We’re so glad you’re able to join our podcast book group. This week we’re talking about the Minnesota Youth Reading Awards!

Check out our full show notes page here.

We’re going to share some background information on the Minnesota Youth Reading Awards, known as MYRA. https://www.myrahome.org/

The purpose of MYRA is to “administer yearly “read and vote” awards programs, providing nominee titles that offer opportunities for Minnesota youth to see themselves and others in the pages, to make new connections, and to engage and enjoy the world of reading.”

Become a full book group member on Patreon! Click here to be part of the “inner circle” of this book group, and get access to behind-the-scenes info and photos. Support levels start at $1/month – and you get a postcard from Official Office Dog Lady Grey! More swag is available at higher levels of support; check it all out today.

We love doing this, but podcasts aren’t free to create; so thank you so much to our book group members who have joined us. We love having you as part of the team.

Join us! We’re on Patreon!

And, what is Patreon?

It’s a place where people can chip in to help support interesting and creative projects.

What is our project?

Well, you’ve probably already heard it: Reading With Libraries! This is our book group podcast.

• Each week we share a new genre
• We have a Guest Host
• We provide information about the genre
• We give you resources to find more books or info on the genre.
• And we have beverages! Themed beverages! (I mean, sure – the books are great, but you need a beverage go really make it feel like a book group.)
• When we are taking a break to produce our Linking Our Libraries skills training podcast, we keep putting up short Book Bites episodes here. Each week a Guest Host shares a quick book they have enjoyed. (We never want you to be alone, without books to enjoy!)

We provide these podcasts to you at no cost to you. But of course, there are expenses on our end! Each episode we create takes several hours of work. It’s a lot more than just chatting with cool book people.

We have to find guests, negotiate dates to record, find information on each genre and lots of resources to share, track down beverages and recipes for each of them, write up the content, do the recording, adjust the sound levels, take out any mistakes made, take out the silences while we try to remember what we were going to say, save audio file to assorted locations so they are all safe, upload to the Libsyn site, create a graphic that fits the genre, create an article on Libsyn and schedule it, create a page on our website filled with links to recipes and books we discussed, and then: voila! It gets published! And it lands in your podcast app! (Yeah, setting all of that up so it magically arrives in every podcast app?? That was a big to-do that I’d really like to never repeat.)

All of that is for Each And Every Episode.

And we don’t just contribute our time and energy – there are monetary costs to making this podcast. We pay monthly fees for our podcasts to get hosted in the happy world of Libsyn, we pay our contractor, and we pay ourselves – because we like food and homes. Every hour we spend working on this, because we think it’s important for our members and for other libraries, is an hour we aren’t spending doing other work for our members.

Recording the episodes is the fun part. It’s the easiest part, because we get to chat with everyone! And it’s the part everyone thinks of when you think of podcasting.

It’s taken us a couple of years now to get all of this working pretty well. We’re pretty pleased with the podcast now. It’s fun to talk with people about books and genres they like, it’s fun to go to conferences and talk with other people about podcasting in their library, and it’s fun to have people mention they have heard it!

And we like sharing all this information with you! It’s fun to be part of a book group!

So we’d like you to share in the book group effort.

If we were meeting in person, we would each take turns bringing snacks and beverages to a meeting. Since we are online, and flexible around your schedule when you want to participate, we have different needs.

We have an assortment of different levels you can choose to support us with a monthly fee. And yes, they are book-related words, because you may have noticed: we’re pretty into books here!

Here are a few:

• folio: $1 or more per month Our mushy, sincere thanks! Access to Discord chat with fellow book group members! And a postcard from Mary, Angie, and Official Office Dog Lady Grey!
• octavo: $5 or more per month Everything from the folio level, plus we  mention you in an upcoming episode! 
• monograph: $10 or more per month Everything from the octavo level, plus we send you a sticker!

We have more choices, including choices for organizations that want to get training sessions from us.

You really want to go to the website to check them all out, because Official Office Dog Lady Grey has a picture at each level – and I promise she’s the cutest thing you’ve seen on a library book group page all week!

We would love to keep doing this for free, and just happily give everything away to you all. But, we really do need money to keep going. And we want to give you the opportunity to be full book group members, to feel like part of the team!

Join us! Become a supporting member of the book group!

It’s our year of STEAM projects! Each week we admire some aspect of STEAM education that is being tried by people and organizations all over the place.

This week, we have a few different links you can use to explore different ideas in STEAM projects in schools. You might want to browse through these for some ideas to implement in your school, for projects we might want to work together to find grant money to fund, or to send to your principal or other stakeholders to help them think about some STEAM ideas that might be good for your community.

You can see that there are a lot of interesting projects happening that are partnerships between schools and areas businesses. Schools want great, up-to-date education tools, and businesses want qualified graduates to work for them. Teaming up to make that happen can make a great STEAM project happen! If you want to consider something like that, we can come over and chat with you to gather ideas, or help you build proposals to take to your administration or wider community.

Click on those headlines to get the full stories!

• People & Places: Flight Night takes off to benefit STEM “The Tulsa Regional STEM Alliance works to build innovative STEM pathways for students to access high-impact careers, fueling a more globally competitive northeastern Oklahoma. Fab Lab Tulsa provides educational programming for schools and after-school programs with technology and equipment in a space where students can learn hands-on digital design and fabrication skills required to solve the problems of the future. Educational programs focus on building skills in core subjects, such as math, science and art, as well as applied problem solving, critical thinking and creativity.”
• Cox Foundation is helping Boys and Girls of Topeka further STEM education “Cox Communications is advancing STEM education at the Boys and Girls Club of Topeka. The teen center received a $25,000 grant through the James M. Cox Foundation. The center used the money towards their Innovation Lab. The lab allows students who may not have access to the internet at home the ability to learn about robotics, 3-D printing, and STEM education. To further the students love for technology. The Boys and Girls Club purchased podcast equipment and new computers.
• ‘STEAM’ is the focus at new school in Brooklyn Park “Classes are underway at the newest school in Brooklyn Park.  Zanewood Community School opened its doors for the first time Tuesday, and there’s a good chance it doesn’t look like the classroom you grew up in. Zanewood is a ‘STEAM’ school in the Osseo Area School District.  That means the curriculum specializes in science, technology, engineering, arts and math.”
• Nominated by local farmers, Elba Central School awarded $10,000 grant to enhance STEM curriculum “By working with farmers, America’s Farmers Grow Rural Education Program, sponsored by the Bayer Fund, awarded $2.3 million in grants nationwide this year to strengthen STEM education in rural schools. The schools that received grants were nominated and selected by farmers in their communities and Elba’s farmers answered the call to strengthen STEM education. Elba’s grant will allow it to produce and broadcast video announcements.”
• Amazon donates STEAM labs to Petersburg’s elementary schools “The lab was part of a $75,000 donation that created a STEAM lab at all four public elementary schools — Walnut Hill, Lakemont, Cool Spring and Pleasant Lane. That donation is in addition to another $10,000 donation last year which established a lab in the high school this year. “Just to hear that a company, an organization is investing in our students, investing in our community, they said we want to do something for our community, We want to have a STEAM lab.” said Walnut Hill Principal Belinda W. Urquhart. “We’re so happy because they said they wanted to give you something, and then they turn around and set up the lab, too. This is exciting.””
• 41 education groups join cohort to end STEM teacher shortage “A group of 41 additional educational organizations on Thursday pledged to address the root causes of the Unites States’ shortage of K-12 teachers in science, technology, engineering, and math…. Each of the partner organizations have made commitments to address specific challenges surrounding the STEM teacher shortage — like how to increase the supply of teachers, retain talent or put policies in place to prevent future shortages. The new cohort — which includes Chicago Public Schools, LEGO Education, National Board for Professional Teaching Standards and Council of Chief State School Officers — will explore the underlying reasons for the teacher shortage, seeking solutions with the greatest potential for impact.”
• How a Partnership is Paving the Way to STEM Education in Kurdistan “Some partnerships were meant to be. For years, kids all over the world have been learning how to program computers and build robots as part of the global movement toward STEM education. But it took a bit longer for STEM to take root in Kurdistan, the autonomous northern region of Iraq. Kurdistan Save the Children was eager to change that. Founded in 1991, the Iraqi nonprofit organization works to ensure protection, health, and education for all children. Over the years, it has developed a wide network and an excellent track record for educational youth programming.”

We love to take field trips to visit our members. And this one was a fun one for us! Yes, it is always fun to visit our members – but this one had some unusual items in their collection that made it stand out a little bit.

It is located on the grounds of Camp Ripley, near Little Falls. You can check out their website right here. It’s filled with all sorts of information and content you can admire here, or prep for your trip.

(Note: we love it when our members have websites, or pages on their parent organization sites! It’s such an important tool for organizing your resources and connecting with your community. If you need some help getting started on yours, we have info on it here.)

The library is a small building across a plaza from the museum, and you can definitely admire both buildings while you are there. And you can ponder the challenges of collection development and display when your collection includes items such as a OH-38A Kiowa Helicopter! Libraries of all sorts are adding more interesting material to their collections, but a plaza filled with helicopters and other military machinery will be a little unusual in most collections.

When you get inside, it does look more like a typical library. You can see Ryan Welle, the Archivist and Librarian, ready to circulate some books from the collection.

You can see the cataloging system they have developed. A lot of small libraries, with specialized collections, develop their own catalog that makes sense of the collection and makes it easier for your community to find material.

This is a terrible picture of a great addition to the library! From their website: “Along the east wall of the library is our 30-foot WWI America mural featuring 100 notable individuals from the era of different backgrounds, interests, ethnicities and orientations. Recently completed by local Veteran David Geister, it was inspired by the even larger, century-old Pantheon de la Guerre on view at the National WWI Museum in Kansas City. ” They keep a list of all the people in this mural – and you will be very surprised to learn about all the people who appear here, including Walt Disney, the Mayo brothers, and all sorts of Minnesota veterans.

We have so many great collections, materials, and programs across our 300+ members! We really enjoy checking in with everyone, to see how you are doing. You can read about our other field trips to visit members here. And if we haven’t been to visit your library yet – let’s make this happen! Email us at admin @ cmle.org, and let’s set up a day that we can come over to admire your stuff!