Last night there was a long line here in the Central Library great hall–around 120 people came to support their 2nd and 3rd grade students in answering questions about the book Junie B. Jones and a Little Monkey Business (in Spanish Junie B. Jones y el negocio del mono) by […]
Kids’ Writing Workshop: The Erasmus Game
Published on :On Friday, Sept. 23 in our Kids’ Writing Workshop for children ages 8-12, we played something called “The Erasmus Game,” which I got to learn from PCC professor and YA author E. Katherine Kottaras. This exercise is based on Chapter 33 of the book Copia: Foundations of the Abundant Style […]
A Pig Parade is a Terrible Idea: Creative Writing for Beginning Readers
Published on :This month’s Creative Writing for Beginning Reader’s workshop (for ages 5-8) was inspired by the book A Pig Parade is a Terrible Idea by Michael Ian Black and illustrated by Kevin Hawkes. It’s a hilarious picture book that is all about contrasting the bright, shiny parade in the narrator’s imagination: […]
Roald Dahl 100
Published on :We had 45 people come to our Roald Dahl 100 Celebration on Tuesday, September 13th, the centennial of Roald Dahl’s birth! Mr. Nick told us all about Dahl’s life and how his life sometimes inspired his fiction and his writing style. We did a quiz, a word search, and a […]
Kids’ Writing Workshop with Tracy Holczer
Published on :On Friday, August 26, we had Tracy Holczer here at the Pasadena Public Library children’s story room to teach creative writing to kids aged 8-12. Tracy Holczer wrote the gorgeous middle grade novel The Secret Hum of a Daisy. We discussed lots of things: reading, how to write a good […]
Curiosity Machine: Build a Balanced Dinosaur
Published on :On Thursday, August 25th, while the rest of the library was closed early, kids and their parents were hanging out here in the children’s Story Room learning about paleontology and center of gravity, and building their own dinosaurs! I showed a slide show about how scientists’ concepts of dinosaurs has […]
Family Storytime – Owls & Such – Aug. 6
Published on :Our Family Storytime started with a hoot and a holler! Well, maybe not a holler but a hoot! Sorry, couldn’t resist the “owl” humor. We read books about some very eccentric owls. We also watched as a few bits of paper (blown around by the wind) were transformed into various creatures. […]
Creative Writing for Beginning Readers: The Wonderful World of Poems with Cassidy Kao
Published on :On August 9, 2016, a young self-published poet named Cassidy Kao, age 10, taught our Creative Writing for Beginning Readers class for kids between 5 and 8 years old. She explained four different kinds of poems to us and then the kids worked individually with their parents to write their […]
Kids’ Writing Workshop: The Hero’s Journey
Published on :Last Friday July 15th our Kids’ Writing Workshop for ages 8-12 learned about the form and structure of the Hero’s Journey. We watched a video about how myths use a more-or-less twelve-step process that gets the audience identifying with and rooting for a hero. The video demonstrates how this journey […]
Programming a Cyborg
Published on :On 6/25/16 we had a special kind of computer class for 6-8 year-olds: one where kids learned about programming in an interactive, personal and funny way! Cyborg.EAN taught them how to program him to move and do things, and taught the kids how to use laptops to program Python 3 […]