Friday in the library with the Sharks

A couple of cozy pictures to brighten a gray Saturday.

(Also, the fall Book Fair's coming this week, Wednesday through Saturday! 8:30-5 Wed-Fri, 10-noon on Saturday in the multipurpose room. Great selection. The fair helps the library – and the classrooms. Look for wish lists for the classes.)

Happy Birthday to the library

Hi everybody:

I wanted to use this post to remind you that Seabury, like lots of schools, has a Birthday Book program. We invite your child to buy a book for library to celebrate his or her birthday. This year (Hooray!) I'm working on Fridays, so I'd love it if the kids would present the books to the school during Friday gatherings. If the books are picture books, I always make sure to read them to the child's class as soon as we get them.

Birthday Books get a label inside with the child's name and the year they are given to the library. That gives a sense of permanence. I'm still opening books that Halley gave to the library when she was a student here.

My son Noah was home from college over the weekend and bought a copy of The Son of Neptune by Rick Riordan because he wanted to read it. (He's still a big kid.) He stayed late on Saturday, finished it and handed it to me for the library in the morning. He turned 21 in September and since he was a Seabury kid, too, it can be his Birthday Book.

Lots of people ask me if we have a "wish list." The answer is yes. I put it on Amazon because that's so easy. There's a link to the right, or if you want to see the whole list at once, search for Seabury School Library in the wish list link. If use our Amazon link at right or tinyurl.com/amazonseab to purchase Birthday Books it will help the library twice.

You might notice an iPad on the wish list. That's partly because I'd eventually love to have a couple in the library for kids to read on. But mostly it's because Amazon is running a contest for a $2,500 gift card if you add things to your wish list from external sites. I could buy lots of stuff for the library with $2,500! You can enter the contest every week. So you might see a few interesting things on the wish list.

Back to the books, etc.


Library's back in full swing and I've got the overflowing book return bin on Thursdays and Fridays to prove it. If the traditional book is going away, you wouldn't know it by Seabury kids.


These past couple of weeks I've been talking to the Navigators, Wildcats and Barracudas about getting King County Library cards and bringing their cards or bar code numbers to me so that I can record them. (Many of our students already have KCLS cards, so their task is just to bring the card/number to me.)


Here's the reason. And I've explained it to the students.


There are amazing resources called "databases" available on public library Web sites. Libraries purchase expensive subscriptions to these databases, but offer them free to patrons with library cards.
Tacoma Public Library System, Pierce County, Seattle – most every public and many school libraries in the country offer them, but only to those with library privileges.

I'm asking our students to get King County cards because King County has the wealthiest library system in the area and the best selection of databases. A KCLS librarian who visited us a couple of years ago said they spend more than a million dollars a year on database subscriptions. I want us to have a record of the numbers here so that we can use them freely to do research at school. I'll be teaching database use, then letting the students who have card numbers here use the library computers to access the public library when they are researching something. It will be great at some point if everyone can memorize their card numbers.

I live in Tacoma, but have cards for Tacoma, King County and Pierce County libraries. They all have reciprocal agreements, so you can get cards for all if you qualify for one. KCLS has agreements like that with many cities. And it's all free!!
Back to the databases themselves. Doing research on a database is very from different bouncing around on Google or other World Wide Web search engines (though we will work the the older students on how to do that more effectively, too). As I said, the libraries pay big bucks to subscribe to databases, with the help of our taxes. Depending on the choices made by the reference librarians at each library system, they can include encyclopedias, wonderful reference works geared toward children and adults on science, art, history, biography, geography, etc., newspaper and magazine articles, and much more. (For you adults, most libraries, including KCLS, subscribe to Consumer Reports!)

These are all book-quality reference sources and most, if not all, include citations at the end of each article that students can use .


In addition to what we do with the databases at school, they're also great resources at home and fun to explore. Check out this list of KCLS databases geared toward kids.


A few of my favorites for kids are Culturegrams, Grizimek's Animal Life, PebbleGo (animals for younger kids), Britannica Online, World Book Online, Science Online, Biography in Context  and Fiction Connection (find good books). I discover something new every time I look!


If you have any questions, feel free to email me. (beckyy@seabury.org)

Bear Cubs pull up chairs to read together ...

 except these two who choose a big truck book on the floor.

Petite fille qui a beaucoup d'imagination ! - Little girl with a lot of ...

Oh la la!!

If you also follow Young Books on Facebook, you saw this there, and it's been posted lots of other places, too, so my apologies if this is a repeat for you.

But if you haven't seen it, you must. And we all must hope that there's a French version of Seabury for this little girl!