Know Your Library #5 December 2013: Special Edition

GIVE YOUR CHILD THE BEST CHRISTMAS GIFT----

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A LIBRARY CARD!

      Start ‘em right! The very best favor you can do for your children is to get them their OWN library card. Even if s(h)e can’t read yet, children as young as five can be started off on a lifetime of the love of reading.

     The Taos Library has an excellent Children’s Library, under the fervent direction of Annette Montoya, who will be happy to guide parents, teachers, grandparents, in getting kids started with books.

     While this newsletter has been going through the Dewey Decimal System, beginning with the 100s in past months, this time we’re doing a special survey of books for children of all ages. Since, of course, there are several thousand books in all categories, we can only give a glimpse.

      For the youngest, who may not be able to read yet, here’s a (gasp!)radical idea: READ TO YOUR CHILDREN. (Yes, you CAN turn off the TV and/or the video games!)

      My own favorite among books for the youngest crowd is the immortal and inimitable Dr. Seuss’ THE BUTTER BATTLE BOOK. With his zany illustrations and clever rhyming text, it’s the story of the Yooks and the Zooks who hate each other and go to war because one of them  spread their bread butter side up, and the other does it butter side down. (Hmm, maybe our World Leaders should read this one.)

      Others, to name just a couple, are TITCH by Pat Hutchins, about the smallest of a family of siblings, and the beautifully illustrated re-telling of THE BOY WHO CRIED WOLF by B.G. Hennessy and Boris Kulikov.

      In the fiction section for kids who can read, there are hundreds of selections; enough to keep your child busy until high school. To name just one: Elizabeth Winthrop’s COUNTING ON GRACE, a fictionalized story about a girl mill worker in 1910, who meets the great photographer Lewis Hine. A feisty heroine, and a reminder that,, even in America, it was a struggle to get kids out of the factory and into school.

      And there is plenty of non-fiction to expand your child’s mind and supplement what s(h)e’s getting school: to get back to the Dewey Decimal System:

100: UFOs by Gary Jeffrey

200: J297P Islam-something we all need to know more about

300: a plethora of books on the Civil Rights movement

400: dictionaries—that can be checked out

500: Precious Earth, Changing Climate by Jen Green. A gentle intro to science.

600: Stop Water Waste by Claire Llewelyn. Something the whole family       can  work on together.

700: Building Big by David Macauley. One of a series of beautiful books on great architecture. 700 also includes art, music, dance, etc.

800: The Sesame Street Book of Poetry edited by Jeff Moss.

900:Lives of Extraordinary Women by Kathleen Krull. The biography section is  an excellent cross-section, including bios of—for instance—famous athlete Hank Aaron to test pilot Chuck Yeager; many women, including Abigail Adams, Harriet Tubman and Eleanor Roosevelt—and even people like Osama Bin Laden.

     There are also VHS and some DVDs—and the librarians are there to help you make just the selection your child needs—and there are story hours for the littlest ones, and special events throughout the year.

Written by Joanne Forman.