Tuesday, September 27, 2011

"Death By Chocolate" Party---A Choco-Lot-A Success!




Last night, we had over 40 tweens and teens attend our first annual back to school Chocolate Party event.  We engaged in chocolate face painting, chocolate trivia, a chocolate game and tasting (guess the secret ingredient...hmm...is that.....pistachio???), as well as some good old fashioned games awarded (properly!) with chocolate surprises.  If that wasn't enough, we also had some great new organic hot chocolate that was served by members of our Teen Adivosry Board for everyone to taste!  It was a lot of fun and hopefully everyone slept well after all the sugar and fun!  Hope to see you at our next program! 

Emily Scherrer
Adult & Teen Services

Friday, September 23, 2011

Shel Silverstein's New Poem.....

When Shel Silverstein wrote the poem "Years From Now," he seemed to know that one day he'd be gone but that his playful words and images would still be making children happy. "I cannot see your face," he writes to his young readers, but in "some far-off place," he assures them, "I hear you laughing — and I smile."


The beloved children's poet and illustrator died in 1999 at age 68. "Years From Now" is one of the poems in a new book called Every Thing On It that has just been released by Silverstein's family. If you liked Silverstein's other books, such as Light in the Attic and Where the Sidewalk Ends, you'll recognize poems — like "Frightened" — as vintage Shel:


"There are kids underneath my bed,"

Cried little baby monster Fred.

Momma monster smiled. "Oh, Fred,

There's no such things as kids," she said.

Visit NPR to read more and listen to an excerpt: http://www.npr.org/books/titles/140566536/every-thing-on-it-poems-and-drawings

Thursday, September 15, 2011

New Post Secret Slideshow and App....

By: Frank Warren

I started PostSecret six years ago in Washington, DC by passing out postcards to strangers and inviting them to illustrate a secret and mail it to me. Quickly, word of the project spread virally around the world. Today I have a pile of anonymous secrets taller than me - more than 600,000.


Now I'm excited about the new PostSecret App that allows users to discover secrets from their cities or schools, create and share anonymous secrets with their phone, and connect with like-minded people. In this special collection made for Huffington Post readers, I have included five provocative secrets mailed to me on postcards and five secrets shared with the new PostSecret App, and a trailer that explains how the app works.

View here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/frank-warren/post_2401_b_961034.html

Thursday, September 8, 2011

DC Teens Work With the Homeless @ The Library

Rebecca Renard September 7, 2011

As DC Public Library's (DCPL) teen employment program coordinator, I often ask teens what it's like to work at our library. One of their biggest complaints? The fact that there are lots of homeless people here. "They stink," some teens have told me. "They talk to themselves. They're crazy." Frequently parents have echoed these sentiments and expressed concern for their children's safety.

It's true. Like many urban libraries, we attract our share of homeless patrons. And they often share the same space with teens. How could we better serve the needs of both groups? I wondered. How could we help teens feel more comfortable around homeless library users? As it happened, I was soon about to find out.

In early 2009, DCPL's Customers without Homes Committee hosted a workshop to offer sensitivity training to our staff so that we could better serve our homeless patrons. The session was sponsored by the National Coalition for the Homeless' Speakers Bureau, and featured people who spoke firsthand about their experiences of being homeless. Listening to these men and women, I soon realized that if our teens could learn more about who the homeless were as individuals, perhaps our kids would become more understanding and less antagonistic toward them. And maybe our teens would be inspired to become advocates for the homeless. With those aims in mind, I created a nine-month project to train our teen employees in portrait photography and interviewing techniques so they could photograph and collect the oral histories of some of DC's homeless residents.


Read more here:  http://www.schoollibraryjournal.com/slj/newsletters/newsletterbucketsljteen/891874-444/your_story_has_a_home.html.csp