Beyond the Wakefields

From Zap2it:

Michael Cera and Kat Dennings will star in “Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist,” a badly titled romantic drama from Mandate Films.

A web design workshop is one of the most valuable programs you can offer teens at your library. Most teens spend a lot of time on the internet and as the proliferation of social networking sites shows, they are interested in having their own little corner of the universe. Whether they are designing a website to sell their homemade t-shirts, posting their poetry and quotes, or changing the background on their MySpace, web design skills are useful both in their current lives and as potential future job skills.

Our web design workshop is a basic overview of internet safety, basic layout and design skills, What You Get editors (WYSIWYG), basic HTML, basic blogging and web hosting. We used the two computers in the young adult room and I set up my laptop in between with a powerpoint presentation in the middle so they could look at screenshots and instructions while they used the WYSIWYG editor on their own computers. Ideally a computer lab with a projector would help teach more students at a time but they got really individualized attention. I made a very simple, somewhat ugly website and explained all the different pieces of it, and talked them through rebuilding the exact same website to see how its done. The program was very introductory and I think a more advanced session would be necessary for anyone who really wanted to get into web design.

A lot of librarians are concerned about teaching their children and teens internet safety skills. Incorporating these skills into a web design course is an easy way to have a captive audience for a topic teens don’t necessarily want to hear. I give about a two minute speech about not posting your exact location, using a psuedonym or just your first name, and not giving away too much information in your posts (like: We hang out every day at the library or I was walking home from JFK school and went to Jimmy’s Pizza). It was simple and to the point. I think some of the internet safety craze is a little overblown, especially since it wasn’t all that long ago that I was a teenager using the internet, but it is appropriate to include this in your lesson.

I am not a crafty person. I took up scrapbooking one summer but gave up because the pages I created never looked anywhere near as good as the magazines. One of the women who works in our children’s room is amazing with crafts. She can come up with a craft on any theme for any age group and have them all be different. I am the complete opposite. But last year when I went to visit the schools to promote the summer reading program,a girl entering the 6th grade asked, “Are you going to do any crafts?” with a look on her face I couldn’t ignore. She had grown up going to the library and just because she was joining the YA program didn’t mean she wanted to give up doing crafts. And even though I’m totally inept at crafts, I told her I would.

This summer we did crafts on three different days. The first day was duct tape crafts. This in some ways continues the craft I did last year as I bought way too much duct tape and we’ll probably be doing these crafts for years. Last summer we made wallets and roses. The day before Valetine’s Day we also made roses in the YA room and that was quite a draw. This year we stuck to the summer theme. We made beach bags, water bottle holders or visors. We used patterns from Pack-O-Fun Magazine.

The second day of crafts was beading. We used pony beads to make penguins and Kenny from South Park. This was very popular and the teens really enjoyed themselves. The patterns for these and many other beading projects can be founds at Making Friends.

The third craft day was Lava Lamps and monkeys. The lava lamps were created out of empty soda bottles, water, cooking oil, and powdered tempera paint. I got the instructions off one of the YALSA listservs. Several librarians have described these as very popular, but I thought they looked rather disappointing. My two teens loved making them though and made about three apiece (We had extra supplies due to the low turnout). The monkeys were made from pipe cleaners and pom poms also from Pack-O-Fun Magazine.

Singing

Originally uploaded by Kerers

As our opening event of the summer reading program, we hosted Draco and the Malfoys (with special guest Justin Finch-Fletchly and the Sugar Quills). I would highly recommend having a wizard rock concert at your library. It is a fairly easy program to put on and attracts a lot of attention. Draco and the Malfoys were easy to work with and very talented too. I had seen them before and knew it would be a great way to start off a very Harry Potter summer.

The band brought their own sound equipment and we only had to provide a stage and an extension cord. With help from the Mayor’s Office and DPW, we blocked off the street outside the library and had a party. A bunch of the teens who had registered for the program attended which was great - since they were the target audience - and we had about 125 people total. The predicted rain managed to stay away the whole afternoon.

Feel free to contact me or comment if you want more specific information on this program.

My registration numbers are a little off from last year, particularly for advanced registration.  I suspect that there are several reasons for that.

1. School Visits - I was only able to visit 3 of the 7 possible schools to do summer reading promotion.  At the end of the school year, everyone’s schedule is crazy and I was unable to connect with a few of the schools.  Next year I will start earlier (which will be easier since I won’t be getting married in the beginning of May) and try to contact different people within the schools to get something set up.

2. Registration Dates - Last year the first week that there was no school was the last week of June.  This year (partly due to the schools opening at the end of August) the students got out a full week earlier, but we left registration the last week in August.  The library was packed in the week in between with students getting their summer reading books.  If registration was that week we may have been able to pull in extra students.

3. Summer Scheduling - Most of the parents in this town work and they want their children to be scheduled all day long.  While in the past that may have included sending them to the library (and it does still happen in the after school time frame), many parents are signing their children up for the school summer programs which are both fun and educational and very low cost.  I think they run four days a week for a $10 registration fee only.  Our program, while free, runs 3-4 days a week, but is only for an hour or two a program.  If their attendance continues to rise and mine continues to drop I may have to modify the program to work more inline with these groups.

4. No Hook Activity - As part of the summer reading program we go on a trip.  The trip this year is a Haunted Boston walking tour.  This is a main draw for the program, but we can only take 30 students with us.  Last year, we did signup for the trip during registration.  Many of the students who signed up were students I never saw again for the rest of the summer.  When the trip rolled around, I had to call them to see if they were planning on attending.  Some forgot that they had signed up.  This year I pushed the registration for the trip back until two weeks into the summer program.  I am hoping this will allow students who’ve been coming to the events so far to be the ones on the trip.  While I think this was a good decision, it meant that advanced signup was not as much of a draw as last year.

It’s summer reading time at my library which means I have tons of things to say on this blog but get home from work so drained that doing anything more intensive than Sudoku is a challenge.

My library is one of the many libraries with a very time intensive summer reading program for both children and young adults.  This is my second summer with the program.  The previous young adult librarian had started a fabulous summer reading program which attracted tons of teens to events 3-4 times a week.  It helped to come into a successful program and I tried to maintain her basic outline and add new events to the mix.  We ask that the participants read five hours per week, but we have a very wide range of what we consider reading (novels, non-fiction, comics, internet websites, magazines, newspapers, cereal boxes).

Over the next few weeks, I’ll post about the different events I do and the pluses and minuses of each one.

As you can tell from the title of this blog, I am a huge Sweet Valley fan. I started reading them in 2nd grade and stopped in college only because they stopped publishing them (which upset me not only as a reader, but . I’d love to go back and reread them all but that’s a pretty daunting task considering there are hundreds of them, most of them are written horribly, and there are tons of continuity problems (just how many Christmases can there be in one year), but even though certain subplots are really awful, a lot of it was just good fun.

Now there’s a Live Journal community dedicated to recapping old Sweet Valley books. 1Bruce1 has a community of readers who are going back to their childhood favorites and pulling apart just how ridiculous they are - with a lot of snark and love.

Here’s a couple of favorites:

College Girls - SVU
Dear Sister - SVH
Brokenhearted - SVH

Thanks to Pop Goes the Library for the link.

2006 was the first year that I tracked my reading and I wish that I had started much earlier. I kept a simple spreadsheet on Tracks Life and put a link to it on my Firefox toolbar at work and at home so I’d be sure to update it. I know many librarians and literature fans keep very detailed reading logs with book reviews, but this was much easier for me to maintain.

Overview

I read 111 books this year. I would have read a lot more, but I moved in June which cut my commute from a one-hour each way T ride to a ten minute drive. Good for my mental health, but bad for my reading. The complete list of books I read (and their ratings) can be found here.

Of these, 75 were YA books. This is the first year I’ve read a number of adult books (at least, not school-assigned adult books) in addition to YA books. This is also the first year where I was interested in reading non-fiction books. Personal finance, pop culture, and glbt issues were a focus. I also decided to start reading chick-lit (since I am a woman in her 20s and not a teen anymore) and think that Jennifer Weiner can do no wrong.

Omissions

I didn’t read nearly enough comics this year. My teens LOVE manga, but I can’t get into it, and my interest lies in the area of indie comics which they won’t touch with a ten foot pole. I consider Fun Home by Alison Bechdel to be one of the best books I read this year.

My most notable omission is the absence of any science fiction or fantasy books! I’m not sure how I let myself get away with that since as a librarian I should be reading outside my comfort zone and my fiance reads pretty much nothing but fantasy. I need to make reading fantasy books a new year’s resolution since I can’t keep booktalking Inkheart and Feed and nothing else.

Adbooks members may note the almost complete absence of JHunt nominees. I’m generally a lurker anyway although last year I read all but one of the books and voted throughout, but unfortunately, this JHunt season almost none of the books I was interested in reading made the list. I like literary fiction as much as the best of them, but my teens would not even attempt most of the titles on the list so I’ll wait for next year.
What I Liked Best (2006 Books in no particular order)

An Abundance of Katherines by John Green
I loved the characters of Colin and Hassan.  The plot wasn’t quite as unique as Looking for Alaska, but I could listen to these two characters for a long time.

Good Girls by Laura Ruby
Every teen girl should read this book.  One of the most honest portrayals of teen sexuality I’ve ever read.

Fun Home by Alison Bechdel
Not YA by any means, but one of the best books written this year period.  Give this to any adult friends who don’t think comic books are for kids and are lacking in literary value.

Possible Side Effects by Augusten Burroughs
I love pretty much everything he’s written, and this series of essays does not disappoint.

The Murder of Bindy MacKenzie by Jaclyn Moriarty (aka Becoming Bindy MacKenzie)
I wish that I had time to go back and read Feeling Sorry for Celia and Finding Cassie Crazy (I don’t like the American title, The Year of Secret Assignments, as much) since there is a lot of overlap, but this book does stand alone.

Blind Faith by Ellen Wittlinger
Sandpiper was my favorite book of 2005 and I think Blind Faith is just as strong.

It’s Kind of a Funny Story by Ned Vizzini
Who would have thought that suicidal thoughts and a stint in a mental hospital would be so funny…but mostly poignant and emotional.

Saving the World by Julia Alvarez
I took an entire class on the works of Julia Alvarez in college, so I am by no means an objective observer, but this is one of her best.  I don’t like historical fiction, stories that take place on boats, or stories with multiple timelines pretty much as a rule, but I was engrossed from the third chapter on.

Just Listen by Sarah Dessen
This was the first Sarah Dessen book I had read and I immediately grabbed two of her others the next day at work.  The only way this book could be better is if the music described in it were real.

King Dork by Frank Portman
I’ve been a Mr. T Experience fan since high school so I knew any book by Dr. Frank would be extremely witty and enjoyable to read.  I didn’t expect that he would have done his homework so well, and that this book would satirize the current state of young adult literature while skewering The Catcher in the Rye.

A Bad Boy Can Be Good for a Girl by Tanya Lee Stone
I hate the cover of this book and I think I’m pretty much done with the verse novel thing, but I am so glad that I picked this one up anyway.  I booktalked this to a freshman class and almost every girl in the class read it (even the ones assigned to read a different book).  It’s honest and thoughtful and hey, any reference to Judy Blume’s Forever is a welcome one.
Honorable Mention (Books that have really stayed with me)

Rules by Cynthia Lord
The Girls Who Went Away by Ann Fessler
Bass Ackwards and Belly Up by Elizabeth Craft and Sarah Fain
The Guy Not Taken by Jennifer Weiner
Dairy Queen by Catherine Gilbert Murdock
RX by Tracy Lynn

Welcome to Beyond the Wakefields!  This blog will focus on things that new Young Adult Librarians should know from basics such as managing list serv messages to programming for teens to required reading.  I’m a huge YA literature fan and an internet geek so there will be plenty of posts on new books and cool websites.  Even if you are not a young adult librarian you will find something here to enjoy.  I will also be reviewing books (even some adult books - which I’ve just recently started to read).