With a loooong, three-day weekend looming ahead what's a family to do?
Well you could...
...play with Legos at Lego Club on Saturday, 9/3 11-12:30 at the Central Library (open to kids ages 2-14, come play with the library's thousands of Legos)
...or you could explore modern art at MOCA's Family Day on Sunday, 9/4 1-3:30 (250 S. Grand Ave, LA)
...or you could transport yourself to the islands with an afternoon of Caribbean music, dancing, food and more at the California African American Museum and their Caribbean Fete on Sunday, 9/4 at 1:00pm
...or you could take a kid-geared hike, followed by an arts project at Sooky Goldman Nature Center in Franklin Canyon Park in Beverly Hills (open to kids ages 3-8) on Sunday 9/4 at 10:00am. Call 310-858-7272, ext. 131 for more info.
...or you could get ready for the Ethiopian New Year at the Little Ethiopia Cultural Street Festival in L.A. on Sunday, 9/4 12-8pm where you will find lots of FREE family fun and great food!
...or you could wander the galleries and groove to LIVE music at LACMA (the Los Angeles County Museum of Art) on Monday, 9/5 as part of their Target Free Holiday Mondays program!
With so much to see and do this holiday weekend, there is no end to the FREE fun a family can have in SoCal! Happy Labor Day!
Wednesday, August 31, 2011
Wednesday, August 24, 2011
Staff Pick: Junonia by Kevin Henkes
by Kevin Henkes
Kevin Henkes is best known as the writer and illustrator of many popular children’s picture books. Not too long ago he won the Caldecott award for Kitten’s First Full Moon, and his earlier group of books with loveable mouse characters, which includes Wemberly Worried, Owen, and Lilly’s Purple Plastic Purse, continue to be patron favorites. Henkes is also, however, a very fine writer of fiction for older children. Olive’s Ocean, a book written for junior high school level children, was a Newbery Honor Book. Junonia is his most recent novel, and is most appropriate for a slightly younger readership.
Junonia narrates the story of ten-year-old Alice Rice during her family’s annual vacation to the beach in Florida. Alice’s birthday always occurs during the family vacation, and Alice is looking forward to celebrating it with the friends who stay at other cottages on the beach, children and adults she sees every summer. She is also hoping to find this year a junonia, a rare shell that she hopes to finally add to her collection. But things don’t go as planned. Several of the children and annual vacationers are not able to come this year, and what makes it worse, another annual visitor shows up with a new boyfriend and his very young daughter in tow, a girl who is troubled by her parents’ recent separation, mercurial in temperament, and seems to demand the spotlight in this small community of vacationers. Alice must come to terms with her conflicted feelings and disappointments. She comes to understand that life is more complex than she would have it be, and that always looking for things to be perfect is an expectation she must leave behind. Sometimes the apparent imperfections, however, serve to deepen the value of the good things. The junonia shell becomes an expansive symbol for these themes.
As will be apparent from this synopsis, Henkes is not writing the kind of fast action fantasy adventure that dominates children’s literature these days. On the surface, it would be difficult to say that in his novels very much happens, or that the events related are unusual or dramatic. Henkes’ literary project is to record the psychological nuances of childhood, to give us a portrait of a child engaged in the act of growing up. His fiction recognizes, understands, and honors the interior dramatic life of a child. Certainly this is not the ambition of most contemporary children’s writers, and it might be difficult to say if Henkes is writing for children as much as he is writing about childhood, although I suspect a child reading him at this age might very well find his writing magical for its accuracy in articulating his or her own experience. Whichever the case, his writing has a certain exquisite quality, the nuances of a child’s interaction with other children and adults are drawn with great insight and subtlety. His writing style has a craftsman-like quality. The reader feels that each word was weighed, each metaphor carefully chosen, and the whole reworked many times over in much the same fashion as a poem. He seems to have created literary novels for children, something unusual, quietly powerful, and altogether remarkable.
Friday, August 19, 2011
Storytime is back!!
Storytime starts the week of September 26th at all Burbank Libraries. Our Fall Session will go from 9/26-11/18/2011.
Pre-registration is REQUIRED for Preschool Storytime and Toddler Tales at the Buena Vista Branch Library only. Sign-ups begin Friday, Sept. 16 at Buena Vista in the Children's Room.
**NO PRE-REGISTRATION IS REQUIRED TO ATTEND THE STORYTIMES OR TODDLER TALES AT CENTRAL AND NORTHWEST**
Storytime Schedule
Preschool Storytime @Buena Vista - Tuesdays at 11:00 am (Pre-registration is REQUIRED)
Preschool Storytime @Northwest - Wednesdays at 10:00 am
Preschool Storytime @Central - Thursdays at 10:00 am
Toddler Tales @Buena Vista - Wednesdays & Fridays at 10:00 and 11:00 am (Pre-registration is REQUIRED)
Toddler Tales @Central - Fridays at 10:30 am (please note NEW TIME)
Tuesday, August 16, 2011
Staff Pick: The Absolute Value of Mike by Kathryn Erskine
A few years ago Kathryn Erskine’s Mockingbird won the National Book Award for children’s literature. The Absolute Value of Mike, her latest book, is a story that will have special appeal to young teens who have “gifted” parents, those who are growing up in households where the achievements of one or more parent are exceptional and a child often suffers under the parental and social expectation that they too will grow up to be high achievers and extraordinarily successful adults. Such is the problem faced by our story’s hero, fourteen-year- old Mike Einstein Foster (no pressure when they give you a name like that!). Mike’s mother died when he was very young, and he has been his father’s caretaker, handling the mundane and practical matters of running thier household for many years. Mike’s father is an abstracted and eccentric engineering genius, brilliant at the math skills so necessary for his career; Mike suffers from a condition known as “dyscalculia,” a brain disorder which causes a person to have great difficulty in manipulating numbers. But that hasn’t stopped his father from assuming that his son will follow in his footsteps and have a brilliant career in engineering…..whether he wants to or not.
One fateful summer, Mike’s father takes a temporary teaching job in Eastern Europe and sends Mike to spend the summer with his great aunt and uncle in rural Donover, Pennsylvannia. His father believes that his uncle is working on an engineering project in which Mike, as his assistant, will get some practical experience in the applications of science. When Mike arrives, it turns out that there has been a big misunderstanding. The project in which the whole town of Donover is engaged is raising $40,000 so that one of its local citizens can adopt an orphan from Romania. Mike ends up managing the entire campaign to raise the money. In the process he comes to understand what are his own special abilities and talents, that he can inspire and bring people together to solve a “human” engineering problem. It’s the very sort of skill set that his father lacks and values so little.
That’s the serious gist of the story, but the tale is enlivened with humor and a cast of very eccentric folks we meet in the town of Donover. As his Aunt Moo tells him, “some of us are more extreme cases than others,” but Donover seems to have more than its fair share. They all seem to be stuck in some sorrow that makes it difficult for them to move on and face the matter at hand and bring about the good that might be done. It is hard for Mike to relinquish his initial impatience with these characters in what seems to him their wallowing in sorrow and their diminished ability to face the world. But his great accomplishment is to finally understand and sympathize with these odd and kind people he comes to know. What he learns that summer is a way to lead them forward from the losses that bind them. The strength of this self-discovery allows him to confront his father and assert his right to make his own choices for his life.
As the son of an engineer who flunked high school Algebra, Geometry, and Trigonometry, I got this story. Or it found me, and will find some others yet I suppose.
Tuesday, August 9, 2011
Lego Club is Back!
Our first Lego Club will be Saturday, 9/3 at Central Library from 11-12:30. It's open to kids ages 2-14 only. For safety reasons we require children under 9 years to be accompanied by an adult. We have toddler-safe Duplo blocks for kids under 4 years of age and thousands and thousands of library Legos for the rest of the kids!It's a great way to enjoy a Saturday as a family at the library. Plus, we have lots of great Lego books you can check out after the club!
Here's the schedule for Lego Club for the Fall:
Wednesday, August 3, 2011
Travel Around the World with Movies!
Travel to Paris, London, New York, and Peru this Summer at Buena Vista Library!
Visit an exciting new city every Saturday in August at the Library! We'll show a short episode from the travel series "Travel With Kids" about a particular city then watch a family film set in that location.
Sat. August 6, travel to London with Mary Poppins (unrated: 139 min.s)
Sat. August 13, travel to Paris with Aristocats (rated G: 78 min.s)
Sat. August 20, travel to Peru with The Emperor's New Groove (rated G: 78 min.s)
Sat. August 27, travel to New York with Oliver and Company (rated G: 74 min.s)
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