children?

After all, picture books, despite their “easy” classification, are really not meant for children to read independently.  Many picture books involve complex words and ideas; picture book illustrations help children to make inferences or to experience parallel stories alongside the text.  Picture books are meant for adults to read aloud with children.  In fact, one of the most important benefits of picture books is the shared experience of adult and child.  Picture books help adults introduce a world of language, ideas, and values to children.   Research continues to point out the importance of reading aloud to young children in terms of developing early literacy skills and building reading readiness and proficiency.

Will electronic picture books such as those available online through subscription services such as Tumblebooks, or those available on e-reader devices, help re-engage parents’ interest in picture books?  Will the interactive features of e-books help entice chidren to listen to more books, help develop better vocabulary and increase comprehension? Or, will e-readers reduce picture books to entertainment–another way to keep a child occupied while an adult gives her attention elsewhere? I eagerly await more research about this topic.  Lisa Guernsey’s “Are Ebooks Any Good?” in the June 2011 issue of SLJ concludes that more research is needed, but she cautions that we cannot lump all ereaders together and that some may meet the needs of some students better than others.  Her article mainly addresses the school setting and the emergent reader, rather than the pre-school set who traditionally experience a picture book as print.

I think the key is that picture books, whether they are in print or in electronic format, should be of the highest quality and should be at the center of a young child’s literary environment.  We need to demand more high quality picture books, not fewer.  Excellent picture books offer a story in which text and illustrations complement and support one another.  They allow a child to imagine, question, draw conclusions and spark a dialogue with the adult reader.  Most of all, let’s encourage parents, caregivers and other adults to read aloud often to and with children–giving the activity their full attention.