Coming Soon: Wreck It Ralph

Why I'm excited at the moment:

Wreck-It-Ralph, coming this November, is a brand new cartoon from Disney that features John C. Reilly as a video game villain who is tired of being the bad guy.  In an attempt to feel better about himself, Ralph hightails it out of his arcade game and begins experimenting in other games.  The below clip shows some pretty hilarious meetings with Jane Lynch in a war game, and Sara Silverman in a super-sweet and girly game called Sugar Rush.  But aside from the cool actors behind the scenes, I and I think most other video game lovers will be most frantic at seeing some of our favorite bad guys from real-life video games appearing in Ralph's support group.  I got a glimpse of King Koopa from Super Mario Brothers, Dr. Robotnik from Sonic the Hedgehog, and even a ghost from our beloved Pac Man.

I cannot contain myself.  Can you?

Pieces of Programming: Drama Club Spring Session Wrap-Up

Aside from my duties as a teen librarian, I keep my connection with the tweens by running our Youth Services Drama Club.  I think I inherited the club just by it being an open opportunity but now that I've had it for a while, and can see some of my tweens reaching the age that gets them into teen activities and the teen room, I can appreciate the bond it has helped me form with them so that it will continue once they are full-fledged teens.

The Spring Session was my best to date, I believe, and in it, I introduced three great things that helped me maintain my sanity:

Summer Reading Has Begun! (And I Think They Actually Like it)

What a couple of weeks it has been!
Summer Reading has officially begun here in my library, and with it came our first teen-focused program.  Heroes & Villains is off to a booming start, with over 25 teens signed up (HUGE for teenagers), and some even having reached a checkpoint already.
There are a lot of little components, which confused me for a while, but I think I've finally gotten it to the point where it is easy to digest.
So, here's the final rundown of our Heroes & Villains SRP Kickoff!

Marketing & Materials

Each teen that signs up receives a contact card (punch card):

Teens can "check-in" with us once a week to receive a punch on their card for any ONE spaces.  They turn in a Debriefing form{below} with a short review and we check to make sure the space they're getting a punch for is the same as the one on their form.  A completed card is their entry into our grand prize raffle!  Thanks to a generous donation from our library Friends group, we are able to offer a Kindle Fire AND a Wireless Gaming chair as our 2 grand prizes.

Now, my other concern was how to keep them interested throughout the summer.  One huge draw for them is that they can turn in as many forms as they wish per week, so even though they only get one punch on their card, and can only win a grand prize from those, they can enter as many forms as they want for chances to win weekly raffles as well.  

Directly Integrated Research With Google Docs

So I'm sitting here working on a few of my final Summer Reading Program plans.  I rely extremely heavily on Google and Pinterest these days, so those are my everyday go-to sites.  I use Google Docs, Blogger (obviously), Google Calendar, etc.  I open up Google Docs today and there, in the corner is a shiny new bauble!

Meet the Google Docs Research Tool!

I have to admit that it sidetracked me long enough to lose focus on my actual document.  What a clever little minx Google continues to be!

YA Review: Going Bovine by Libba Bray

The Wizard of OZ on steroids. No,...on hallucinogens.

First off, let me say that I tried this book a year ago on audio and just couldn't get into it. I liked what I heard, for the most part, but the beginning is more of an introduction to who Cameron is, and unfortunately beginning-of-the-book Cam, is kind of a jerk. I mean, when watching The Wizard of Oz, you don't really care how Dorothy came to be living with Auntie Em and Uncle Henry, you just want to see her get caught up in that twister.

Anyway, I picked the print version up this go-round and was pleasantly surprised by how quickly I fell down the rabbit hole. Cameron's angst about his possibly/maybe having an affair dad, his flighty mother, and his perfectly popular twin sister is heightened to the point of being obnoxious, but there's also some endearing qualities about him, like for instance the fact that he's dying. Yeah, bummer.

Daring to Be Different

It's May...which means that Summer Reading "planning" month is in full effect.  I feel behind actually, since the calendar of events for the younger kids and tweens is already full in my library, and the teen calendar is seriously lacking at the moment.

Planning the summer reading program this year has actually felt a lot like cleaning my room.  You know, you get really excited about how your room will look once you're done, and you start digging in, but before you know it your room is messier than it began and you find yourself sitting in a pile of trash wanting to say "never mind".  That pile of trash is my Pinterest board right now. LOL

I knew from the very beginning that I was not going to want to follow the state SRP(Summer Reading Program) theme.  I'm sure that "Own the Night" is perfect for some, but my teens and even myself if I'm being honest, would have looked at it with a lot less than enthusiasm.  No shade on anyone using it, but it just makes me think of a rape prevention event. :/

Our department decided to do our own thing this year, with a "What's Your Story" theme to highlight story, magic, fairy tales, folk tales, etc. For the teens, this will be the first year that they have their very own program, and I don't feel that I've been too ambitious.  At least not yet.

This Frantic Pace!

It dawned on me this week that I hadn't posted here in quite a while.  Regardless of the fact that we've been doing TONS of programming around these parts, and I've been trying to gullet down as many books as possible, none of this has made it onto the actual blog.  :(  Oopsie!  LOL  Sometimes the subtitle of this blog: "Tales and Tools from a Librarian who is MOSTLY JUST TRYING TO KEEP UP" is more true than I'd first joked.

So what does librarianship look like in the wee months of the year?
It looks an awful lot like librarianship in the latter months of the year.   I'm nearing my 1 year mark as a public librarian and I've learned quite a few things about the differences between this life, and my former one as a school librarian.

Pieces of Programming: Making Puppets with Drama Club!

When I first started at my current library, drama club was thriving.  The kids had posed in front of our green screen, made great videos, and did a lot of reader's theater with the former librarian who served as their teacher.  One of my predecessor's last activities here was actually a drama club premiere party, where they got to watch themselves on the big screen (our projector screen), and see what they'd done all year.  I was impressed, and excited, but greatly intimidated.

I'd done drama club as a child myself, and I LOVE performance art, but teaching kids how to do it is not as simple a feat.  Kids are not only balls of energy, but tweens specifically are balls of emotions, and sometimes the drama part of the club is all I knew I could expect to see.  There were also the task of redefining what the club was for and how it ran for me, as opposed to what they were used to with the other librarian.  Her plans and outcomes were great, but I needed to determine my own goals.

2012 National Ambassador for Young People's Literature Named!

Thanks to K.C. Boyd over at MissDomino, I've just learned something amazing!
Walter Dean Myers has been named the 2012 National Ambassador for Young People's Literature!
The quote found on Read.gov is just ONE of the many things I love about Mr. Myers and is his platform policy.

For more information on the office of the NAYPL, click the above screenshot.
For a truly inspiring post that says what I was thinking far better than I ever could, check out K.C.'s blog.