What’s happening in-person

Hello! Sorry, summer was so crazy I almost had a breakdown, so I didn’t write. But Fall is quieter and really, much more fun, because I’m not on the verge of collapse.

So what am I doing?

Mad Scientists Club: This was originally pretty much borrowed wholesale from this wonderful library: https://cheshirelibraryscience.wordpress.com/, and I still use a lot of the themes and some of the ideas, but I’ve now got two years of online pandemic science under my belt, so I have a lot of ideas from books, zillions of websites, and my own homeschooled kid science memories. It’s awesome. I cram as many kids (currently 14) into a room as I safely can, we have a theme, and we do 3-5 different experiments tied to that theme. The themes are either material (balloons, candy) or concept (magnetism, energy) based. If the former, I explain the scientific stuff before each individual experiment, if the latter, we have an intro with some explanation and a cute video. We all wear lab coats, we make a giant mess, and it’s so much fun. So far we’ve done Balance and Candy.

Song and Dance Time: This is a long-time favourite of mine since I got a manager who will let us play recorded music in programs (five years ago, I believe). I am a fairly serious vocalist, so sometimes we do some real music stuff, but sometimes we just dance and clap and bang along with 20-30 minutes of songs. Laurie Berkner and Jim Gill are my primary go-tos, but I mix it up with a lot of other things, Putamayo kids stuff, hip-hop for kids, almost always Baby Shark, and occasionally even some of the Brazilian stuff I grew up dancing to, since my mom spent her teen and young adult hood in Brazil when Bossa Nova was king (and it’s great dance music).

3D Printing for Kids: I am a huge nerd for 3D printing, in exactly the way kids are. I don’t really have any ideas for what it’s good for (although earrings is definitely one), I just think it’s sooo cool! And we have had a million 3D printers over the years (since 2014, I think), but I’m the only person willing to teach kids about it. So what do we do? Well, it’s a 2-hour class, one hour a week over two weeks. First week we mostly talk about how it works and explore Thingiverse and the concept of CAD, and they all pick something small for us to print for them. During the in-between time we print the things, and have them ready to be picked up for week 2. Week 2 is a dive into CAD design using TinkerCAD (and yes, you will want to pull your hair out after you’ve done this, but I only do it once per season so that’s okay), and we get out the 3D pens if we have time and enjoy them. I only do this for ages 8+, I find you must have kids with good computer skills to do the CAD part, and no one younger really does, not keyboarding and mouse/touchpad, which is what you need for our devices.

I also do other storytimes as needed (which it is, a lot, and I’m one of only two all-rounders–comfortable doing anything for kids), but I’m looking forward to more things come winter!

Getting back to Normal

We are preparing for a fairly normal summer, programming-wise. This is a huge thing. We’ve been very shut down due to the pandemic and major construction in all our programming spaces, but, fingers crossed, construction will be mostly out of those spaces and summer will again be less dangerous, in Covid-19 terms, and we can run our summer reading program pretty normally.

My current challenges are: figuring out (as best we can) what will be safe to do in-person. Most of our program rooms are on the small side, and the biggest has gotten smaller thanks to construction, so we’re looking at small quick projects so we can get a lot of people through a program in small batches.

Talking myself and staff through the idea of transitioning from one indoor program a week to at least two a day, and also dealing with the fact that our schedules will change back to evenings and more weekends, but we don’t yet know what that will look like (which is very stressful and makes program planning very hard).

Remembering how much we can afford to knock ourselves out when we’re in-library full time. This is a big one for me. I am all too willing to work at 150% for a couple days, but I can’t do that if I have to be in the library and reasonably personable 5-6 days a week and 8 hours a day. Summer needs to be more like 105% but all the time, and then exhausted days off.

Helping new staff get up to scratch. About half of the children’s program people were here for our last normal summer, in 2019, but the other half weren’t.

Plus, there’s all the catching up, moving, and weeding for a return to normal. So yes, I’m pretty busy!

tiptoeing towards normality

In my still under construction but otherwise mostly reopened library, we are very much in a state of inching (or tiptoeing) towards normal.

We no longer require masks, capacity limit is gone, our one in-person storytime from 2021 resumes next week (but will still require masks because it looks like wave 6 is in progress here, and I’m not risking me, the other staff, or the children while we sing together, which we’re going to), but the fact is that we still have almost no bathrooms (and really no accessible ones) and a temporary door which is poorly lit and slippery when icy or wet.

Staff are still working part-time from home, although less so than we were before, and we still aren’t open mornings before 11, or evenings at all, except two evenings a week for curbside pickup. Every time my poor manager clears a space for us to film virtual programs (which is what most staff do while at home), someone dumps a pile of furniture from a part that’s under renovation, and we’re back to having nowhere to film in-library, which makes coming back to work full-time hard, as we have a very full virtual program slate for April-June.

So still, in an odd way, we’re kind of grateful to COVID-19. I think if other libraries hadn’t also had to close and limit hours and admission, we would have been lost. We have no program space and no quiet study space (because how can you with construction all around). I think everyone would have dumped us if it weren’t for COVID-19. We’re now below the normal service level around here, but only slightly, and we would have been this way due to construction while everyone else kept on as normal without COVID-19. So don’t get me wrong, I am not at all grateful, but I think my workplace as a whole has some reason to be.

We did have the world’s most awesome outdoor program in March Break, in one of our parks. It was the most beautiful day, and we headed to the splash pad (because it wasn’t muddy) and set up our seed-planting, and games, and sidewalk chalk, and the whole town came out to join us, either knowing we were there or as a delightful surprise and supplement to the playground!

Here’s one of our favourite families decorating:

We also did some fun things for Reading Gives You Superpowers Week, which is a favourite of mine:

I added speech bubbles to everyone later saying how many of each character could be found around the children’s area to make it a game.

I also took a really old and faded bulletin board down and replaced it with this:

I have no art skills related to drawing, so it’s not beautiful, but it sure is bright and cheerful, and people have really appreciated that!

So it’s been a pretty good March. Certainly the best since 2019, which is as much as I can ask at this point!

A Wonderful YA Book, quickly

Everyone should read Needlework by Julia Watts. It is an adorable yet realistically tough book about a gay boy who wants to be Dolly Parton (as a drag queen, except he barely has the words for that) in rural Kentucky. He loves to quilt and cook with his grandma and his best (girl) friend, but neither of them realizes he’s gay and everything kind of goes south when they do. He’s also got an addict mother and a dad in jail for armed robbery, but Kody is going to make it work, and you know? I really believed that by the end. Lovely, lovely book.

Programming towards the end (hopefully) of a pandemic

So here we are, coming out of Omicron and trying very hard to believe that everything won’t be shut down by a new variant.

So what’s happening in my library-land? Well, not much. Our province, Ontario, is announcing major changes to restrictions starting ASAP, but we’ve just passed the program submission deadline for Spring, and almost everything that was submitted was virtual (my 2 outdoor programs for school-age kids and one in-person, in-library storytime are the only exceptions). We could still manage to change that, if we wanted, but then we’ve got the renovation still going on, and we really have no indoor program space, except the middle of the main part of the library (where storytime happens, when it happens), which is a fine place for a short and/or not-to-noisy program, but otherwise pretty useless, since it’s literally the middle of the library. We might be able to clear one very small room, but that will hold maybe three people if distancing is still a thing, and even the next biggest room (which will not be cleared soon) is only big enough for maybe five-seven people with distancing (that’s the nice thing about the middle of the library, it can hold about 15 small family groups with distancing).

So we’re kind of stuck. If everything goes back to normal-ish, we’re going to be left behind (we find ourselves strangely grateful to COVID-19, since we would have been in the same state with construction without the pandemic, and would have lost everyone to other libraries will we sat around empty), but we can’t be normal-ish because we literally have nowhere to go.

It’s going to be an interesting few months, for sure.

Outdoor Storytime

I started doing outdoor Storytime sometime in August. It’s been awesome! We’re currently under a ridiculous amount of construction at my library, so even if Covid-19 wasn’t, I don’t know that we’d be having indoor Storytime. All our program rooms are either in the construction zone, or serving as storage or staff space because the normal staff and storage space is under construction. So I do outdoor Storytime in the nearest local park, and it’s lovely. It was small when I started, but as soon as Labour Day arrived, it suddenly went from 6-7 people to 30-40, which is really nice—many of the people who come are friends I haven’t seen since the last indoor Storytime I did, back in March 2019.

So what do we do? Well, blankets are encouraged (and I always bring a few extra that I wash between uses), and we spread out on as much ground as we need to keep everyone properly distanced. I wear a mask, because Storytime without singing is not a thing I can countenance, and I encourage adults to mask if they’re going to sing along—I’m more than able to do all the singing at Storytime if need be!

We read 2-4 books, and I walk them around as much as necessary so everyone can see the pictures. We sing or rhyme about twice to every book, and I keep going as long as I have interested kids. Given we’re near a playground, they haven’t seen other kids much for eons, and it’s usually garbage pickup around the park, that’s often not more than 15 minutes but that’s fine! I don’t expect or want to compete with a playground or a garbage truck.

Everyone seems really happy with outdoor Storytime, and the only bad thing is that we can’t do it more often, and probably we won’t be able to go past mid-October because weather. So many people were not terribly enamoured of Virtual Storytime to begin with, and especially not after a year and a half of it, so I’m desperately trying to figure out what we can do to engage all these lovely people once the wintery weather comes!

Things I’ve Enjoyed #3

Outdoor programming: we’re still not able to program in-library, so outdoor programs are saving my life this summer. We’ve been touring around parks in our town with a lot of fun stuff to play with and give away, and it’s been grand. First outdoor Storytime this week!

Fruit: mid to late summer in my part of Canada means endless delicious fruit. Plums of all varieties, blueberries, peaches, and I am glorying in it all. Mostly fresh, but some crumbles and cobblers which are so easy and delicious!

Rickety Stitch: just read the first Rickety Stitch graphic novel by Ben Costa, and I love it! Highly recommended if you like colourful and silly high fantasy with a lot of heart. It did take some time to get in to, but I’ve got holds on numbers 2 and 3 already.

The Foster Manoeuvre: I just got over my second ever attack of vertigo, and it sucks. So I was delighted to discover the Foster manoeuvre which cured it in one go!

My garden: I am going all containers this year, and loving it, as my yard is very shady but the porch is not. We’re drowning in tomatoes and basil, surrounded by zinnias and nasturtiums, and even have some bell peppers ripening!

Back after a long break

Well, that was a long break! Sorry everyone, life got away, especially work, but now we have COVID-19, and I am enjoying everyone else’s blogs, so I thought I should get back at it myself.

What am I doing? Well, I am working from home (we had four weeks administrative leave and then they brought the librarians and managers back and are slowly adding additional staff as we figure out how to get everyone we can working from home). I do virtual programs on FB live four days a week, and spend the rest of the time planning those and ordering ebooks and figuring out how summer reading is going to work! Such is the life of a children’s librarian at home.

I enjoy FB live programming more than I thought I would, I’m getting enough interactions during the course of each program to feel like I’m really doing a real service, especially for my live storytimes, which I do twice a week. I thought I’d share a few things I’ve learned, some of which are at odds with what I’ve seen elsewhere, and some of which are things I’ve never seen expressed at all!

Virtual Storytime: do it, if at all possible. They are consistently the most popular regular online thing we do, as they are the most popular regular in-person thing we do.

Copyright issues: We are using only books by three authors who have made it clear online that they are happy to have things shared widely while COVID is on. We are sharing these widely, and have not had any pushback, so I think it’s okay. The authors are Sandra Boynton, Mo Willems and Ryan T. Higgins. I have invested heavily in copies of my own by these three authors, thereby supporting both them and a Toronto bookstore that is doing delivery (Book City) so I feel good about that. My wife and I are both incredibly lucky to be still being paid as normal, so we are able to do things like this. Otherwise I’ve been singing my normal songs and doing my normal rhymes, and if I’m breaking any copyrights I assume someone will let me know and I will take them down–but most of the storytime songs and rhymes I use are not anything that is copyrighted anywhere. I may progress to singing some songs by performers (like Laurie Berkner) that I like and who have given permission, but I will never use recorded music, as FB mostly takes it down, and anyway, I don’t ever use it for ordinary storytime in the library either.

Presentation: I film in front of my living room bookcase every week, and I change up the toys and knick knacks that you can see behind me every week. It’s a bit busy, but everyone seems to like it, and I ask every few weeks if anyone finds it difficult to see and would like me to move to a cleaner background. I am a dressing-up kind of children’s librarian anyway, so I try to wear my fun dresses and headbands and earrings the same as I often do in-person. I highly recommend Etsy and the wonderful Svaha if you want fun apparel of your own! Most of my headbands come from Clare’s or from Target $1 bins when I was in the States, and my earrings come from all over.

Technology: I use my own iPhone with the Facebook app. I find the limited screen is made up for by the fact that it has a much better camera than either the laptop or the iPad my Library has provided. And in a way, a limited screen is fine, it means I can prepare less background! The screen flip is easy to use with the iPhone app now they’ve fixed the green issue, and my sound and picture are both pretty good with my iPhone X.

Online Book Club: I’ve been reading aloud chapters of an out-of-print children’s chapter book every week, and while it gets little engagement while I’m filming, and I’ve never yet gotten any answers to my discussion questions, it does actually get pretty good stats, about 80 people watch at least part of it every week, and I’ve received emails saying families are using the questions at home. I may not repeat it once this book is over, but it’s worth finishing. This I film on a quieter background while wearing something interesting but more grown up, since it’s more for kids 8 years and up.

Science experiments online: a big part of my job since I last blogged has become being my library’s “Mad Scientist-in-Chief”. I run a Mad Scientist’s Club twice a week after school and the same content for homeschoolers and unschoolers once a week. So of course I do science online now! Once a week I either film and upload or FB Live a simple experiment with stuff most people have at home. I spend a lot of time researching this one, as it’s quite hard to find things with really simple ingredients that can be shown in less than 5 minutes. For this I wear my lab coat and I try to have science-y earrings on. Sometimes I film this on the iPad rather than my phone, as a bigger screen is easier with science. But I do notice the down in image quality. These videos are always less pretty than my other ones, as I do have to sometimes be in my kitchen if it’s messy, or move the device around to show results. They do pretty well as well, but storytimes definitely get the most traffic on FB.

Summer Reading: We’ve signed up for Beanstack, we are working on ideas for small in-library programs and large online camps and daily programs, we’ll just have to see how reopening goes in Ontario! Right now we are doing curbside pickup (not me, but some of our Circulation staff) and it’s going well–started last week.

So that’s my job with COVID-19!

If you are a librarian struggling with online programming and want more info, please let me know and I will try to help!

If you’d like some what I’m knitting or cooking, or what the cats are doing posts, let me know that too, and I can add some of that!

Stay safe and well everyone!

Things I’ve enjoyed #2

Ghosts of Greenglass House, the second Greenglass House book by Kate Milford. I love everything Kate Milford writes, and the Greenglass House books are gentler than her others, and right now I like that. This is a fantastic follow-up, I may like it even better than the first book!

 

 

Jane, Unlimited, by Kristin Cashore. I also love everything Kristin Cashore writes, and this is fabulous. Mind-bending, strange and wonderful, and OMG those umbrellas!

 

Lilliput Hats. Milliners extraordinaire in Toronto, I bought my wedding hat here, and would happily buy half of what they make if I had a lot of money, which sadly I don’t. Right now I’m lusting after a particular top hat-style hat I saw when I picked up my wedding hat!