The Monkey Speaks

Today I serendipitously found another quote to share. I’m a fan of author Mem Fox, and I just picked up her book Reading Magic (Harvest, 2001), for parents, teachers, and librarians, about the importance of reading aloud to children. She harangues us, humorously and in some detail, about the structure of a story that grips us, and how she picks the words she chooses to tell her stories. She writes:

If anything could be more important than the first line of the story, it’s the last line. If our story reading is as mesmerizing as it should be, the last line will be akin to the final amen at the end of a church service and will provide this kind of reassurance to the child: “Good-bye for now, go well, God bless you, take it easy, you’re safe with me, I love you very much, see you soon.”

When I heard Fox speak several years ago, she discussed this very topic, describing how she chose the words for her book Where is the Green Sheep? (Harcourt, 2004; illus. by Judy Horacek). When she read the passages from this book aloud, she did it slowly and hypnotically. “Here is the sun sheep. / And here is the rain sheep. / Here is the car sheep, and here is the train sheep. /[pause] But where is the green sheep?”

It’s a book I read to groups of babies and toddlers all the time now, and they love it. When you read this book silently, it doesn’t seem like much; when you read it aloud, though, in just the right, slow, foot-tapping rhythm, it’s close to perfect. Green Sheep is a gentle lull of rhythm and rhyme; it keeps asking, “but where is the green sheep?” And, so, where is it? The last lines: “Turn the page quietly - let’s take a peep… [pause] / Here’s our green sheep, fast asleep.”

When I heard Fox speak, she read excerpts from several successive versions of this book. She spent a lot of time making little changes in the wording, honing and sharpening each line. For all of us who love good picture books, it was a wonderful lesson in how putting the exact words together in exactly the right way can show us just how a few words can give each young listener the right feeling, like a hug, when a story ends.

Do you want to do the right thing about making your library friendlier for Spanish speakers, and to the Latino community in general, but aren’t quite sure how to begin? If you go here, to the WebJunction site, you’ll be able to download a PDF document called “Evaluating Materials for Latino Children and Young Adults,” an excerpt from a new Neal-Schuman book, Serving Latino Communities by Camila Alire and Jacqueline Ayala. This brief article gives an overview of important points to think about when adding titles - most particularly, that “Latino culture” is not one big thing that’s all the same. There are dozens of nationalities and groups included in that blanket term; there are important linguistic and cultural differences between a rural Mexican family and a Dominican from the big city. Also, a book by a U.S. or British Anglo author that has been translated from English (there are a lot of these out there) and one written in Spanish by a native speaker may be received very differently by the people you’re trying to reach.  This article is an excerpt, and it just sort of ends, but it’s still worth your time to read.

Another site worth visiting is the Barahona Center for the Study of Books in Spanish for Children and Adolescents at the California State University, San Marcos. Here’s a useful database of recommended books in Spanish for school and library collections, sorted by title, subject, grade, and/or age, and searchable in both English and Spanish. There’s also a list of books in English about Latinos and Latino culture. If you’re working to serve Latino members of your public better, pay a visit.

How is technology changing children? Most people I know don’t really believe that kids are any different than they’ve ever been, but others claim that technology encourages them to multitask, to scatter their attention more than ever, and yet manage just fine. I’ve heard it claimed that techno-savvy children have gained an almost mystical ability to assemble impressions and ideas from the fragments of word and image that the world around constantly bombards them with into new ideas that make sense.

I’m a great believer in synchronicity & serendipity. This morning I opened a book and read a passage at random. Here it is: a quote I found in a book called Popular Culture, New Media and Digital Literacy in Early Childhood, edited by Jackie Marsh (RoutledgeFalmer, 2005). The quote’s from Neil Postman’s The Disappearance of Childhood (Vintage, 1994):

Childhood… was an outgrowth of an environment in which a particular form of information, exclusively controlled by adults, was made available in stages to children in what was judged to be psychologically assimilable ways. The maintenance of childhood depended on the principles of managed information and sequential learning.

In the early 90s, when Postman wrote these words, the Web was in its earliest stages, and most children had no access to it. Today, of course, in the Web 2.0 era, in the age of Facebook and MySpace and Wikipedia and all the other online destinations, children can not only be clonked on the head by chunks of information from a thousand places, but can generate chunks of it themselves to toss at other kids.

Adults have less control over managing and sequencing information in the era of Web 2.0, obviously, and this loss of control affects the way children build the world they live in. Are children assimilating this mess of out-of-sequence fragments well and building new worlds out of them, or just spending hours online because society & their peers tell them it’s a cool thing to do without much of a constructive result, or because they just want to play games? What do you think?

Every so often, someone claims that babies can be taught, from birth (almost), to be toilet trained. Here’s the latest iteration of that claim - the “diaper-free” movement. These are babies that parents encourage to let them know when they are about to pee or poop. The parents then hold their children over the toilet or (as you’ll read in this story) the sink, or even a tree. These parents say they want to lessen the “environmental impact associated with diapers” or who saw parents who didn’t use diapers while traveling abroad.

Are such practices developmentally appropriate? Who knows? Child development experts disagree. But somehow I bet these parents of diaper-free babies end up with just as much dirty laundry.

To keep this relevant to libraries, by the way, here’s a book for your library’s collection on raising babies diaper-free: The Diaper-Free Baby by Christine Gross-Ioh (This link is to the Amazon listing).

The folks at the Minneapolis Public Library have a great page on their site called ELSIE , or Early Literacy Storytime Ideas Exchange. It’s a booklist of titles particularly suited to reading aloud to preschoolers, and it identifies which of the six pre-reading skills (if you’re familiar with ALA’s “Every Child Ready to Read” program, you’ll know these skills) each book helps young children gain. It also includes some fingerplays and songs.

While the list is very incomplete, it should inspire you to look at the picture books, somgs, and activities you use in your library programs and match them up with the six skills. Which books encourage vocabulary building and which build phonological awareness? For example, I often sing “Down By the Bay” with the kids, encouraging them to give me the name of an animal, which I then must rhyme. Rhyming = phonological awareness, dressed up in a song. (One of my rhymes: “Did you ever see a bear / wearing purple underwear / Down by the bay?”) If you’re presenting baby lapsit programs and toddler and preschool storytimes, are you telling parents and caregivers between stories and songs about these skills and how they work?

“Environmental print” sounds like something a librarian might use to combat global warming, but it’s actually a way to encourage literacy in young children, especially children growing up in print-deprived homes. The modern (or should I say post-modern?) child is surrounded by advertising and product logos; a child who can’t yet read print seeing the Golden Arches and saying “McDonald’s” is a common experience. Children learn to “read” those familiar symbols, and adults can help them turn their ability to comprehend everything from signs to cereal boxes into real literacy skills.

Take a look at a page on teacher Vanessa Levin’s site, http://www.pre-kpages.com/environmental_print.html , that gives ideas to other teachers, parents, and librarians about using print and symbols from the world around them to help kids learn early reading and concept skills. For example, she shows the front of a Cheerios box that’s been bound into a classroom book called “What’s for Breakfast?”

Remember that many families have no books in their homes (see the previous posting), along with parents who aren’t readers. Reaching them through advertsing and logos may be the most relevant way to reach them. All we can do is hope that we can somehow reach these children and put books in front of them, too.

One in four Americans say they read no books at all last year, says a new Associated Press - Ipsos poll. Here’s the story on CNN.com  (http://www.cnn.com/2007/LIVING/wayoflife/08/21/reading.ap/index.html?iref=newssearch). Someone does a poll like this every few years, and the outcome always seems to be written up in a depressing way. I’m sure we’ve all heard that book sales haven’t been growing for a while. But library circulation continues to be strong just about everywhere, so I’m not too worried.

Anyone who works with younger children–babies and toddlers in particular–knows that music rules. Kids under 3 love songs and singing, and there’s no better way to get them focused on you in a baby lapsit program or a storytime than to sing to them. If you play an instrument, they focus on you even more intensely. And if you’re singing with older kids, up through middle school, playing an instrument gives you cred you wouldn’t have otherwise.

I learned to play the ukulele when I was in high school (I discovered early that my stubby fingers - which you can see in the picture - weren’t well suited to the guitar and I wanted to impress the girls that I could play something). But after high school, I put it away until I had become a librarian and started doing kids’ programs. Now I know that a lot of people don’t take the ukulele too seriously, but I wanted to tell all who will listen that it’s a perfect vehicle for musical whimsy. It makes folks of every age smile, and it’s ideal for library programs or doing outreach. It’s small, light, and easy to carry around.

And the great thing about the uke is that it’s easy to learn to play. All you really need is four or five chords and you can play about a hundred simple children’s songs of the Raffi/Pete Seeger variety. Some of the songs I play and sing that work really well for me include “Wheels on the Bus,” “Illy Ally O,” “Six Little Ducks,” “Aiken Drum,” and “The More We Get Together.”

If you do children’s story programs, but have never done any with an instrument, I strongly recommend it.

You can find the chords you’ll need to play songs like these in several places online. But I will be posting lyrics and chord sheets for them over the next few weeks to encourage people to try out the uke.

Many people have old ukes around, or possibly inherited one from a relative. But if you want to buy an inexpensive uke, there are plenty on eBay, although I particularly recommend one seller from Hawaii known as Musicguymic (http://stores.ebay.com/Musicguymics-Room), who sells everything from the most expensive collector’s ukes to inexpensive ones that are still of decent quality. I bought the pictured ukulele from him, an Ohana longneck soprano, which is the best uke I’ve tried yet for singing with kids. I’ve met Mic, and he’s a good, trustworthy guy. E-mail him and ask him for his recommendation for a good instrument that’s affordable. More uke stuff soon!

Zero to Three is a great publication for any library that serves folks who care about and work with very young children. Their Web site, http://www.zerotothree.org/, doesn’t have their printed journal’s content, unfortunately, but there are several articles and features worth visiting, and new things pop up from time to time. Zero to Three keeps reminding as many of us as will listen that there’s a place in which the lives of the youngest Americans collide with a political system that continually professes a love for children, but frequently doesn’t seem to want to spend a whole lot of money on them. Young children aren’t terrorists, they don’t bring big profits to the economy, and they don’t have big lobbying firms to donate money to politicians, so they often attract less attention than other forces at work in Washington, DC.

Right now the site highlights a PDF document* that anyone interested in young children should read; it’s called “Babies Can’t Wait! A Presidential Agenda to Support Families with Vulnerable Infants and Toddlers.” Zero to Three designed it as a discussion-starter for any of us who get the chance to communicate with any of the presidential candidates or their staff people, to ask them what the candidates intend to do to help young children who need help getting ready to learn. For example, less than three percent of the babies and toddlers eligible for Early Head Start are actually enrolled in that program, due to lack of federal funds.

“Babies Can’t Wait” also pumps for something anyone involved with young children knows to be a serious need—namely, that we as a nation need to improve the care and education of young children by elevating the status of child care and preschools. We need more teachers of young children, better-educated teachers, and—most critically—better-paid and -respected teachers. Take a look at Zero to Three, whether you subscribe to the magazine or not. If you don’t, you should.

*[rant] I printed this out, and unfortunately, it seemed to use half the toner in my laser printer. Why is it that the text of this publication is only available as a “graphically-designed” PDF brochure, with lots of dark colors that don’t print well on the average library’s printer? Black type on a plain white background would be a nice option if you just want to hand a copy to people to read. Or even just read it more easily on the screen. Sigh. [/rant]

After having a blog briefly in the past, I’m back at it again. I want to promote some discussion about the present and future of children’s services in libraries. I hope to include issues such as programming, technology, how libraries serve both kids and parents, teachers, and other adults who care about children. While my main experience has been in public libraries, I’m interested in any place or topic in which the lives of children intersect with libraries.

What I won’t be dealing with much is children’s books. I love children’s literature–hey, I read more children’s books than adult books, plus I review books for School Library Journal. But there are already bunches of blogs out there that review and discuss children’s books, and we probably don’t need another one.

That said, let’s go. –W