Kelly K

Celebrate Hispanic Heritage Month!

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Hispanic Heritage Month runs from September 15 – October 15. Let’s celebrate by reading books by Hispanic authors and illustrators! One great way to find these great books is to check out the Pura Belpré Award. This award, established in 1996, is an annual award presented to a Latino/Latina writer and illustrator whose work best portrays, affirms, and celebrates the Latino cultural experience in an outstanding work of literature for children and youth.

I compiled this list of Pura Belpre award winners to help get you started. Books on this list are all award winners or honorees and range from easy to chapter to teen titles.

But who was Pura Belpré? Pura Belpré was a woman that changed the way children’s librarians work with kids. She was the first Latina children’s librarian in the New York Public Library. As a children’s librarian, storyteller, and author, she enriched the lives of Puerto Rican children in the U.S.A. through her pioneering work of preserving and disseminating Puerto Rican folklore.

In honor of the Pura Belpré award, all Chippewa Valley residents can access TeachingBooks.net which offers a searchable database of more than 1,000 online Belpré resources, including author interviews, book trailers, book discussion guides and more! Visitors to the site can hear directly from Latino/Latina authors and illustrators as they talk about and read from their books.

Julia

Can You Survive…Book Scouts?

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Traversing a raging river on a slippery log. Foraging for wild berries. Setting a broken bone. Yup…just an ordinary night at book club.

Book Scout book club members put their wilderness survival skills to the test this September (albeit from the comfort of home) by voting their way through a series of challenges from Can You Survive The Wilderness? by Matt Doeden. Do you think you have the expertise to survive? Choose your own interactive survival adventure from the exciting “You Choose” series and put your skills to the test!

The real challenge of the night, though, may have come from solving a series of Mad Gab riddles. To play Mad Gabs, one person repeats a nonsensical sentence aloud until the group can decipher what they are actually trying to say:

Ape Hand Hub Hair*

Gnome Ore Mist Her Nice Thy*

We capped off the meeting with a round of National Geographic Funny Fill-ins! Create your own mixed-up story (and learn about parts of speech) with this Mad Lib-style generator.

Book Scouts offers two sections of book clubs, the Story Seekers and the Page Turners, perfect for kids in grades 3-5. Meetings are held virtually, and include discussion time, games, interesting videos, and fun craft and STEM projects to complete independently! Meetings are held on the Third Thursday of the month. Learn more and register today.

SEA YULE HATER*

 

*Mad Gab solutions:

A panda bear.

No more mister nice guy.

See you later!

Julia

Read Me a Book Club Returns!

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What do you call a tree with lots of friends? Poplar!

What does the ocean do when it sees its friends? It waves!

What do loggers eat in the forest? Mac and trees!

Make new friends and kick off the fall session of Read Me A Book Club with goofy, laugh-out loud read-alouds and silly games. This month, you’ll help Lucy, a very high-spirited bear, find a friend, and encourage Norman the jealous porcupine to welcome a new friend into his heart.

Coming in October: A Monster Ate My Book Club

What happens when a hungry monster has a playdate? How do you solve the problem of creepy underpants? Learn all this and more at the October Read Me A Book Club meet-up!

Book Club is recommended for kids in grades K-2, and meets virtually on the last Monday of each month at 4:30 pm. Learn more and register for Read Me a Book Club!