Portland, OR, Day 5

Today was the day I dedicated to my daughter by exploring the world of Beverly Cleary. My daughter is a BIG Ramona Quimby fan.

Here’s what we did on the final day of our trip:

We went to what would have been Ramona’s local public library - in Ramona’s world, it was the Glenwood Library, but in Beverly Cleary’s real world, it is called the Hollywood Branch of the Multnomah County Library.

There is wall-sized map of Beverly Cleary’s neighorhood, which is the neighborhood that she writes about in her stories.

The children’s librarian gave us a map to take with us.

Our first stop was the Grant Park, where we explored the Beverly Cleary Sculpture Garden. This is the statue of Ramona.

This is Henry Huggins, Beverly Cleary’s first character.

And this is Henry’s dog Risby.

And this is the real Klickitat Street, where Ramona Quimby lived, on the corner of 28th Ave and Klickitat.

All in all, a great way to end our trip.

Did I mention that our room at the Bed and Breakfast made us feel like we were in a mansion? Well, check out these pictures …

A very long day of travel tomorrow. I look forward to seeing you all again, on Thursday (1/25/07). I’ve missed you.

Ms McDaniel

Seattle,WA and Portland, OR, Day 4

Seattle, Day 4

First, the ALA Awards …

The are numerous awards given by various divisions of the American Library Association; the most famous awards are the Newbery Medal, given to the most distinguished American book for children (ages 9-12), and the Caldecott Medal for the most distinguished American picture book. But there are other awards as well:

From the Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA):
• Printz Award for the best young adult (ages 12-1 book published in English
• Margaret Edwards Award for Lifetime Achievement of a young adult author

From the Social Responsibilities Round Table (SRRT):
• Coretta Scott King Awards, for the best book for young people written by an African American, the best picture book illustrated by an African American
• Coretta Scott King/John Steptoe New Talent Award for the best first time African American author

From the Association of Library Service to Children (ALSC), in addition to the Caldecott and Newbery,:
• Bachelder Award, for the best book for young people, translated from another language into English
• Theodore Seuss Geisel Award for the most distinguished beginning reader
• Laura Ingalls Wilder Award for someone who has made a lasting contribution to literature for children
• Schneider Family Book Award for the best artistic expression of young people with disabilities
• Sibert Medal, for the best nonfiction book for young people

I have only read a few of this year’s award winners, so far. I don’t always agree with the various award committees that the winning books were the “best” or “most distinguished” in their categories. But we’ll buy them, and read them, and decide for ourselves.

One thing that I am very excited about is the fact that this year’s Printz Medal went to a graphic novel, American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang

We did have the chance to visit the Seattle Public Library, another interesting building, made mostly of glass panels. It is ten stories high. It has lime green elevators and escalators. Lime green!? Whose idea was that?!

Our final visit to the exhibit hall was another great boon for us. We shipped our third box of books back to Portland, ME via the post office in the exhibit hall.

The final author that I had the pleasure of meeting was Zlata Filipovic, the author of Zlata’s Diary, which is about her life and experiences in the Balkan War. She has a new book out that she edited; it’s called Stolen Voices: Young People’s War Diaries from World War I to Irag. The publisher, Penguin Books, was giving away copies, so I got two and had them autographed. I asked Zlata (left) if I could take her picture while she autographed them. She agreed.

We were only in Seattle for the first half of the day. Then we packed up all our stuff and headed to King’s Station to take the Amtrak Cascade train to Portland, OR …

Portland, OR

Our train ride was uneventful, but very comfortable. We rented a DigEPlayer for Aedin to amuse herself with during the four hour train ride. The device is like a portable DVD player, except that it has twelve movies and a series of TV and cartoon episodes on it. The really cool thing is that you can rent it at one Amtrak station and drop it off at another one. It only cost $11 and we got to keep the headphones. (I think I now have enough headphones for all the library computers.)

The Bed and Breakfast where we are staying is so beautiful! It is called, Portland’s White House - I think because it has a strong resemblance to a certain home located at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave, in Washington, D.C. …

We feel like we’re staying in a mansion …

Tomorrow is our last full day. On Wednesday, we fly home, from Portland, OR to Portland, ME.

Check back for my final Seattle/Portland blog.

Ms McDaniel

Seattle, Day 3, Part 2

Our second visit to the exhibit hall was interrupted by an Unfortunate Event: my daughter lost her conference badge. I’m ashamed to admit that I was not very gracious and instead of reassuring her that “everything will be okay,” I got angry and made her cry. (For the record, I did apologize.) The good news is that the ALA conference folks were very gracious and printed her out a new badge. But the whole thing did put a dent in our exhibit hall time.

I wanted to take the opportunity to demonstrate how I choose books. The process is (surprisingly) similar to the “How to Choose a Good Book for Yourself” activity that we just did with Windsor 7.

I judge books by their covers. Here are a couple of books that I chose simply based on the cover art:

Here are some that I chose just because the titles sounded interesting:

Thou Shalt Not Kill Unless Otherwise Instructed: Poems and Stories by Mike Sharpe

Speed Show: How Nascar Won the Heart of America by Dave Caldwell

James Houston’s Treasury of Inuit Legends: Stories and Drawings by James Houston

These are books that I chose because I recognized (and liked) the authors:

If a Tree Falls at Lunch Period by Gennifer Choldenko (Notes from a Liar and Her Dog and Al Capone Does My Shirts)

The Breakup Bible: A Novel by Melissa Kantor (Confessions of a Not It Girl)

Rickshaw Girl by Mitali Perkins (Monsoon Summer and The Not-so-Star-Spangled Life of Sunita Sen)

The Wednesday Wars by Gary D. Schmidt (Lizzie Bright and the Buckminster Boy)

These are books that I chose because I saw something on the cover that let me know that they were graphic novels, which I LOVE:

The Plain Janes by Cecil Castellucci and Jim Rugg

Houdini: The Handcuff King by Jason Lutes & Nick Bertozzi

Stuck in the Middle: Seventeen Comics from an Unpleasant Age edited by Ariel Schrag

These are books that looked a little interesting, so I picked each one up, read the blurb on the back, flipped through it, and then asked the person selling it to “tell me more.” After learning a bit more about each book, I was definitely interested:

Evil Genius by Catherine Jinks “Cadel Piggott has a genius IQ and a fascination with systems of all kinds. At seven he was illegally hacking into computers, and now at fourteen, he’s studying for his World Domination degree at the Axis Institute founded by criminal mastermind Dr. Phineas Darkkon.” - from back cover

Piratepedia “This time travel manual will transport you to the world’s most dangerous seas, where you’ll fight in the bloodiest battles with history’s cruelest cutthroats, from Egyptian Sea People to Blackbeard to pirates of today.” - from the back cover

The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick “With 284 pages of original drawings and combining elements of picture book, graphic novel, and film, Brian Selznick breaks open the novel form to create an entirely new reading experience.” - from the back cover

All the books that I have talked about so far, are still only just a small sample of what I have picked up here at the conference! I can’t wait to get back and share them all with you!

This evening, I had the wonderful opportunity to hear a talk from Chris Crutcher, one of the most challenged and banned authors in the United States. He is both an author and an adolescent and family therapist. Many of the characters in his books were inspired by young people he has met through his practice as an adolescent therapist. His books are very gritty and contain a lot of rough language - one the reasons they are frequently challenged and banned. He said to us, in defense of the “language” he uses in his books, “I have to tell the stories in their native tongues. … If you censor that voice, you censor that kid. … If you ban that book, you ban that kid. … If we don’t want to hear about it because we don’t like the way it’s said. Well, that’s just crazy.”

He was an awesome speaker! He’s another one that we have just got to bring to Maine!

After his talk, he stayed for more than an hour and autographed books. I bought - and got autographed for YOU - Athletic Shorts: Six Short Stories, King of the Mild Frontier: An Ill-Advised Autobiography, The Sledding Hill, and Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes.

The awards will be announced tomorrow. Stay tuned…

Ms McDaniel

Seattle, Day 3, Part 1

I had a meeting this morning with school librarians representing every state in the United States. The meeting is called the American Association of School Libraries (AASL) Affiliate Assembly and there are two representatives from each state library association.

QUESTION: Two representatives from each state is like which part of Congress, the House of Representatives or the Senate?

After the meeting, which lasted two hours, by the way, my daughter and I walked around the exhibit hall we didn’t get to visit yesterday. But we didn’t even go down half of the aisles before we were so bogged down with “stuff” that we had to come back to our hotel room to make a drop!

Here’s some of the more than 3 dozen Advance Reading Copies (ARCs) of new books that are going to be coming out this spring and summer that I picked up:
• Five Ancestors Book 4: The Crane by Jeff Stone;
• a new novel by Laurie Halse Anderson, Twisted;
• a new book by Walter Dean Myers about a boy coming-of-age in 1920s Harlem, Harlem Summer;
• Masquerade, the second book in the Blue Bloods (vampire) series by Melissa de la Cruz;
• an upcoming New York Times book, Hurricane Force Winds: In the Path of America’s Deadliest Storms;
• a new graphic novel by the author of Boy Proof, Cecil Castellucci, The Plain Janes;
• the first book in a new series by Mates and Dates and Truth, Dare, Kiss or Promise author Cathy Hopkins, Zodiac Girls;
• Sharon Flake’s upcoming book, The Broken Bike Boy and the Queen of 33rd Street;
• I LOVED the title of this humorous-looking book: Do the Math: Secrets, Lies and Algebra by Wendy Lichtman

And we still have more than half of one exhibit hall still to go!

Stay tuned …

Ms McDaniel

Seattle, Day 2, Part 2

At the American Library Association’s (ALA’s) Midwinter Meeting exhibit hall, there are thousands of exhibitors. The exhibits are spread out across two exhibit halls. My daughter Aedin and I went through one of the exhibit halls today.

Here are some of the special things we saw and did:

Terry Trueman, the author of Stuck in Neutral, gave a talk at the Library of Congress booth as part of LC’s Lifelong Literacy Initiative. He was such a great and incredibly funny speaker. He is an author I would absolutely LOVE to bring to Maine. I bought three copies of Stuck in Neutral and two copies of his new book, No Right Turn. Then I got them all autographed! I got one copy of Stuck in Neutral autographed for Mrs. MacDonald, because she brought all of her W6 Language Arts classes down to the library for booktalks and Stuck in Neutral was one of the books that we did.

This is a picture of my daughter with Terry Trueman.

One of the new technologies that I was excited to try out was the Playaway. It is like an ipod, but it is a single digital audiobook. In this picture you can see me plugged in and listening to Thomas Harris’ Hannibal Rising. The company was also giving away “ear candy”, i.e. earphones. My daughter and I each took a pair.

Both my daughter and I were excited to learn that Jimmy Gownley, the author/illustrator of the Amelia Rules! comics was also here. So we bought copies of his two new collections and had them autographed to you, the students at King Middle School.

One of the exhibitors was a company that specializes in publishing materials about notable African Americans. As part of the promotion, this famous African American was standing near their booth. Do you know who he is?

HINT: He was a very famous abolitionist.
HINT 2: He wrote and published his autobiography, which was titled, A Narrative of the Life of …
HINT 3: He published an anti-Slavery newspaper called, The North Star.

I’ll check in tomorrow.

I wonder what we’ll discover when we visit the other exhibit hall …

Ms McDaniel

Seattle, Day 2, Part 1

So, last night’s events were interesting, but both Aedin and I were pretty tired. We had done so much during the day already.

Mercedes Lackey was not able to attend the SciFi/Fantasy Authors’ Panel. But there was another woman, Laini Taylor, who was wonderful. I got an autographed copy of her first (upcoming) book. It is called Faeries of Dreamdark: Blackbringer and it will be published in June.

I loved a lot of what she said in her speech, which I told her when I got her autograph. She told me that her speech would be posted on her website, http://www.lainitaylor.com. Here are some of the highlights of her speech that I tried to write down:

“When people escape into fantasy, they don’t escape into a green meadow to weave daisy chains for unicorns. They escape into worlds where they fight battles and save the world. … They escape into worlds where they are not powerless. … I have the great job of bringing hope to a devastated world. … I get to save the world, and so do my readers.”

And from R.A. Salvatore:

“If, in reading fantasy and science fiction, you get used to worlds that are just, worlds where justice prevails, then I think you get intolerant of injustice in your own world. … Science fiction and fantasy can empower you to fight injustice in your own world.”

The Young Adult Video Gaming Night, I’m afraid I was really tired for, so I didn’t appreciate it as much as I would have earlier in the day. There were lots of games (card games, board games and video games) that they were giving away. Here’s what I picked up:
• Dungeons & Dragons Miniatures Starter Set
• Magic: The Gathering Core Set, with Booster Packs
• XBOX Forza Motorsport Demo

There were various video game stations set up for us to try, but I felt so ignorant about everything, that, to be honest, I was afraid to try. The hand-held controls were so complicated. The only one that I did pick up to try was a Legos Star Wars game that started vibrating as soon as I picked it up! I have to admit that it freaked me out. The guy showing me what to do told me that the control vibrates when you die. So I caused a Jedi Knight to die just by picking the thing up!?!

The librarian next to me was standing on this Twister-like mat and stomping on different parts of the mat. She looked pretty strange. There was no way that I was going to try that one out!

And then there was a librarian who was wielding one control in each hand like tennis rackets. The rest of us were giving her a wide berth!

I’m afraid that the whole video game thing was sensory overload for me. (Tess, I realize that you are probably very disappointed in me …)

Today, we had to check out of our hotel room and change to a new room. This change caused us to get a late start on the day. There are only a few things on the agenda today:
• Back to the Conference Exhibit Hall
• Meet author Terry Trueman, author of Stuck in Neutral, and get his new book, No Right Turn
• See if there are still tickets for the Freedom to Read Guest Lecture by frequently challenged and banned author Chris Crutcher

Best Wishes,
Ms McDaniel

Seattle, Day 1

Our flight from Portland, ME took twelve hours door to door.
There were two plane rides:
1.5 hours from Portland, ME to Washington, D.C.
5.5 hours from Washington, D.C. to Seattle, WA

There is a three hour time difference between Portland, ME and Seattle, WA. Although my daughter, Aedin and I got up before 7 AM here, it was really like getting up at 10 AM.

This morning was our first full day in Seattle. And it has been a pretty full day so far!

We started our day at Seattle’s Best Coffee, where we had the best hot chocolate that we’ve ever had. It was made with cocoa powder, soy milk (of course!), and had shaved white chocolate sprinkled on top, with a dark chocolate stick stirred in to melt. Doesn’t that sound fabulous?

We picked up our Conference registration materials this morning. Our hotel is only 8 blocks from the Seattle Convention and Trade Center. (It is also right across from the local public library, which I have not visited yet, but I do plan to visit.)

Then we walked 15 blocks from the convention center to the Space Needle. Although I am not fond of heights, Aedin and I went up the Needle. The Observation Deck is 520 feet straight up. It was a little freaky for me.

Here is an interesting fact about the Space Needle: when it opened, there was going to be a special ceremony where a local baseball player was going to pitch a baseball from the Needle’s Observation Deck. They cancelled the event when they learned that the ball was going to be traveling 130 MPH when it was caught on the ground 6.1 seconds after being pitched. It is a crime to throw any object from the Observation Deck.

Then we went to the Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame and the Experience Music Project. These two “museums” are in the most interesting looking building that I have ever seen. It was designed by architect Frank Gehry.

There was so much super cool stuff at the SciFi Museum …

We saw
• Darth Vader’s actual helmet
• a real model of R2D2 that was used in the original Star Wars
• Yoda
• ET
• the actual costume worn by Charlton Heston in the original (196 Planet of the Apes
• one of the robots from I, Robot
• the Alien and the equipment moving device worn by Sigourney Weaver in Aliens
• the only physical model ever made of the Death Star

In the SciFi Museum gift shop I bought my son a t-shirt that says, “Vader was Framed.”

Last, we went to the Experience Music Project, where we saw a variety of special exhibits:
• history of the electric guitar - Mr. O’D I saw a Dobro guitar!
• clothing and instruments from famous historical and contemporary musicians
• a studio where you can record yourself on a variety of tracks, then mix and burn a CD of yourself
• a special exhibit about the music of Disney, which was very interesting and especially fun for my daughter.

It was a 15 block walk back to our hotel, so we stopped and had lunch at a small French bakery, Boulangerie Nantaise. We each had soup in a bowl made of bread, so that when we were done, we had eaten everything but the spoons!

This afternoon/evening, we are going to hear a talk by some scifi/fantasy authors, R.A. Salvatore and Mercedes Lackey. And our final event of the day is the Young Adult Video Gaming Night (Tess!)

We’re having a great time.

Ms McDaniel

Windsor 7: Choosing Hero/Heroine Stories

Windsor 7 students were in the library with their Language Arts teacher, Mrs. Alvarez today. Each student was to select a “hero/heroine story” to compare/contrast with the legend of King Arthur. In Language Arts, they will be exploring the standard elements of “a hero story.”

To help the students select good books, we set up a How To Choose a Good Book for Yourself Activity. Based on a reading list created jointly by the teacher and librarian, we set up books to choose from. Each student had an evaluation form to complete. The evaluation form asked the student to, first only looking at the cover of the books, choose a book that looks interesting to you and rate - from “Very Interesting” to “Not Interesting at All” - the Picture on the Cover and the Title. For the second part, the student picks up the book s/he is interested in and reads the Blurb on the back or inside cover and considers the Reading Level. After the student finds a book that s/he wants to read, s/he must complete this sentence at the bottom of the evaluation form, “I want to read this book because …”

Among the most popular titles were:
The Sea of Trolls by Nancy Farmer
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis
Eragon by Christopher Paolini
The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood by Howard Pyle
Rowan Hood by Nancy Springer
The Great Good Thing by Roderick Townley

Ms McDaniel & Mr. O’D

Windsor 6 Library Skills Assessment

Windsor 6 was doing their Library Skills Assessment (LSA) January 8-12, 2007. The LSA asks each student to demonstrate their skills at finding, evaluating and citing information using the following sources:

• library catalog,
• index in an informational book,
• print encyclopedia,
• online encyclopedia,
• search engine,
• and an informational web page.

Each student demonstrates using each of the resources and is rated on a scale of 1-4 by a teacher - Ms McDaniel, Mr. O’Donnell or Ms Flynn.

What a great group Windsor 6 has been to work with! They have come to the library every day excited and ready to work. They asked some very thoughtful questions and made some very astute observations, e.g. “The information on this webpage is pretty old [1999].” and “How do we know the author [of this web page] didn’t write his own biography and exaggerate?”

More than two dozen W6 students successfully completed their LSA, being rated at level 4 - “independently able to access, evaluate and cite information using this source” - which is quite an accomplishment for sixth graders! Congraulations Windsor 6; you should be very proud of yourselves!

Ms McDaniel, Mr O’D and Ms Flynn