Librarians Help! – With Early Literacy

In my Librarians Help! series, I’ve decided to start providing links to sites explaining ways other Librarians Help. Here’s a link from Pierce County Library System that I find extremely cool. They did an actual study with pre- and post-tests to show that when childcare providers are trained by librarians, the children under their care actually do increase in Early Literacy Skills. And they compared with a control group to show this was a significant improvement from the untrained providers.

Don’t forget: Librarians are educators. And we help people learn at all ages and from all backgrounds.

Now, here are some of the ways I got to help people this week.

I got to help with some computer skills this week:
— Helped a woman load a picture onto Facebook.
— Helped another woman get data from a PDF file on the internet into an Excel spreadsheet on her laptop.

I showed someone where we keep our tax forms now that tax season is past.

Mostly, again, besides back room work (mostly about converting books from Reference to Circulation this week), my work was about helping people find books. Like ones about:

— Various SAT Subject Tests
— Cooking in crock pots
— Ancient Chinese art
— The history of Batman
— French resources for kids
— Drawing
— Espionage

People also asked for specific books, such as:
— The next one of the Psalm 23 Mysteries
Running With the Kenyans
Bone chapter books
— specific issues of Wired magazine
— next Rick Riordan book
— First Harry Potter book for a girl who currently does most of her reading in Korean. (Mom wants to tempt her. I did suggest that would be a good choice for listening to the audio version.)
My Weird School books

By far the most fun question this week was for suggestions for books to tempt a 15-year-old son. Some of my suggestions that were chosen were:
The Thief, by Megan Whalen Turner
White Cat, by Holly Black
Ship Breaker, by Paolo Bacigalupi
Octavian Nothing, by M. T. Anderson

Spread the word! Librarians Help!

Disclaimer: The views expressed on this blog are entirely my own and should not be construed in any way to represent those of my employer.

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