PLA 2008

For those of you attending the PLA Conference in Minneapolis this year, I will be leading a Talk Table discussion about homeschooling on Thursday, March 27th from 10:30-11:45 AM. I’ll be bringing some resources from my library for people to take a look at, and I’m really looking forward to seeing who comes and what kinds of things they’ve been doing and want to discuss. I’ll hope to see lots of you there!

Public Libraries Looking for “Perspectives” on Homeschooling

Public Libraries, the journal of the Public Library Association, is looking for essays about homeschooling for an upcoming “Perspectives” feature. Find more information here.

Thanks to Susan from Wizards Wireless for giving me the heads-up on this.

Anatomy of a Curriculum Kit, Part 4: Processing and Circulating Kits

When I talk about curriculum kits, I get a lot of questions from librarians about how to process and circulate them. The best way to handle these issues is going to vary widely from situation to situation, and there’s no right or wrong way to do it. That said, I’ll tell you some things I thought were imporant as we made decisions about processing at WPL:

1. Make the loan period for the kits at least as long as the loan period for books. The temptation is to give the kits a shorter loan period, one that might be more in line with the AV materials in the kit, but the kits contain a great deal of information and will take a family time to get through. If I could, I would make the standard loan period for these six weeks.

2. Make sure the packaging is up to the job. We’re using the hanging bags from Janway that you see in the photo for our kits. They’re working out so far, but there is A LOT of weight in those bags. Sometimes I wish we had put them in clear plastic boxes, but I think the expense and amount of room they would have taken up would have been prohibitive.

3. Put a label on the kit that clearly lists each item in the kit in a large font. If you want to keep the kits complete, you should make it as easy as possible for patrons and staff to figure out what’s supposed to be in them.

4. Think of the patrons who will be searching for the kits when you create titles and catalog records. We titled all of our kits “Subject Kit–X,” so that when patrons do a title search on “Subject Kit,” they’ll wind up with an alphabetical listing of all the subject kits. We also created a couple of brochures patrons can access in print or electronically, one that lists just the titles/grade levels, and one that lists all the contents of every kit.

If that doesn’t answer all of your burning questions, feel free to post a question or two in the comments. I’ll be happy to respond.

Helping Homeschoolers in the Library in the D&C

They ran a blurb about Helping Homeschoolers in the Library today in our local newspaper. I’m not sure how long the link will stay live.

Anatomy of a Curriculum Kit, Part 3: Resources to Help You Pull It Together

Selecting materials to create kits in subject areas you may or may not know much about can be a challenge. You can feel free to copy our kits, but I’d bet a fair number of the items we chose are already out of print. Here are some resources I’ve found helpful when designing curriculum kits.

Children’s Catalog
I can see the possibilities in the electronic edition, but I’ve only ever used the paper version with the red cover. Browsing the call number areas and perusing the index is a great way to remember books you’ve forgotten or to identify books you didn’t know about subjects that aren’t covered widely. I’ve also found this to be a helpful way to identify subjects and subtopics for kits.

Best Books for Children by Catherine Barr and John T. Gillespie
Best Books for Children contains many more books than Children’s Catalog and can be helpful in much the same ways.

Library Video
Library Video sells educational videos to schools and libraries. They have some interesting films, and you can search their catalog online by topic and age/grade level. Many of their titles are reviewed by journals such as SLJ and Video Librarian.

Midwest Tape
Midwest’s search feature isn’t as helpful as Library Video’s if you’re searching by subject, but it’s still good. Midwest has an excellent selection, and we’re big fans of their customer service at WPL.

Lakeshore Learning Materials
This is where we found a lot of the manipulatives that enhance our kits: dominoes, play money, magnifying glasses, etc. Their prices are reasonable and their quality is decent.

Being part of the Monroe County Library System, we have a shared catalog that lets me search the holdings of all the public libraries in the county at once. Most libraries are part of a system like this, and it’s an excellent way to identify materials you may not be familiar with. As a bonus, if a library in your system owns something, you can take a look at it.  Personally, I find this tremendously helpful when there aren’t any reviews or the reviews are conflicting (which is so often the case, particularly with non-book materials). And, of course, don’t forget your colleagues in youth services. Other youth services librarians can be the most useful resource of all.

In our next installment, “Anatomy of a Curriculum Kit, Part 4,” we will explore issues surrounding processing and circulating your new kits.

Anatomy of a Curriculum Kit, Part 2: Deciding Which Topics to Cover

Once you’ve decided to create curriculum kits, your first priority will be figuring out what topics to cover. Here are some things to consider:

• What is the homeschooling community looking for? You may want to gather information through surveys or focus groups. Curriculum kits are a significant investment of time and money, so you want to make sure they’re going to be used.
• How much money do you have to spend? Use this to figure out how many kits you’d like to create and how much money you have to spend per kit.
• Do you want to make kits focusing on one broad subject area, such as math or language arts, or do you want to design kits for several subject areas?
• What age ranges will your kits be geared toward?

Use the answers to these questions to draw up a list of the topics you’d like to cover, and then you can start designing. Sometimes you may find that there an overwhelming number of great materials on your topic or too many books that are too general because your topic is too broad. In that case, you may want to think about changing that big topic into two or three more specific topics. On the flip side, you may find that you’re having trouble making a complete, interesting kit because your topic is too narrow or a topic that hasn’t been covered widely. In that case, you may want to broaden the topic in some way.

As an example, let’s consider the subject of division. Try looking for a wide variety of high-quality elementary-level materials on division that are currently in print. You won’t find many. There are quite a few materials available on multiplication, though, so you might want to consider combining multiplication and division in one kit. Personally, I think it’s better to adjust the subject to ensure the quality of the kit than to pad a kit with materials that are sub-par.

In our next installment, “Anatomy of a Curriculum Kit, Part 3,” we’ll be discussing resources I’ve found helpful when designing curriculum kits for WPL.

Anatomy of a Curriculum Kit, Part 1: What Is a Curriculum Kit?

One of the most successful and interesting things we did as part of our 2005-2007 NYS Parent and Child Services Grant was to create curriculum kits. We had homeschoolers in mind when we designed the kits–and homeschoolers are loving them–but the excellent news is that they’re also being used by teachers, tutors, and families of all types. I thought it might be helpful to talk about the nuts-and-bolts of putting one together.

So what does a curriculum kit look like? I’ll list the contents of two of the kits currently circulating at the Webster Public Library:

Gardening (Gr. K-2)

Kids’ Container Gardening: Year-Round Projects for Inside and Out by Cindy Krezel, illustrated by Bruce Curtis
Dig, Plant, Grow: A Kid’s Guide to Gardening by Felder Rushing
The Gardener by Sarah Stewart, illustrated by David Small
I Heard It from Alice Zucchini: Poems about the Garden by Juanita Havill, illustrated by Christine Davenier
Tops and Bottoms by Janet Stevens
Science Specimens: Plants (Lakeshore)

Birds (Gr. 3-5)

Birds: Nature’s Magnificent Flying Machines by Caroline Arnold, illustrated by Patricia J. Wynne
Field Trips: Bug Hunting, Animal Tracking, Bird-Watching, and Shore Walking with Jim Arnosky by Jim Arnosky
Project UltraSwan by Elinor Osborn
Raptor!: A Kid’s Guide to Birds of Prey by Christyna Laubach, Rene Laubach, and Charles W.G. Smith
Songbirds: The Language of Song by Sylvia A. Johnson
Birding by Ear-Eastern/Central (CD, Peterson Field Guides)

The goal was to pull materials that would normally be shelved in many different areas of the collection together into multidisciplinary, multimedia kits that would be informative, spark interest, and help to encourage multisensory learning experiences. Most of the science and math kits have some kind of a manipulative (exs: dominoes, a magnifying glass, a tape measure, etc.) as well as one or more books that suggest experiments or activities. In the Gardening kit, for example, there are two activity books, Kids’ Container Gardening and Ready, Set, Grow. The Gardener is a picture book about a girl and her passion for gardening. Tops and Bottoms is a well-known folktale adaptation featuring a rabbit trying to outwit a lazy bear. I Heard It from Alice Zucchini is a poetry collection I adore. Last, the science specimens are plants embedded in acrylic with their various parts labeled. Were these materials not part of a kit, it would take quite a bit of time for a patron–or even a librarian–to identify them and track them all down. Aside from being extremely convenient, the kits give librarians the opportunity to showcase high-quality materials (some of which may not get the attention they deserve in the larger collection) and to show how different parts of the collection can be used together to study a topic. It’s a way for an individual librarian to share his or her expertise even when he or she is not in the building. How cool is that?

In our next installment, “Anatomy of a Curriculum Kit, Part 2,” we’ll explore how to decide what subjects to cover in your kits.

For the Love of Literature by Maureen Wittmann

Wittmann, Maureen. For the Love of Literature: Teaching Core Subjects with Literature. La Grange, KY: Ecce Homo Press, 2007. ISBN: 978-0-9797609-9-7. (Available from Ecce Homo Press and Amazon.)

I know Maureen through cyberspace. I put her on my blogroll early in the process of researching and writing Helping Homeschoolers in the Library. I interviewed her here, and she’s also profiled in my book. One of the things I most enjoy about Maureen is that she is a READER who knows libraries and literature well. Among her many other activities, she moderates a Yahoo discussion group called Homeschool Library Connection that is devoted to encouraging homeschoolers to be proactive library users and gives excellent, realistic guidelines for homeschoolers who would like to submit titles for the library to consider purchasing.

Maureen’s passion for homeschooling, literature, libraries, and her faith are all on display in her new book, For the Love of Literature. The goal of the book is to provide homeschoolers who would like to incorporate literature–as Maureen and Charlotte Mason might say, “real books”–into their children’s studies. As such, the bulk of the book is devoted to literary guides broken down by subject: “Art and Music Appreciation,” “Math”, “History,” “Science,” and “Books about Books.” Each section includes books that can be tied into subject areas along with annotations and recommended age/grade levels. To make the guides even more useful, Maureen has organized the art and history sections chronologically, and she has subdivided the math and science sections by topic. Any youth services librarian who browses the lists will see a great number of library staples–for example, math books by Mitsumasa Anno, D’Aulaire’s Book of Greek Myths, biographies by Demi, and the Magic School Bus series. Librarians will also find less familiar books by some smaller, specialty Catholic presses–books about famous missionaries, for instance, and series about the saints.

In addition to the literature guides, Maureen has chapters devoted to using the library, building a home library, the value of reading aloud, information about teaching from a classical or Charlotte Mason perspective, and how to create unit studies. She encourages homeschoolers to get to know libraries with a summary of the Dewey Decimal System and information about what one can and can’t expect from a public library. She acknowledges, for example, that libraries can’t get titles that are out of print and that librarians will be most interested in purchasing materials they know will circulate. She talks about how the library ELF can help homeschoolers keep track of heavy borrowing and how LibraryThing can help homeschoolers organize and track their own libraries at home.

This book will be useful to libraries for a lot of reasons. Catholic homeschoolers are one of the fastest-growing segments of the homeschooling population, and there aren’t a great number of books that address their particular homeschooling needs. This is also a book that will prove useful beyond its originally intended audience. Teachers and librarians at parochial schools may find it useful when looking for materials to supplement their institutional curriculums. Open-minded homeschoolers of many faiths will find useful titles within these pages, and this is a book librarians can use to identify alternate selections from a homeschooling perspective when patrons are looking for books that the library can’t provide. Because Maureen made an effort to include titles that were in print when the book went to press, it can also serve as a collection development tool. Highly recommended.

“A Clean Well-Lighted Place”

If you want to let your homeschooling population know that you’re serious about reaching out to them and serving their needs, I highly recommend creating a homeschooling section somewhere in your library. It can be a whole room like the Johnsburg Public Library District’s Homeschool Resource Center, or it can be something small, even one shelf. At the Webster Public Library, we set aside one range of shelving for homeschooling materials. It’s a subset of our parenting section in the Children’s Room and contains:

-Books about homeschooling children up through grade 5.
-Handouts of particular interest to homeschoolers, including one handout of laws that apply to homeschoolers in New York State and a handout produced by LEAH that gives additional information about these laws.
-Our reference collection of catalogs for companies that sell materials of potential interest to homeschoolers.

We should also have an up-do-date listing of local support groups and organizations, but, at the moment, we don’t. This is a good reminder for me that I need to update our existing list, make copies, and get them out there. Information about local organizations can be a life-saver for people new to homeschooling.

NYLA Presentation: Powerpoint and Some of the Titles I Mentioned (With Links!)

In case any of you are interested, here is the PowerPoint I used in my presentation:

Helping Homeschoolers in the Library PowerPoint

Here are some of the titles I remember mentioning:

• 100 Top Picks for Homeschool Curriculum by Cathy Duffy
• Pagan Homeschooling by Kristin Madden
• I also mentioned books by Maureen Wittmann. I’ll be posting info on her newest title soon.