If it’s Thursday, it’s the arthur lunches…

Pat Mora (children’s author and much more) shared a few letters sent to her from children. One said, “I was a little nervous, because I’ve never met a real live arthur.” I had no idea (until I came up to blog this) that Ms. Mora is one of the forces behind the Dia de los Libros, a very cool event (see link.)

Lunch was delicious and I mostly absorbed the talks given by Pat Mora and Raul Colon. But here were a few tidbits:

• 1 in 5 children go home from school and speak another language at home.
• “Sometimes allow yourselves the wacky ideas.” (Her commentary on Doña Flor, a tall tale about a huge woman–think Paul Bunyan–who makes tortillas, among other things.)

Raul seemed to expect the question, “When did you start drawing?” and so he started with, “Ever since I can remember, I’ve been drawing.” He had chronic asthma as a child which gave him a lot of indoor and not at school time to draw. He actually bribed his sister for notebooks, which he filled with more drawings, and was grateful that X-box didn’t exist in his childhood.

One of his early works was a story called “The patient army” which was about about a wounded group of soldiers.

 In the question and answer period someone asked a question of Pat Mora and part of her answer was that she had a feisty mother, that “neither the President nor the Pope could have intimidated my mom.”

It was an early morning, to attend a vendor breakfast, where I met a librarian from Missoula, MT. Since I had just been to Montana this summer with my family, and spent a night in Missoula, we chattered along until the presentation started.

Then I attended two workshops: Clap! Shake! Play! Sing!: Creating Musical Storytimes to Encourage Emergent Literacy by two fabulous librarians, hang on I’ll get their names…Ilene Cohen and Ann Wagner from the Santa Monica Library in Santa Monica, California. Since I do a storytime for 6mos to 24mos that uses music, this was the one workshop I absolutely needed to attend.

I learned a lot. For instance, did you know that the ukelele is easier to learn than the guitar and you can play more songs?

Their handouts are in the PLA workshop stuff, lemme see if I can pull up a link…well, it’s the handouts page. (And having printed out some of their handouts, believe me, they are thorough!)

Ilene and Ann do musical storytimes (using more staff) when they’re not in their regular storytime schedule. They start with books, action rhymes, nursery rhymes, and then go into a time where they hand out instruments (like mini drums or bells) for the kids to play along with them.

Books they “performed” for us:

• Seals on the bus by Lenny Hort. They actually just showed us the book and then used puppets to tell the story.
• Jazz Baby (if you work with toddlers and storytimes, YOU MUST BUY THIS BOOK)
• I ain’t going to paint no more (and an audience member said she has parents use foam paint brushes with the kids for this one.)
• Rapatap by the Dillons
• Tanka Tanka Skunk by Steve Webb (this is so much fun!)
• Barnyard Banter (done best with one person holding a goose puppet.)

It was truly a sight to see, a room full of librarians at 9 a.m. singing “I like to eat apples and bananas…”

Songs they shared:

Thumb dance (continue with all the fingers)

Flip Flap Jack (oh this is great!!)

Skinamarink (which I generally don’t like but they endeared me to the song, this time.)

 I also attended a workshop on Disconnected Youth, but I’ll blog on that later.

Oh, and if you’re staying near the Metrodome and you want a Japanese food restaurant (with a decent sized walk), I recommend Wasabi Fusion. The decor was fun, the food was good (although I’m not a snob, so you can’t trust me as far as authenticity) and the company was great. The thing I like about conferences is that it gets us out and we talk about the books we’ve read, the movies we’ve seen, and eventually to what we think about our current library web site, and new ideas.