Children and YA Newsletter
November 2021
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All things autumn!
Brrr... it's cool, crisp, and cozy! What will you do with the rest of your fall? You could start reading your All CT Reads book of choice, join us to prepare for engaging with people experiencing homelessness, and watch our new CT Pages! That's just a start anyway, there's always more. Read on to learn all about it.
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Kymberlee Powe | Children and YA Consultant |
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Announcing All CT Reads 2022! |
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[Primary Books]
Children
Teen
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One of the Good Ones by Maika Moulite and Maritza Moulite
Adult
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Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi
[Shortlists]
Children
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Starfish by Lisa Fipps
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Efrén Divided by Ernesto Cisneros
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The Best at It by Maulik Pancholy
Teen
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Black Brother, Black Brother by Jewell Parker Rhodes
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Cemetery Boys by Aiden Thomas
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Firekeeper's Daughter by Angeline Boulley
Adult
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The House in the Cerulean Sea by T.J. Klune
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Migrations by Charlotte McConaghy
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This Town Sleeps by Dennis E. Staples
About All CT Reads
Launching in January 2022, All CT Reads is a year-long initiative to promote lifelong reading, learning, and connection that uses a rotating community committee structure to select three main book titles and 3 shortlist book titles, each calendar year for three age groups: children (ages 8-12), teens (ages 13-18), and adults. In addition to the books, All CT Reads provides a supported programmatic structure built around the titles with room for individuality and creativity.
More coming for January 2022!
Resources
While the website may look a bit barebones for now, there will be more – stay tuned! There will be rich book and author wraparound resources including discussion questions, program ideas, flyer templates, author videos, book reviews, and more!
Books for Borrowing
We will have book discussion sets of all 12 titles available for borrowing from the Middletown Library Service Center.
Books for Purchase
We partnered with the CT Library Consortium to make sure you have access to the best pricing on these titles when you purchase off their book contracts. Learn more.
Our Partners
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Our Sponsor
All CT Reads is supported by a generous grant from EBSCO Information Services to the Connecticut Heritage Foundation.
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Growing Equitable Library Services:
Preparing Library Staff to Assist
People Experiencing Homelessness
TOMORROW!
Tuesday, November 16 | 10 am-2 pm
This session will take place in Zoom and participants are asked to have cameras to engage for the duration of the training.
Individuals that are experiencing poverty or homelessness constitute a significant amount of those that frequent the library today. Library staff represent a crucial part of the emergency homeless response system. It is not uncommon for library staff to be a first point of contact for someone currently experiencing, or at imminent risk of, homelessness - which provides libraries with an important opportunity to change lives. Unfortunately, there continues to be an urgent need to assist those that are experiencing poverty and homelessness, which makes it essential for libraries to know how to effectively respond to their needs.
This training will provide knowledge and resources and will also be interactive and engaging to coach you through having person-centered and respectable diversion conversations with those that are in the library and currently experiencing a housing crisis.
The training will provide an overview of the homeless response system and provide basic knowledge about available resources as well as focus on how to effectively intervene in a housing crisis and assist in connection to services. There will be an emphasis on the practice of Shelter Diversion, which is a strategy that prevents homelessness at the front door by helping people identify immediate alternative housing arrangements to shelter and, if necessary, connecting them with services and financial assistance to help them return to permanent housing. Diversion can reduce the number of households becoming homeless, the demand for shelter beds, and the size of program wait lists.
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CT Pages
CT Pages is a channel for sharing community engagement success stories by libraries with and for their communities. Beginning in fall 2021, the CT State Library Division of Library Development is partnering with CT libraries to create and release monthly short video conversations with the library staff who make things happen.
Our third edition with Melissa Canham-Clyne, Library Director at the Hamden Public Library inspires with her enthusiasm as she shares the experience launching Hotspotting the Community. The Hamden Public Library and its partner the Hamden Keefe Community Center took lending hotspots one step further offering hotspots to local businesses in a section of Hamden that according to the US Census has low personal connectivity. The businesses consisted of two barber shops, a braiding shop, a popular restaurant, a laundry mat, a preschool, and the Keefe Center. The goal is help strengthen the community's overall connectivity by giving these businesses a way to help their clients connect to the Internet, whether the business is open or closed. What did they as for in return? Hang a poster about the partnership with the Hamden Public Library, subscribe to their weekly e-newsletter, and tell them any technical problems so they can fix it!
And we need more to share! We are always seeking submissions for consideration.
Do you have a creative, program, service, activity, partnership or project that you want to share with your library neighbors?
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Transforming Teen Services
"We hardly have any teens in our library."
"How do we get teens to come to the library?"
So say more than one librarian... While there may be no one-size-fits-all solution, Transforming Teen Services (T3) offers tools and approaches to engage and provide for your teens in both school or public library settings. T3 is a 4-course series of trainings designed to help improve library services for teens across four basic content areas:
- Connected Learning
- Computational Thinking
- Child and Youth Development
- The Pursuit of Equity
In the winter of 2020, state and local library staff from around the country were trained to implement Transforming Teen Services trainings in their home states. Kymberlee Powe, Children’s and Youth Adult Consultant at the CT State Library Division of Library Development, and Mia Orobona, Teen Services Librarian from Darien Library, were trained to facilitate T3 in Connecticut.
Join Kym and Mia along with your teen librarian colleagues from around Connecticut, to learn, build, and develop services for and with teens that will guarantee the adolescents you support have what they need now, and for future success.
Please note, even if you have done some of the T3 trainings before we will always welcome you again - we all need refreshers. And you are not required to do all of them, but you’ll gain the most benefit if you do!
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Impacting Lives One Teen at a Time: What Directors and Supervisors Should Know
Tuesday, December 14 from 11:00-12:00pm
Transforming Teen Services (T3) is a series of trainings designed to help improve library services for teens. Youth Services and Teen Librarians rely on support from Directors and Supervisors to provide the unique services teens need. Services that will look vastly different from those for a library’s youngest patrons. Directors, supervisors, unit heads, and board members, join T3 Facilitators Kym Powe and Mia Orobona as they discuss
- YALSA Competencies
- Why teens come to the library
- Teen Development
- Connected Learning
- How to Reach/Serve Teens
- Impact on Librarians
- Impact on Libraries
More coming to Zoom in 2022 - stay tuned!
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All About READsquared
Build your Reading Program: A READSquared Tutorial
Thursday, December 16 from 1:00-2:30pm
This webinar will walk you through building a basic reading program in READsquared using preloaded templates. Attendees will be asked to have camera and mics available and will be asked to come having already created a READSquared account. In this step by step tutorial, we will be:
- Uploading the Winter Reading 2021 program
- Setting up registration fields
- Setting up badges
- Walk through creating booklist that link to library catalogs.
- Set up the Coming Soon Page
This webinar is designed for attendees to build library specific programs with Children/ YA Consultant Kym Powe. This webinar will be most helpful for public library workers with little to no experience with READSquared. We will do our best to work slow enough for everyone to remain in sync. Join us!
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Reimagining School Readiness Toolkit |
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The Reimagining School Readiness Toolkit (completely downloadable and printable) is full of research-backed resources created for librarians to help families prepare children ages 0 to 8 for success in school and in life.
A literature review of over 150 research studies indicates that we are missing the mark in preparing our children for school by equating “school readiness” with a finite checklist of academic skills to be mastered by age five. Instead, we should think about school readiness as a robust developmental process that spans the early childhood years through age eight. All children are capable of developing the skills they need if the adults in their lives provide developmentally appropriate and rich experiences to boost learning and cognitive development.
Join Connecticut trainers Kym Powe (CT State Library) and Shannon Wild (Russell Library) for training on the Reimagining School Readiness Toolkit training in 2022.
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Summer Reading 2021 | All Across Connecticut
Remember the warm, sunny days of summer? Dreamy...
Summer reading is over for this year so check out (and be proud of!) how Connecticut public libraries and their communities read, engaged, and learned all summer long.
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Latinx Kidlit Book Festival
December 9-10
The Latinx Kidlit Book Festival is a virtual celebration of Latinx Kidlit authors, illustrators, and books for all students, educators and book lovers everywhere. The festival will open its virtual doors from December 9-10, 2021, and present two free days of panels, craft sessions and illustrator draw-offs with your favorite Latinx authors and illustrators of picture books, middle grade, young adult, graphic novels, comic books and poetry. The sessions are geared towards ALL schools, educators, students and book lovers, not just those identifying as Latinx. Everyone is welcome!
The event will run during the school day because they’re hoping to have participation from classrooms! You’ll see in some of the media that students are encouraged to send questions to panelists and will be entered into a giveaway for classroom sets of books. Peruse the schedule to see who will be in attendance - I certainly hope to attend some of these sessions myself!
Join us in sharing about the Latinx Kidlit Book Festival:
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Kymberlee Powe
Children and YA Consultant
Connecticut State Library | Division of Library Development
Middletown Library Service Center
786 South Main Street | Middletown, CT 06457
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