On Friday Dec. 18th, our kids’ writing workshop made up new stories involving one or more fairytale characters. Kids got to draw two names from a basket–these were names of characters from some European or American fairytale, such as Brothers Grimm fairytales or Hans Christian Andersen fairytales, and usually not from the […]
Meeting Liesl Shurtliff, author of Rump
Published on :On Tuesday, November 17, Pasadena Public Library celebrated this year’s Young Readers League selection, Rump: The True Story of Rumpelstiltskin (Knopf) by Liesl Shurtliff. In partnership with Vroman’s Bookstore, Young Readers League is designed as a community-wide reading celebration by championing and geeking out over a single book. PPL and Vroman’s […]
Mother Daughter Book Club: The Blossoming Universe of Violet Diamond
Published on :I want to share one activity we did at Wednesday night’s Mother Daughter Book Club meeting that is worth remembering and thinking about some more. This month, we read the book The Blossoming Universe of Violet Diamond by Brenda Woods. In my opinion, the character who grows the most in this […]
Rump’s Restaurant – Young Readers League Program
Published on :For the past month we’ve been celebrating the Young Readers League: a book reading event based on the idea that all the kids in the community read the same book. It’s similar to our One City, One Story program, but for kids. Sponsored by The Friends of the Pasadena Public […]
Kids’ Writing Workshop: What’s your TRUE name?
Published on :To help kids brainstorm for our Young Readers’ League writing contest, we did writing exercises from the book Leap Write In! by Karen Benke, writing poem sentences and answering writing prompts about what our name means or what an ideal name would be for us. Here is what the kids came […]
Creative Writing for Beginning Readers: Flipping Out Over Alliteration
Published on :In today’s Creative Writing for Beginning Readers workshop, we created funny flip books with very random, strange characters whose traits were based on silly alliterations. We learned that alliteration means that all of the words in a sentence or phrase begin with the same letter sound. So we had animals like […]
Kids’ Writing Workshop with author Elana Arnold
Published on :Sometimes I like to make a video mashup of clips from these workshops, especially now that we have a digital camera that will take both photo and video. So before I go into how amazing and fun and rewarding last week’s creative writing workshop with Elana K. Arnold was, why […]
Lucha Libros: Bunnicula
Published on :Kids came to Central Library’s Donald Wright Auditorium tonight to do battle in Pasadena’s own Lucha Libros reading competition, answering questions about the book Bunnicula by Deborah and James Howe. They did a wonderful job answering questions about the plot and characters, and a high number of kids got 100% […]
Kids’ Writing Workshop: Overcoming internal censorship and silencing your inner critic
Published on :Next week happens to be Banned Books Week, held nationwide in libraries and bookstores every year on the last week of September to remind people that restricting and censoring books that you might find “offensive” actually harms people because it restricts people’s freedom to read whatever they want. All that follows is a less-informed, […]
Curiosity Machine: Magnet Structures!
Published on :Everybody knows magnets are FUN, but did you know scientists use magnets when making certain kinds of polymers? Did you know that magnets can help chemists to sort out the tangled mess of molecules that most polymers consist of? Today’s Curiosity Machine class focused on Making a Self-Assembling Structure […]