Have you been looking for new ideas to spice up your storytime? Sign language with babies and toddlers can be a fun addition! It encourages participation and can make the experience more interactive and entertaining.
ALA is offering a webinar “Liven Up Baby and Toddler Storytimes with Sign Language Workshop” and CMLE wants to extend an invitation to any interested librarians that may want to participate! If we can get just two additional people that would like to come view this webinar from CMLE Headquarters, we will qualify for the group rate for the workshop, which is $40 instead of $60.
The online workshop is 90 minutes long and begins at 1:30pm on Wednesday, Dec. 7th.
At the completion of this workshop, you will be able to:
List 3 benefits of using sign language with young children
Describe at least 3 ways to use sign language in baby and toddler storytimes
Demonstrate 3 ASL signs appropriate for use in baby or toddler storytimes
You can find more information about the workshop here.
At CMLE, we are dedicated to connecting our members with each other, in order to share resources, experiences, and library enthusiasm! As we make our way to each member library and hear about all the great things that happen at each one, we write up a blog post and put it on our website for everyone to access.
But, just in case you happen to miss a Library Visit post, we have created a page specifically for them! Check it out and admire all the great work your colleagues are doing! We will continue to update the page as we continue to visit more libraries.
We will be taking a short break from visiting libraries, as the holiday time is crazy for everyone, but in the New Year we will be back at it! So, if we haven’t been to see your library yet, keep an eye on your email! 🙂
At CMLE Headquarters, we want to help members with access to resources and ideas from across the profession and our professional organizations. This press release, copied below, is timely in discussing an issue that is being widely pondered by librarians, teachers, parents, and everyone else: how libraries can respond with information assistance after the election. Any election and post-election season is filled with excitement, changes, and a rapid flow of all kinds of information, and this one has had all of that.
Libraries are here to help people sort through that information, to figure out what is real and meaningful, and to understand how information can apply to patrons and to their communities.
Angie and I are on a mission to visit all our CMLE member libraries – and we are making some great progress! This week we were invited to visit the library at the St. Cloud Hospital, by librarian Susan Schleper. We are sharing all these library visits with you, our members (and others!), to help everyone see the diversity of service we are providing across the CMLE system. And we want you to know what is going on in different libraries, so you feel invited to contact each other to talk about partnerships or sharing ideas for great service! Many of you are solo librarians, or working with others who are not doing the same kinds of things you do – but someone else in the system probably does it or wants to learn more about it. So: read, be awed by all we do here in the CMLE area, and reach out to each other! (And us! At Headquarters we like to partner too!!)
A nice place to sit, some popular fiction on the shelves – a great place to visit if you are in the hospital!
Most visitors to the hospital library are probably not as enthusiastic as we were to be there – but look at this location! If you are in the hospital as a patient or visitor – drop by to look at their materials. It can be very helpful to have a spot to just take a break; and the library can be that space. (I managed to keep my hands off their copy of the Hunger Games. But it was a close thing! Visiting libraries and NOT reading their books is really hard for a book-loving librarian!)
Everyone dreads this. It’s hard, as an employee, to have your performance judged – even when the result is good news. And it’s hard, as a manager, to have to come up with insightful things to say about everyone’s work without constantly repeating yourself.
So is it still valuable to go through the process? For most people: yes!
Ideally, a performance appraisal is not a time to talk about problems – though those should be addressed. When there are performance issues during the year, those can be addressed in the moment and dealt with at the time. They should not build up to wait for the annual review. Instead it is a time for people to reflect on their past performance, and to think about what they want to do over the next year. It is an opportunity to take time out of a hectic schedule, or one that has a lot of repetition from day-to-day and week-to-week, and to see, think, and do some self-evaluation.
Have you been looking for new ideas to spice up your storytime? Sign language with babies and toddlers can be a fun addition! It encourages participation and can make the experience more interactive and entertaining.
