State Library Services is sharing this exciting opportunity to bring the program Girls Who Code to your school! Definitely check out their website and get the details below:
Minnesota State Library Services has partnered with Girls Who Code (GWC) this year to bring free computer science learning opportunities to our community. Girls Who Code Clubs are FREE after-school programs for 3rd-5th or 6th-12th grade girls to join a sisterhood of supportive peers and role models and use computer science to change the world. Please note, this program targets, but is not limited to, girls. Participants not only learn hard coding skills and computational thinking, but they’ll also learn project management skills, collaboration, bravery, resilience, how to positively impact their community, and so much more.
When you start a GWC Club, you’ll gain access to free resources, flexible plug and play curriculum, funding opportunities, ongoing support, alumni opportunities for your young learners, and more! There’s no computer science experience needed to get started since GWC is there for you every step of the way. Apply now with the quick 15 min Clubs Application through our partnership or learn more about how to get started by joining the next live 30 min webinar!
Mark your calendars for Thursday, September 26th from 4-7pm! We will be in the Bremer Community Room at the St. Cloud Public Library and will have so many things to share with you!
Reading With Libraries: podcast book group, with new genres, books, and beverages each week
So, yeah – we are big fans of podcasts! They can be such a good way to share ideas with your community.
Each week we are going to share a podcast from a library, or looking at books, so you can join us in expanding podcast community and admiring the work others are doing to share cool info!
This week we are admiring the work done by the Professional Book Nerds podcast! @ProBookNerds
Their Twitter bio is: “Book recommendations, author interviews, and more from some nerds in the literary world. Tweets by @Jill_Grun & @SocksCLE. Presented by Rakuten OverDrive.”
Yes! THAT Overdrive!! The place where so many of my beloved audio books live!!
From their website: “We’re not just book nerds, we’re Professional Book Nerds® (PBN) who work at OverDrive, the industry-leading app for eBooks and audiobooks through your local library and school.
With over 1 million downloads, readers and
librarians turn to the PBN team for weekly expert book recommendations,
author interviews and all things books.
Our team has a deep knowledge for the literary world and helps thousands of libraries with collection development, making us uniquely positioned to provide suggestions and recommendations for readers around the world. The Professional Book Nerds podcast is available through iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, iHeartRadio, TuneIn, Radio FM and anywhere people download their podcasts.”
So if you are looking for some author interviews, and some information about new and upcoming books from podcasters who are professional book people – this is a great one to check out!
The grant is funded in part with a grant from the Minnesota Department of Education using federal funding, CFDA 45.310 – Library Services and Technology Act, Grants to States Program (LS-00-19-0024-19).
This year, we are so excited about our Year of STEAM at CMLE! And we’re especially excited because we received a grant LSTA grant from the MN Department of Education, the State Library Services, with money from the Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS), we were able to buy VR/AR kits we will be sharing across our member school libraries!! These headsets are sturdy and meant to be used in schools. When you receive the headsets in your school you will also be given access to an online Portal that contains hundreds of curriculum-aligned lesson plans that incorporates the VR/AR technology.
We will have an application ready soon, but for now, if you would like to request a kit, just email admin @ cmle.org. We’ll have some questions for you and will work out the details! (Please keep in mind these kits must be coordinated through your school library).
We are holding a Fall Welcome Back Event on Thursday, Sept. 26th from 4-7 at the St. Cloud Public Library and will be happy to bring kits along to distribute to members that have contacted us and applied ahead of time.
Otherwise, we’ll have signup sheets and more information available at the event. Plus, you can try the VR headsets for yourselves! (They are seriously cool).
We are working with the vendor to schedule formal in-person training sessions and will announce them when we know more. In the meantime, you can get started on our vendor’s website – browsing around to get some ideas you might want to try when your kit arrives.
Also, browse this document! It’s the setup and user’s guide. You also NEED to show this to your IT people before your kit arrives, so they have time to make any modifications. (Show them page 27: Technical Guidelines.)
Watch this video to see what the headsets look like, and watch our website all year for updates from schools that are using the headsets in their libraries and classrooms! Of course, email admin @ cmle.org with any questions.
Each week we assemble a collection – a bouquet, if you will – of
books you can read for yourself, or use to build into a display in your
library. And each week, we tend to go to a random word generator to
find words that would be interesting to explore.
As always, the books we link to have info from Amazon.com. If you click a link, and then buy anything at all from Amazon, we get a small percent of their profits from your sale. Yay!!! Thanks!!! We really appreciate the assistance!
This week we look at books about fish, and books with fish on the cover. We are considering bringing in fish to be companions in the CMLE office; so if you have suggestions on good names, send them to us!
One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish, by Dr. Seuss Well, this is a classic and an obvious choice. ” “From there to here, from here to there, funny things are everywhere” . . . So begins this classic Beginner Book by Dr. Seuss. Beginning with just five fish and continuing into flights of fancy, One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish celebrates how much fun imagination can be. From the can-opening Zans to the boxing Gox to the winking Yink who drinks pink ink, the silly rhymes and colorful cast of characters create an entertaining approach to reading that will have every child giggling from morning to night: “Today is gone. Today was fun. Tomorrow is another one.””
A Fish Caught in Time: The Search for the Coelacanth, by Samantha Weinberg I’ve been interested in these fish ever since I read about them being rediscovered – so cool to know that there are still so many mysteries out there for us to discover! “The coelacanth (see-lo-canth) is no ordinary fish. Five feet long, with luminescent eyes and limb like fins, this bizarre creature, presumed to be extinct, was discovered in 1938 by an amateur icthyologist who recognized it from fossils dating back 400 million years. The discovery was immediately dubbed the “greatest scientific find of the century,” but the excitement that ensued was even more incredible. This is the entrancing story of that most rare and precious fish — our own great-uncle forty million times removed.”
Beneath the Surface: Killer Whales, SeaWorld, and the Truth Beyond Blackfish, by John Hargrove Yes, they are not fish; but they eat fish, so… they count for this list. “In Beneath the Surface, Hargrove paints a compelling portrait of these highly intelligent and social creatures, including his favorite whales Takara and her mother Kasatka, two of the most dominant orcas in SeaWorld. And he includes vibrant descriptions of the lives of orcas in the wild, contrasting their freedom in the ocean with their lives in SeaWorld.”
Flush, by Carl Hiaasen I love Hiaasen books! And if his latest ones are more mellow, and less high-edge-crazy, well that probably means he’s living a happier life. ” Noah’s dad is sure that the owner of the Coral Queen casino boat is flushing raw sewage into the harbor—which has made taking a dip at the local beach like swimming in a toilet. He can’t prove it though, and so he decides that sinking the boat will make an effective statement. Right. The boat is pumped out and back in business within days and Noah’s dad is in the local lock-up. Now Noah is determined to succeed where his dad failed. He will prove that the Coral Queen is dumping illegally . . . somehow. “
In the Heart of the Sea : The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex, by Nathaniel Philbrick Okay, yes – this one is cheating too; whales are not fish. But that cover is very dramatic! ” In 1820, the whaleship Essex was rammed and sunk by an angry sperm whale, leaving the desperate crew to drift for more than ninety days in three tiny boats. Nathaniel Philbrick uses little-known documents and vivid details about the Nantucket whaling tradition to reveal the chilling facts of this infamous maritime disaster.”
Gould’s Book of Fish, by Richard Flanagan “Once upon a time, when the earth was still young, before the fish in the sea and all the living things on land began to be destroyed, a man named William Buelow Gould was sentenced to life imprisonment at the most feared penal colony in the British Empire, and there ordered to paint a book of fish. He fell in love with the black mistress of the warder and discovered too late that to love is not safe; he attempted to keep a record of the strange reality he saw in prison, only to realize that history is not written by those who are ruled.
Acclaimed as a masterpiece around the world, Gould’s Book of Fish is at once a marvelously imagined epic of nineteenth-century Australia and a contemporary fable, a tale of horror, and a celebration of love, all transformed by a convict painter into pictures of fish.”
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