'Word Nerd' author Susin Nielsen @ Bialik

Secondary 1 Bialik students welcomed YA author and TV screenwriter (Degrassi Junior High) Susin Nielsen on September 15, 2011 for an an event which we shared with Sec.1 students from Hebrew Academy accompanied by HA librarian, Norma Newman.  Susin Nielsen is an award-winning author with Canadian Screenwriter and Gemini Awards to her credit, along with nominations for the prestitgious TD Canadian Children’s Book Award, the Ruth and Sylvia Schwartz Children’s Book Award and the Canadian Library Association’s YA Book Award, among others.  She is the author of numerous children’s and YA books, including ‘Word Nerd’ and ‘Dear George Cloony, Please Marry My Mom’(2010).  Susin spoke to our students about her career as an author using comical scenes from her life as a backdrop, and read to them from ‘Word Nerd’.  She also demonstrated the differences between writing for television and writing novels using student volunteers to act out a scene from one of her scripts.  Students were excited by Susin’s engaging presentation, and her books are flying off the Bialik Library shelves!   Watch Susin Nielsen reading from 'Word Nerd' to our students:

Summer Reading

Summer vacation provides me with some uninterrupted reading time to work through that pile of books and magazines on the night-stand that I have been hoarding all winter and spring.  I also have many titles saved up on my Kindle, which  seems to sprout books as quickly as weeds pop up in my garden.  The joy of having a book download almost instantly prompts me to add more and more to my ebook library, which means I have lots more available to read at any one time.  And the popularity of ebook reading is growing so much that I have spent some time doing research this summer into the pros and cons of using ebooks in school libraries like Bialik High School.  More about this later.
Meanwhile, I hope all of you are happily ploughing your way through the summer reading on your shelves and ebook readers.  Our English department added a few new titles to the list for incoming and Sec.2 student reading this year, including a wonderful new favorite of mine, The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate by Jaqueline Kelly. From the book cover:  In central Texas in 1899, eleven-year-old Callie Vee Tate is instructed to be a lady by her mother, learns about love from the older three of her six brothers, and studies the natural world with her grandfather, the latter of which leads to an important discovery. This is the story of a strong-willed, smart, and original character whose expeditions into the natural world with her grandfather lead her away from the traditional women's roles of her time, toward research and scientific discovery.  It is a chance to experience another world, to hear the sights and sounds, and feel the heat, of a Texas summer when fans were a new invention and they were powered by big gas motors.  In order to continue to encourage an interest in literature and to help develop reading and comprehension skills further, the following titles are also recommended for those students entering Sec.2 this fall:  Speak by Laure Halse Anderson;  The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins; What I Saw And How I Lied by Judy Blundell and Big Mouth, Ugly Girl by Joyce Carol Oates.  All of these are available @Bialik Library for your reading pleasure.  Summer is a time to give yourself an opportunity to play, to relax, to dream and to read, read, read away into the long days and nights.  What is on your Kindle?

Not Your Grandmother's Library!

Computers and smartphones have changed the way we work.  I have been using the internet since its inception as a text-based system, and used to do online searches of remote databases using a 'dumb' terminal. In addition, the skills I learned searching for information for students in print indexes way back when have served me well into the new century.  I have adapted to the new technologies without becoming a slave to them; that is I use digital devices as tools rather than as my social or intellectual world.  I love to talk to far-away friends and family members on Skype while I am looking something up, but too much multi-tasking is a distraction from the work at hand.  In a recent article by Lisa Perez(Learning & Leading with Technology, March/April 2011) I am encouraged to become a more savvy school librarian, who can 'leverage technology to prepare students for a successful future'.  I definitely agree with her assessment that students consume a wide variety of electronic formats and need a 'digital age library' and 'savvy' information professionals to teach them 'to effectively navigate and use vast amounts of information'.  No question that she is correct there, and I do work collaboratively with many teachers in my school to teach information literacy skills.  Yet I am troubled because, although I appear to have been working for many years on realizing the long list of recommendations which uber-librarian Joyce Valenza outlines in her 'Manifesto for 21st Century School Librarians' (automation, website, wikis, pathfinders, pathfinders as wikis, collaboration, Facebook and LibraryThing presence, etc.), I still feel that the major contribution I am making to my school community is to provide great books for everyone to read.  Librarians have many skills which make them an essential piece of the successful school equation, but we are champions at providing the best reading to the most people, as Perez points out "School libraries...provide an equitable, fiscally responsible strategy for sharing resources across grade levels and the curriculum while addressing core reading, information, and technology literacies."
So, while I will continue to blog away in hopes that it catches the attention of a few book and library lovers, the daily act of pushing books, and helping students navigate the internet remain a one-on-one, human interaction in my rather industrial 20th century library. 

Bialik Bookblasters Select Best Reads of 2011

Our Bialik Bookblasters members have recommended their favorite titles for this year's Bialik Reads! contests. Junior Bookblasters have made their selections with the incoming Sec.1 class for 2011-12 in mind as well as the Summer Reading list for the incoming Sec.2 group.  Senior Bookblasters have created their own list to be posted on the library website as recommended reading for all students in the Senior School (Sec.3-5).  Here is the list of books they read and loved and want to promote in the next Bialik Reads! contest.  In an upcoming blog I will announce the winning titles for each grade.

Sec.1:  Theodore Boone: Kid Lawyer by John Grisham; The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman; Half-Brother by Kenneth Oppel; The Red Pyramid by Rick Riordan; Diary of A Young Girl by Anne Frank; The Giver by Lois Lowry; Holes by Louis Sachar; Cirque du Freak by Darren Shan; Eragon by Christopher Paolini; Artemis Fowl by Eoin Colfer; The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S.Lewis; The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan; The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins; The 30 Clues by various authors including Rick Riordan, Gordon Korman, etc.

Sec.2: Will Grayson, Will Grayson by John Green and David Levithan; Courage Tree by Diane Chamberlain; In Your Room by Jordanna Fraiberg; The Perks of Being A Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky; Just Listen by Sarah Dessen; It's Kind of a Funny Story by Nick Vizinni; Last Song by Nicholas Sparks; The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd; Little Brother by Cory Doctorow; Leviathan by Scott Westerfeld; Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card; We All Fall Down by Eric Walters.

Sec. 3-5: Least Difficult Reading:  I Am The Messenger; The Book Thief by Marcus Zusak; The Illustrated Man by Ray Bradbury; The Tenth Circle; The Pact by Jodi Picoult; The Princess Bride by William Goldman; Shutter Island by Dennis Lehane; Rule of the Bone by Russell Banks; When Bad Things Happen to Good People by Lawrence Kushner; The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold; Looking for Alaska by John Green.   
More Difficult Reading: I'm Not Scared by Niccolo Ammaniti; The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks; The Book of Negroes by Lawrence Hill; The Client by John Grisham; A Great and Terrible Beauty by Libba Bray; The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffeneger; Lost In Place by Mark Salzman; Little Brother by Cory Doctorow;
Most Difficult Reading: Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut; Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer; Faultlines by Nancy Huston; The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien; Mr. Vertigo by Paul Auster; Kafka On The Shore; Dance, Dance, Dance by Haruki Murakami; Time's Arrow by Martin Amis

Library Snapshot Day! Zoom In On Jewish Libraries

During the week of November 1 - 7, 2010 a single day was selected to show what is going on @ Bialik Library as part of the American Library Association's library advocacy initiative.  This particular week was also chosen by the Association of Jewish Libraries, to highlight the Global Day of Jewish Learning, on November 7, 2010. To help celebrate this, I invited author Alan Silberberg to speak to all the Grade 7 students about his new book, 'Milo'.  About 140 students and teachers were in attendance. Throughout the day,  I took photos and kept a headcount of students and staff using the library.  I also checked the circulation statistics for that date, a typical day at Bialik:

Library users November 1:  130 students and teachers used the library. 

Library Statistics November 1:  40 loans, 14 renewals and 25 returns

Results from all the participating Jewish libraries can be viewed on the 'People of the Books' blog at:
http://jewishlibraries.org/blog/ 

GNO @ JPL!

The 6th Annual Girl's Night Out was held last night at the Jewish Public Library, with Sara Shepard, author of the wildly popoular 'Pretty Little Liars' books and television series.  The Gelber Center was filled to capacity with tween and teen readers who greeted the author enthusiastically, along with their friends, sisters, mothers, aunts and librarians.  Delicious munchies kept the energy level in the room high while the author engaged the audience with tales of her own teenage years, which form the inspiration for her 'Little Liars' characters.  She also read from her upcoming mystery novel, 'The Lying Game', which will be coming out next month.  Many girls lined up to ask questions about Sara Shepard's life, work and career and she answered with humour and patience, hoping to inspire these young women to read and to write, as she herself had been at the same age by author Lois Duncan's mysteries.  Fabulous door prizes were handed out during the evening and each and everyone left with a goody bag.  Special GNO certificates were distributed to all participants inviting them to join the JPL at a great discount.  It was a great event and we look forward to next year's author, Ally Carter!

'Milo' author @ Bialik

On Monday November 1, Alan Silberberg, author of Pond Scum and numerous YTV and DisneyChannel tv shows, introduced his new book, Milo: Sticky Notes and Brain Freeze to the Secondary 1 students of Bialik High School.  Alan demonstrated how his illustrations for Milo are used to highlight emotions that the character, a 13 year-old whose mother has died, and who has been moved from house to house and school to school ever since, cannot express on his own.  His comical illustrations introduce readers to Milo's grade 7 friends, his family and his teachers, in a warm and funny way that our Grade 7 students found appealing, especially when they found out that Milo's story is based on the author's own experiences.  Our students asked many questions about writing, about getting published, and whether or not Alan had met some of their favorite tv stars.  You can find more information on Alan Silberberg at:  silberbooks.com