myimaginarybrooklyn:

Norwegian Students Build Airy Bamboo and Teak Library for Thai Orphans

Looking for more than a vacation in southeast Asia, an amazing set of young, skilled students from Norway set out to change the future for a group of orphans in Thailand. TYIN Tegnestue is a non-profit organization focused on an array of humanitarian projects that hope to provide real solutions through architecture. Run by a group of students from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, a new workshop held at Safe Haven Orphanage located in Ban Tha Song Yang, Thailand, gave way to an incredible new structure for the destitute community. Sourcing local materials and collaborating with locals, the group of students built a beautiful new building that would provide both a bathing house and a library to help with the dire sanitary conditions and the lack of educational resources in the area.

I’ve never heard fo a bath house / library before, but this is pretty lovely, and cool.

consortwithstars:

Today is World Read Aloud Day!

If you care about literacy, books, writing, reading, publishing, education, society, or the world, you should care about World Read Aloud Day!

Now not everyone has someone to read aloud to and not everyone has someone to read aloud to them (especially those of us who aren’t kids but kids at heart), but I think Tumblr can help!

Please take a minute to record yourself reading aloud for tumblr to hear! Whether its a video of you with a picture book, or Soundcloud clip of you reading from your favorite novel, or livestream of you reading your favorite fanfiction, YOU CAN BE A PART OF WORLD READ ALOUD DAY!

We know Tumblr can raise awareness, so here’s to advocating for literacy, education, and the right to be read to!

I read some of The Fellowship of the Rings to J today, so we’ll say that counts. At the moment, the guys are hanging around Moria, starting to get a little freaked.

hi/lo books

Does anyone on here have experience with readers’ advisory for low-literacy adults? I had a man come in with his son a couple months ago and ask for adventure books written at a fourth-grade reading level for himself.

We’ve been closed or operating on a restricted basis since then, but the question hasn’t left me, and last week I read SLJ’s “Never a Dull Moment: Body Piercing? Extreme Sports? Teen Pregnancy? Welcome to the Action-Packed World of Hi/Lo Books” with some interest.

We already have in our YA collection some books from Orca Soundings, an imprint the author recommends. Would these be a good match for some of our urban, low-literacy adult readers? I’ve also started a pathfinder of suggestions on GoogleDocs, but I’m unsure if I’m on the right track.

Advice?

Meredith Phillips, an associate professor of public policy and sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles, used survey data to show that affluent children spend 1,300 more hours than low-income children before age 6 in places other than their homes, their day care centers, or schools (anywhere from museums to shopping malls). By the time high-income children start school, they have spent about 400 hours more than poor children in literacy activities, she found.

“Education Gap Grows Between Rich and Poor, Studies Say,” 2/9/12 [via]

I think as public librarians we are positioned to encourage low-income parents that any time spent with their children can help narrow this gap. I learned in my Underserved Populations class that low-income children hear dramatically fewer words before starting kindergarten, already limiting their vocabularies and setting them behind other students in beginning literacy. Often, parents need to know that it helps to just talk to your child about whatever, to read them books even when they’re beginning to read on their own, to not trust too much to “educational” television programs.

For Reading and Learning, Kids Prefer E-Books to Print Books

thelibrarianontherun:

Enhanced e-books – those that have more bells and whistles than e-books, like interactive features and games – were also compared in the study with their regular e-book counterparts. Children recalled fewer of the details of the content of enhanced e-books versus the same e-book.

‘Kids were more focused on tapping things and that took away from their comprehension as well as the interaction between the parent and the child,’ said Shuler.

The most interesting bit, I think, is that the interactive e-books distracted from, more than engaged the kids in, the learning experience. I could have seen it going either way, really.

I’m afraid today everybody thinks the sexiest, smartest thing to do is write for YA, and I worry about the middle grade readers, because if they don’t learn to love books when they’re middle graders, when are they gonna learn to love them?

Judy Blume (via NPR)

In a nutshell, why I want to be a youth librarian

(via karijetaime)

Maybe y’all can help me, as this is somewhat related: what adventure books would you recommend to a man reading at a sixth-grade reading level?

Today’s question may have been the toughest reading advisory I’ve given yet. He didn’t seem to care if the books were fantasy or not, and he couldn’t tell me anything he’d read and liked before. Even though we should, with our huge ESOL population, we don’t have a good collection for adult beginning readers. I recommended that Anthony Horowitz spy kid series and Margaret Peterson Haddix’s Among the Hidden series. Also Animorphs, but it turned out we’d weeded them for our move. What would y’all recommend?

(via karijetaime)

firstbook: Our friends at Random House Children’s Books have generously agreed to donate one brand-new book for each new follower we gain on Tumblr, Facebook, and Twitter this week. Those books will go to thousands of schools and programs serving kids from low-income families across the country. Please Re-blog! To learn more about First Book, please visit: www.firstbook.org
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firstbook:

Our friends at Random House Children’s Books have generously agreed to donate one brand-new book for each new follower we gain on Tumblr, Facebook, and Twitter this week. Those books will go to thousands of schools and programs serving kids from low-income families across the country.

Please Re-blog!

To learn more about First Book, please visit: www.firstbook.org

(via judgernaut)

Source: firstbook

I just learned that the Spanish word for literacy is alfabetismo. And suddenly, doing homework inside while my husband is chasing the chickens and drinking beer in the evening cool, just got a little more fun.

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