McConnell 2011!

What a great McConnell Conference the UK School of Library and Information Science put together this year!  Sharon Draper lifted our spirits with her amazing energy, Rafael López shared his dazzling colors and artistic process, and Matt de la Peña illuminated and inspired with his own personal story.  It was truly an honor and a joy to present at this conference.

I was thrilled by the questions and ideas shared during both of my sessions.  Here are some of the ideas that participants shared that they were planning to take back to their libraries.  I have added some of my own comments to these in asterisks:

• Start planning a Día celebration for the first time.  *LOTS of folks said this, which is wonderful!  Don't forget that Reforma Southeast is accepting applications for two mini-grants for folks planning Día programs.*
• Access websites for Survival Spanish and translations of library policies.
• Contact services in my county that serve Latinos to ask about the materials they need, the programs they would participate in, and ways to reach Latinos in my community.  *This is great!*
• I am an elementary school librarian.  I can contact the local public library to collaborate with them to build a stronger Latino program in my school.
• Staff training about using folktales as part of programming to Latino communities.  *Conejito by Margaret Read MacDonald and Martina, the Beautiful Cockroach by Carmen Agra Deedy are two great books to start with.  The Bossy Gallito by Lucia Gonzalez also makes a great flannel story!*
• Check out Webjunction resources and share them with others at my library.  *Consider their Spanish Language Outreach training, which is available online.*
• Welcome Latino families into our school with warmth and a smile.  *I LOVE this one!*
• Start homework help if possible - helps total constituency.  *Great point!*
• Add more multicultural / bilingual books to storytime.
• Contact with Spanish liaison at school to schedule a library tour for local Latino families.  *Fantastic idea!*
• Start a Noche de Cuentos evening program.
• Purchase more bilingual books.
• Have high school students taking Spanish do bilingual storytelling, giving them volunteer hours and giving the children role models.  *Love this idea!  There are lots of great books and stories out there that incorporate little bits of Spanish into English text.  This might be a great place to start, so that it is not too overwhelming for the high schoolers.  I recommend Susan Middleton Elya and Ann Whitford Paul to get you started.*

Mil gracias to everyone who attended my sessions at the McConnell for sharing these ideas.  Keep us posted with how things are going for you by leaving a comment or sending me an email.  Also, if you have any questions along the way, please know that I am always happy to help.  You aren't alone!  Reforma Southeast is here for you too!

Serving Latino Children and Families in Kentucky Libraries

On February 25 and 26, 2011, I will be sharing this presentation at the McConnell Conference in Lexington, KY.  By clicking below, you can access the entire PowerPoint.  The two accompaning handouts are also available at http://www.slideshare.net/KatieCunningham, as well as past presentations.

Serving Latino Children and Families in Kentucky Libraries

View more presentations from Katie Cunningham.

12 Ways Libraries Are Good for the Country | American Libraries Magazine

A colleague recently shared this article, and I love it. We are truly fortunate to have the public libraries we have in this country. At a time when so many are in crisis due to dwindling budgets and a stalled economy, it is important to remember the value and return on investment libraries provide to their communities.

12 Ways Libraries Are Good for the Country American Libraries Magazine

¡Feliz Navidad!

It's a rare thing when you actually love where you work and what you do.  This should give you a glimpse of why I honestly love working at Village.  Happy New Year everyone!

Manos pequeñas, ideas grandes: A bilingual discovery center program

My amazing colleagues at the Tates Creek Branch library have been doing a series of programs called "Little Hands, Big Ideas" for a while now.  Last year I observed one, and got inspired to try a bilingual version here at the Village Branch.  Today was our first program, and it was really fun!

The program works like this: various activity stations are set up using a certain theme, and the parent/caregiver and child move from activity to activity.  Through this interactive play, the child is building early literacy, science and math concepts.  There is a lot of prep to setup the program, but it is worth it to see child and parent interacting together and having fun while they build important Kindergarten Readiness skills.

Our theme for today's program was Grocery Store / El supermercado.  We started off with a book and a story: Susan Middleton Elya's Bebé Goes Shopping, which introduces Spanish vocabulary through rhyming English text, and "Chocolate," one of our favorite phonological awareness building rhymes.  Then it was off to explore at the five stations.

Station 1:  Shopping Baskets / Cestas de compras
Children counted the items in two shopping baskets and compared which one had more items.  They then created patterns with the groceries and lined the various items up by size.  This helped them practice counting up to 20, comparing objects of different sizes and constructing simple patterns. 

Station 2:  Shopping Cart / Carrito de compras
Kids estimated how many objects they could fit into the shopping cart and then experimented by placing object in the cart.  They did the same activity again, estimating how many small items would fit into the cart and then how many large items would fit.  This also practiced counting and size comparisons, as well as making and testing hypotheses.


Station 3:  Food Sort / Tipos de alimentos
Kids sorted various types of foods into the appropriate categories based on the USDA food pyramid.  This helped children practice sorting skills.

Station 4:  Let's Go Shopping / Vamos de compras

This was a very fun activity.  Kids could use shopping baskets and mini shopping carts to search for the groceries on their list, while they talked with their parent or cargiver about what they were purchasing and what they would use it for.  This activity helped build early literacy skills such as vocabulary and narrative skills by sparking parent and child conversation.  Plus, pushing around the mini cart was a lot of fun!

Station 5:  Price Matching / Emparejamiento de precios

Lots of products and prices were spread out for kids to match the prices to the correct items.  The best part?  They could then enter the prices into a REAL cash register.  It even beeped and opened to reveal play money!  This was an opportunity to identify various numbers and to compare numbers of different sizes. 

This style of program is a great way to share with parents the types of early skills their children need to know to be ready for school success, and to share fun ways of practicing those skills which they can expand out at home or in other locations.  All of the files used in this program are available online here at Google Docs.  Do you do any kind of discovery center programming?  How do you make it accessible for everyone in your community?

Celebrating Halloween and El Día de los Muertos through Stories

Two holidays in one week? Yippee! This alone is enough to put a smile on my face, but when you add in that the two holidays are Halloween and the Day of the Dead (Día de los Muertos), it gets even better - costumes, calaveras and candy!

Like last year, we celebrated Halloween in bilingual family storytime with Slightly Spooky Stories / Cuentos algo escalofriantes. We started off with a vocabulary activity, reviewing the names and colors of an orange pumpkin / calavaza anaranjada, a purple bat / murciélago morado, a white ghost / fantasma blanco and a balck cat / gato negro. The cutouts of each are available here through Google Docs. They would also work for flannel patterns. To keep this piece interactive, we pretended to scoop out our pumkins, fly like bats, boo like ghosts and hiss like cats.

Our first story was the Pura Belpre award winning Los Gatos Black on Halloween by Marissa Montes and illustrated by the always amazing Yuyi Morales. The story is told in rhyming English text, useful for practicing phonological awareness, with Spanish vocabulary sprinkled throughout. We then did some Five Little Pumpkins / Cinco calabazas fingerplays. Several versions are available and I included them on my Spooky Stories handout.

Next, we tried a new spin on an old classic - La viejecita que no le tenía miedo a nada by Sue Williams, also known as The Little Old Lady Who Was Not Afraid of Anything. At a presentation I attended last week at Kentucky's Widening Circles conference, a music therapist shared how she tells this story incorporating musical instruments, which I thought sounded like a great idea to try. It was great! Each piece of clothing got a different instrument, such as drums, rattles, shakers and bells. Luckily I had enough egg shakers so that every kid could participate. This story tends to run a little long, but the use of the instruments kept the kids engaged throughout.

We finished with an English song, something I don't do very often, but it was a cute thing I had seen another librarian do and wanted to try out. We first found our derecha and izquierda (right and left), and then instead of the Hokey Pokey, we sang the Hooky Spooky. Everyone had a ball! The kids trick-or-treated throughout the library on their way out with huge smiles on their faces.

This Monday, we will celebrate El Día de los Muertos with stories, calavera puppets and pan dulce. We will be sharing Bob Barner's new book, The Day of the Dead / El Día de los Muertos.  We have a community altar for folks to drop by and leave rememberances of their loved ones, such as pictures and favorite foods.  A personal note to share, is this year I lost my cat Zoey who was my faithful companion for 20 years.  I will be celebrating her long and beautiful life by bringing a picture and some of her treats for our altar.

Butterflies and Science Make Storytime Fun!

Bilingual Family Storytime is back in full swing at the Village Branch Library with a new time.  We are now offering the program on Wednesday evenings at 6 PM.  Last week, mariposas filled the air.  This was a great theme for incorporating important science and early literacy concepts.

We started off as always with our opening song, "Hola amigo" from Ole! Ole! Ole!  Dr. Jean en Español by Dr. Jean Feldman.  This song introduces English speakers to fun Spanish greetings, practices rhythm and rhyme, and signals to the children each week that storytime is beginning.  Our first book was Mariposa, mariposa by Petr Horacek.  I love this book!  Lucía encounters all kinds of colorful bugs in her yard as she searches for an elusive butterfly.  The cutouts in the pages and a special surprise at the end make this book extra fun to explore.  It's a perfect choice for reinforcing print motivation.

Moving on, we practiced both colors and sorting while we listened to "Mariposa" from ¡Piñata! Bilingual Songs for Children by Sarah Barchas.  We placed four sheets of paper on our carpet - azul, morado, amarillo  y anaranjado.  Then I had a big bag of assorted objects in those colors.  One at a time we sorted the objects by color into 4 different groups.  This activity took about three minutes to complete; we ended just as the song was finishing.

Next we met Rita, a mischevious little butterfly in the book by Rachel Chaundler.  The story is amusing and can even be adapted into a creative dramatic using puppets.  Afterward I put on my storytelling apron and used pieces available from Lakeshore to retell Eric Carle's classic The Very Hungry Caterpillar.  This story is excellent for telling bilingually.  The repetition of "he was still hungry / todavia tenía hambre" makes the story interactive to tell.  The names of the different fruits help build vocabulary, and counting them practices early numeracy concepts.  An alternative to purchasing the storytelling pieces is to make your own puppets or felt pieces.  Patterns are available from DLTK.

Next we reviewed the life cycle of una mariposa.  I printed out four pictures - an egg (un huevo), a caterpillar (una oruga), a cocoon (un capullo) and a butterfly (una mariposa).  We put the pictures in order to practice sequencing, and then acted out the various stages as a movement activity.  As always, we closed with another Dr. Jean tune, "Adiós amigos."  Handouts for parents shared information about what specific Kindergarten Readiness skills we were practicing throughout the program, and included books and ideas to use at home.  The handouts are available in English and Spanish.

Another fun song you could use in a butterfly storytime is "La mariposa" by Colibri from Putamayo Presents World Playground: a Musical Adventure for Kids.  Clapping to the rythm with their manos and pies help kids develop phonological awareness.  What do you like to share when mariposas come to visit your storytime?