Mel's Desk

My library is just completing phase one of our own picture book reorganization! Piloted by the Darien Library, a picture book reorganization project sorts your picture book collection into broad subject categories instead of alphabetizing by the author’s last name. It is intended to help families browse more easily to find topics of interest to their children–and help children be more independent in finding books as well.

I was not the architect of our initiative, so rather than outline all the logistics, I will point you to others who have written about their projects: Katie and Amy and the ALSC Blog or the Darien Library slideshow.

The Thomas Memorial Library in Maine even ran a little survey to help decide what to call each section! Or check out the Picture Book Project pages from the Marin County Free Library.

I will say that we managed to do our reorg across multiple branches with a floating collection and with no library closures, so while it seems like a huge undertaking, it is totally doable.

I read this post recently: From the Short Stacks, which provides an update on their reorg project and a reporting on a few tweaks they made to the categories, and it inspired me to at least share our categories, in case you’re about to sort all YOUR books, and one more perspective helps you clarify your thinking!

Every library does this a little differently! Here’s the 10 categories we ended up with, and the little blurbs I wrote to describe each one.

Activities
There’s so many things for children to do and try! In this section you’ll find stories about play, sports, arts and crafts, reading and the library, music, and dance. And more!

Animals
Young children are fascinated by the creatures that share their world. This section includes stories about animals at the zoo, in the wild, under the ocean, and on the farm–as well as pets, insects, and dinosaurs.

Celebrations
Some special days are different than others! Find out why with the books in this section about holidays, religious observances, and events such as birthdays and weddings.

Concepts
Children begin learning and thinking about the world by putting objects and ideas into categories. Look in this section for books about colors, shapes, letters, and numbers, but also other ideas such as time, opposites, sizes, and patterns.

Growing Up
Babies, toddlers, and preschoolers experience one major “first” after another! Books in this section will help them explore important milestones, rituals, and relationships. Topics include potty training, welcoming new siblings, making friends, starting school, establishing bedtime routines, learning about their bodies, as well as books about family members.

More to Explore
The best thing about books is making new discoveries! There’s something for everyone in this section, such as books about real people, and books set in other times and places. You’ll also find longer stories, including Dr Seuss books, and fun surprises such as monsters, ninjas, and pirates.

Nature and Science
As children grow older, they become more and more interested in the world around them. Encourage their wonder with the books in this section about the weather, seasons, mechanics, outer space, geography, and ecosystems.

Popular Characters
It’s so much fun to find a familiar face in a book! Look in this section for characters from movies, TV shows, toys, and new and classic picture book series.

Rhymes, Songs, and Tales
Children’s picture books draw on a rich history of traditional literature. Explore that heritage with books in this section that showcase classic folklore and fairy tales, as well as new twists on old tales. You’ll also find familiar children’s songs, Mother Goose rhymes, and poetry.

Things That Go
How do we get from here to there? Books in this section are full of cars, trucks, trains, planes, construction vehicles, bikes, boats, and even balloons.

A Few Notes:

Animals is intended to be, broadly, animals-acting-like-animals (as much as possible) otherwise half the picture books in the world would end up here.

More to Explore is our “Misc” section. We put monsters over here in the hopes of helping families who wanted to avoid them. We tried really hard to put authors in a subject category, to save our Popular Characters section just for favorite characters, and not favorite authors too. So Richard Scarry is in Concepts and Eric Carle is in Animals. Dr. Seuss is our exception, and is our only author collected in More to Explore.

Growing Up turned out to be way huger than we anticipated. The way we described it, EVERYTHING is about “growing up.” O.o I think my advice here would be to consider separating out the books about families, or maybe friends and families, which would leave the “milestones” topics by themselves.

No, we don’t have a Princesses category! We have Disney princesses in Popular Characters, and all other princessy books go in Rhymes, Songs, and Tales.

We’re still getting used to it, patrons and staff alike, but I love that we did this! How about you? Are you planning a reorg project?

In January, I ran a reader’s survey, asking among other things for feedback from you on what Mel’s Desk content is most valuable. As it happens, an unexpected opportunity to step into a supervisory role at my library seriously derailed my plans to use the survey responses to refresh and refocus Mel’s Desk this year.

However, one thread about “best practices” from the survey has been frequently in my thoughts, even if I’ve been unable to address it yet here. When I asked, “What other types of posts or topics would you like to read?” One thoughtful reader said, “[About the] research underlying practices,” and followed that up with, “1) Make purpose or expected result of practice crystal clear 2) use comparative analysis to show a particular practice is best possible for purpose. We need stronger comparative analysis to know what is best in our practice.”

I’m not sure exactly what context this reader was thinking about in terms of practices–he or she may be thinking of programming, customer service, reader’s advisory, any number of things. But of course when I read it I thought of storytime.

As a storytime trainer I’ve been wrestling with the idea of best practices for a long time. Way back in 2010, after a round of storytime observations, I asked, “What aspects of storytime fall under “personal style” and what fall under “best practices”?” In other words, is there anything about a storytime performance that we can label objectively ideal?
This is exactly the kind of appealing idea that the survey reader raised–that we can test and measure different approaches to how we present our services, possibly including storytime.

I still go back and re-read the comments to that post as well as the ones to my follow-up post “What Not To Do,” because your thoughts were so valuable to me as I developed a set of storytime competencies to guide training and mentoring at my library.

As we worked out those storytime competencies, though, my boss and I realized that they depended completely on our vision of storytimes, not as a platonic ideal, but for our particular library. Our goals for storytime for our community impacted what we wanted our competencies–our “best practices”–to be. I talked about this, how various goals for storytime affect the assessment of storytime, in a 2012 post, “Storytime Questions and Storytime Goals.”

Now here we are in 2014! I am still completely invested in the idea that storytime practices–for any storytime, at any library–can and should be regularly assessed for areas of improvement. I believe this and I have also come to believe that given the great variety of libraries, staff, communities, and missions, that working to discover a universal set of “best practices” for all storytimes is not the best strategy for me to use to improve storytimes at my library.

As I start a new adventure with a dedicated team of storytime providers, I will be challenging myself not to think about “best practices” but instead about “intentional practices” and “best questions.”

Intentional practices: Given our goals for storytime and for our community, how can we be thoughtful and deliberate about every aspect of storytime so that we meet our objectives? As the survey reader said, “Make the purpose of the practice crystal clear.”

Best questions: What can we ask ourselves about planning, preparing, and delivering storytimes to clarify the impact of our practices on our goals?

I’ll be observing (and presenting!) even more storytimes than ever in my new job, and I promise to post the questions my team and I ask ourselves as we work to bring even more thought and intention to the work we do.

What questions do you ask yourself about your storytimes? How do you choose to be intentional about what you do in storytime?

Update 9/4/14: Yesterday Abby wrote an excellent essay for the ALSC Blog about owning the educational and developmental benefits of storytime and being intentional about communicating those benefits to your community. It’s a must-read!

A few years ago I decided I wanted to tell “Three Little Fishes and the Big Bad Shark” by Ken Geist for summer reading school visits. In this version of The Three Little Pigs, the fishies take refuge in a seaweed house, a sandcastle, and finally, a big scallop shell as they escape from the shark.

The before & after images of the seaweed and sandcastle houses gave me the idea to make front-and-back pictures to show as I told the story. Using clip art cartoons as my patterns, I put together several sets of pictures, using cut out construction paper pieces and cardstock bases.

We needed a shark, of course:

GRRR!

And three little fish:

Here’s the seaweed house, before and after destruction:

The sandcastle before and after utter collapse:

And the scallop shell, open and closed.

And at last, the shark, sans teeth, after trying to get at the fishies in the scallop shell:

These are about 9×9 each. I glued them back to front (The three fish are the only ones that are one-sided) so the shark with teeth was on one side, without teeth on the other; seaweed tall on one side, short on the other, and so forth. I stuck a paint stirrer stick thingy from Ace in each one as a handle:

And I marked up the base of the handles, so I could tell which picture was which while I was in the middle of telling the story. Dots are the “front side,” dashes are the “back side:”

What I did was sit in front of the kids, and put the pictures handles-up in a box in front of me. Then I started the story, holding up the right picture at the right time. When the houses got destroyed, I just flipped the pictures from one side to another while I was holding them up. When the shark went after the scallop shell at the end, I showed the shell open and shut with one hand, then the shark before and after with the other.

It took a little practice to be able to manipulate the pictures while I was telling the story and interacting with the kids, but in the end it was worth it and it was a slightly different way to present.

Here’s all the images together:

Happy Shark Week! The round up is at Sharon’s place this week, head on over and see all the other sharky goodness!

You can always find everything Flannel Friday at our website.

1) Starting a new job as a supervisor
2) Scheduling a 13-person team
3) Going to meetings
4) Answering email at work during the day
5) Revising the schedule
6) Talking with other supervisors
7) Attending training sessions
8) Planning training sessions
9) Updating the revised schedule
10) Finishing projects from my old job
11) Answering email at home in the evenings
12) Learning new software on which to publish the updated revised schedule
13) Binge-watching 836 episodes of Midsomer Murders in puddle of exhaustion

Although children’s gross motor and fine motor skills are both developing all the time, many fine motor skills take more patience and cognitive development than gross motor skills. Think of a baby who can mush applesauce around on her tray (arms) before she can pick up a Cheerio (fingers). In addition, small muscles get tired more quickly than big ones (could you hang from the monkey bars longer from your hands or your knees?). Using arm and body motion activities to is a way to introduce children to letter-shape or directional concepts while they are still working on learning how to hold and use crayons and pencils with confidence.

Using scarves is one way to introduce purposeful movements into storytime. We often use scarves and open-ended activities with music, but we can use them in more directed ways too. We want to be careful to do so in age-appropriate ways, though. Here are a few ideas:

Babies:

Encourage the walkers to move their scarves up high and down low and around in a circle. Can they “swim” their scarf like a fish through the air? Can they drag their scarf like a snake on the floor? Encourage parents of babies to see if their children will grasp the scarf. Parents can help their babies move their baby’s arms and watch the scarf move, or pull gently on the other end of the scarf in a little game of tug of war. They could also tie it gently around an ankle and prop the baby so they can see what happens when they kick their feet.

Toddlers:

Have the children move their scarves in different ways. Some ideas are: from high to low, from low to high, in a rainbow (arc over their heads), upside down rainbow or a smile (a big “u” shape in front of their bodies), a big circle (whole arm), a little circle (just moving forearm or wrist), bumps (little humps from left to right), zigzag (like a Z, from top to bottom, or like a W from left to right). These are all line shapes that make up letters, but without requiring letter knowledge yet from our little ones.

Preschool/Family:

You can encourage preschool children to hold the scarf between their pointer finger and their thumb—this is a “pincher grip” and good for fine motor development. Make letter shapes in the air together. You could write a letter first on a whiteboard to give the kids something to copy. Say aloud the movements as you go. “Let’s make an M! Start down on this side of your body, now go straight up! Move down to the middle by your tummy! Now go up to the other side! Now move down to this side of your body.” OR, “Let’s make an O! An O is like a circle, it goes around and around! Start at the top! Go around to the top again!”

When you’re done, collect the scarves and say something like this to the adults: “Grownups, when you and your kids play with scarves or ribbons or magic wands, your children are developing their arm muscles and starting to learn about lines and shapes. These muscles and concepts will help them when they are learning to write. Playing with your children will help them get ready to read and write.”