On Monday, February 24, we held our fourth Educator Night at Pasadena Public Library. 48 teachers, librarians, and administrators from 27 schools came to learn about the resources available at our libraries and enjoy lots of giveaways and opportunity drawings! Around 20 new educator cards were opened. Participants came from the following schools:

  • Cottage Cooperative Nursery School
  • Sequoyah School
  • Polytechnic School
  • Westridge School for Girls
  • Foster Elementary School
  • Longfellow Elementary
  • Lila International School
  • The Waverly School
  • Marshall Fundamental
  • St. Gregory Hovsepian School
  • Hamilton Elementary
  • Blair Middle School
  • Aria Montessori Preschool
  • New Horizon School
  • Wilson Middle School
  • Clifton Middle School
  • McKinley K-8 School
  • Pacific Clinics Early Head Start
  • Sierra Madre Middle School
  • Children’s Center at Caltech
  • Blair High School
  • Options for Learning
  • Extera Public School #2
  • Edison Elementary
  • Madison Elementary
  • Natsarim Academy
  • PCC Child Development Center

And we had many who homeschool their kids as well. To be eligible, educators had to either live within the city of Pasadena, or work at a PUSD school or a school in the city of Pasadena.

Dinner and Icebreakers

Year after year, educators tell us that one of the things they love most about Educator Night at Pasadena Public Library is the opportunity to meet and connect with other educators in other schools. So we provide educators with a boxed lunch dinner and an ice breaker BINGO game for getting to know each other a little better! For each row, you had to find five people who fit those descriptions and have them sign their squares. Each row earned you 1 ticket to use in the opportunity drawing.

Dinner was catered by Perfect Equation Catering, a local business here in Pasadena. I hope everyone liked it — I think we’re going to be using them again in the future. I was pleased to see just how much food you get: their boxed lunches come with a large sandwich, salad, chips, fruit, cookie and beverage.

 

Presentations

Educators got to know some of Pasadena Public Library’s librarians and partners a bit better with a brief presentation we gave after people got their food.

Jen Driscoll, Youth Services Manager, welcomed everyone, explained some of the things PPL can do for teachers, and shared some of our newest collections like our Mental Health Kits.

 

Katie Harris shared how the Friends of the Pasadena Public Library help support our programs and how you can help too by becoming a member.

 

Crys O’Grady from the Office of the Young Child shared some of the work she has been doing on the Growing Together PASadena initiative, which identifies seven “hubs” for service to families with children 0-5 years old and brings those hubs into a network sharing their resources and referrals.

 

Librarian Rosa Cesaretti of the La Pintoresca Branch Library, one of the hubs in our Growing Together PASadena initiative, shared what her library does for kids and families, including their Spanish Storytimes, Homework Help and summer programs to prevent summer slide.

 

Jane Gov, our Teen Librarian, shared about our Mental Health Education kits, Book Club Kits, STEAM kits and read everyone the city’s Youth Master Plan, which she has been an instrumental part of helping teens to develop.
Illyanna Logan, Senior Librarian managing our San Rafael and Lamanda Park branches, shared some of the unique collections and services at her branches, including Sensory Storytime and the Spanish books at San Rafael. Illyanna also played a major part in developing Pasadena Library’s Innovation Lab and STEAM Kits.

 

And I presented information about three of the library’s newest online databases:

  • Flipster, for reading magazines in full color and searching for articles
  • Britannica School and Britannica Escolar, with articles tailored to your students’ reading level and the ability to have articles read to you out loud
  • TeachingBooks.Net, with lots of resources for finding good books, developing curriculum and doing fun activities like getting to know the authors
You can view the slideshow here: 

 

Resource Tables

In order to make it easy for teachers to find book lists for the kids they teach and flyers about the various programs and offerings we have for each age group, we set up resource tables grouped by Preschool, Elementary, Middle and High School.

 

 

Freebies!

At the library, we get donations now and then. We also come back with a lot of free stuff when we go out to library conferences–including Advance Reader Copies or ARCs of upcoming books. So we set up a table for teachers to just take whatever they liked!

   

 

 

Opportunity Drawing Prizes

We set up another table with prizes  that you could enter to win by getting a row of signatures on our Bingo Icebreaker handout. Educators got to choose whichever prize they wanted to enter.

Winners of our Opportunity Drawings!

After tickets were pulled for all of the opportunity drawings, educators got to choose a free paperback book to take back to their class. So everyone was a winner at Educator Night!
We had such a blast getting to meet all of you and we hope you came away with a good book you’ll share with your students, and lots of tools and knowledge to help your students do research at the library. Thank you to everyone who came! We appreciate you and we urge you not to hesitate to contact us if we can ever be of assistance to you!