Staff Picks Are Coming to a Library Near You!

A great thing about working at the Tigard Public Library is working with a staff full of readers. Coworkers are always sharing interesting titles with each other.  Now, we want to share them with you!  Beginning today, Wednesday, December 10, find out what books have enthralled, entertained and energized library staff.  Look for the staff picks displays in the Children’s Room and on the second floor near the top of the stairs. The selections are as diverse as the staff!  Read a staff pick today!

More on Screen Time

Can you tell we liked the presentation by journalist-turned-author, Lisa Guernsey? First Janet, and now I am blogging about it! And I have to admit, my first reaction when I saw we were hosting an author to talk about screen time, was "Great. Now I have another person to make me feel guilty about letting my under-2-year-old watch TV." And it was not that way at all. Lisa focuses more on the quality of TV, apps and video games than the quantity (even for kids under 2), and she offers a pneumonic to help you remember: SPLERN. "SPLERN???" you may ask, "How am I going to remember a nonsense word like that?" That's what I said to myself. But I remembered it without even taking notes, so the acronym did it's job!

• Straight-time story line (the story goes from beginning to end without things like dream sequences, flashbacks, memories, side plots, etc)
• Participation (Dora or Blue's Clues are good examples of this where the kids are actually asked a question and given time to answer, but anything that encourages participation like songs, movement, etc.)
• Labeling (When unfamiliar words or items are shown, they are labeled or defined within the context of the show)
• Engagement (Do the kids like it?)
• Repetition (Speaks for itself)
• Non-Violence (I should probably stop letting Coby watch even the 1981 Spiderman cartoon *cringe*)

So glad I got the opportunity to see her in person, and I highly recommend her book Screen Time: How Electronic Media--From Baby Videos to Educational Software--Affects Your Young Child.

Wild Plants You Can Eat

Thinking about doing some hiking or camping with the family during spring break or this summer?  Or perhaps just hanging out locally? John Kallas, author of Edible wild plants: wild foods from dirt to plate will be presenting on Tuesday, March 26th, from 7-9 p.m. in the Burgess Community Room.  Learn to identify, harvest, and prepare nutritious, delicious edible wild plants found in the wild and that can also be found within walking distance of your kitchen.  Kallas has been teaching about edible wild plants since 1978.  This event is for adults and books will be for sale at the event. 

Mary, Mary quite contrary how do your Readers Grow?

"The playing adult steps sideward into another reality; the playing child advances forward to new stages of mastery."  Erik H. Erikson.

As a child, my friend and I passed our free time at home doing what looked like nothing much at all.  Laying around in the grass, collecting wild flowers, rocks, sticks, pine cones, assorted snakes and hundreds and hundreds of woolly bears!  Which by the way, got out in my bedroom!  But that’s another story. 

Truly one of our favorite childhood summer wanderings involved making mud pies.  One summer we meticulously made and decorated  hundreds of chocolaty colored mud confections with my father's shaving cream.  We added flowers from my mother's garden and the most perfect rocks and sticks from our collections carefully adorned each gooey top.

We discussed everything about our beautiful creations. How many layers they should have? Should we use her father's worm mix?
Or better yet, his worms for the filling!  Should we hire the neighborhood boy we had a crush on for help? Who should be in charge of turning off the hose and digging the dirt? And of course, who should be the boss of the shop?



Our freewheeling unencumbered play allowed us to construct the most successful neighborhood bakery in summer vacation history! As we added each delicious ingredient to our make-believe play: imagination, concentration, cognitive skills, internal verbalization, conversation, persistence, problem-solving and growing task building skills we made up our own rules.  

We sold our sunbaked goodies to the neighbor kids who paid with marbles, cool colored rubber bands
and gum wrapper chains. Social networking at its finest. 

Our bold entry into the business world was constructed with endless scenarios and conversations that lasted all summer long.

Little did we know that as we surmounted each challenge of our imaginative enterprise, we were learning how to self-regulate our own behaviors which is an essential pre-literacy ingredient.  We enthusiastically contributed to the foundation of our own house of higher learning and ultimately our ability to read.

Who knew you could do all this playing with mud pies!

Suggested Reads:

A Child's Work: the importance of fantasy play by Vivian Gussin Paley

Imagine Childhood: exploring the world through nature, imagination, and play by Sarah Olmsted