New beginnings!
Hi everyone and welcome to my brand new blog- BookWings!
First, I think I should introduce myself. I'm Jennifer- I'm was born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, and I currently live in Northern Virginia. I'm currently a part-time Youth Services Library Assistant at the Arlington (Virginia) Public Library. I've been working in public libraries since 2006, when I started as a shelver at the Berkeley Public Library in California. After many years of working at the BPL, I decided to finally take the plunge and start library school. I learned as a lot as a graduate student, and I finally obtained my MLIS last December from the Information School at San Jose State University.
During my 3 years as a grad student I had the opportunity to learn, both in and out of the classroom, how to provide quality services to children through public library programming, collections, and outreach. In 2014, I faced one of my biggest fears of youth librarianship, conducting storytimes, when I completed a 2 week intensive training with the organization, Books for Wider Horizons. Books for Wider Horizons is a program organized by the Oakland Public Library (California) which recruits, trains, and places volunteer story readers in preschool and childcare centers throughout the City of Oakland. The program was truly invaluable to me, and I learned so much from providing weekly storytimes to a classroom of preschoolers at De Colores Head Start located in the Fruitvale district of Oakland. During that time, I found the blogs of many other library professionals incredibly helpful in planning my own storytimes and as valuable resources for songs, rhymes, fingerplays, and flannel board props. I always wanted to create my own blog to share my own storytime programs, but unfortunately I didn't have the time to do so while working and studying.
I moved to the Northern Virginia area last year in order to close the gap of my then long-distance relationship with my husband (then-fiance). I spent the better part of my first year here acclimating to the the weather differences between California and Virginia, planning my elopement wedding, and finishing up my last semester of library school. Since graduating I've been working at the Arlington Public Library in the Youth Services Department and I really love it! I'm often in our department's office (behind the scenes and at my desk), so I really enjoy the times I get to interact with our library users. Because of scheduling conflicts with some of our children's librarians, I've recently had the opportunity to conduct a weekly storytime for a rotating visiting group of local Head Start preschoolers.
Since beginning to conduct storytimes at the APL, I again revisited the idea of starting my own blog to document, archive, and share my storytime programs. Generally, my programs are thematic and centered around one topic. They consist of sharing a variety of picture books and are enhanced with songs, fingerplays, rhymes, puppets, flannel board props, crafts, and more recently songs played on my soprano ukulele. I'm hoping that my blog can help other library professionals looking for inspiration and ideas for their own storytime programs, in addition to being a record of all the work I've been putting into planning and conducting these programs for me to search and consult in the future.
The inspiration for the name of this blog, BookWings, is a reflection of my personal philosophy towards books, information, and the institution of the American public library. As a child I grew up in an impoverished neighborhood which didn't have a public library to call its own. In addition to this, my parents didn't have the money to afford to buy new books for me and my younger sister. Despite these challenges, I became voracious reader with an insatiable appetite for books and information. Luckily, my mother worked just a few blocks from the Central Library of the Berkeley Public Library, and I always had free and open access to the books I needed to flourish educationally and personally. I strongly believe that I wouldn't be the person I am today without the open access that I had to public libraries as a kid, so I truly believe books and libraries are what gave me my wings to soar as an individual and as a participating member of society. The BPL's huge influence on my life was one of my main motivations for obtaining my MLIS, and why I continue to pursue youth librarianship today.
I'm a living example of the good that public libraries do in their communities, and the power that they have to change and improve lives. I hope to use my storytime programs as a way to inspire the young people of today to love information and books as much as I do, and to highlight the public library as a fun, lively, and most-importantly, welcoming institution open to all.
Thank you for visiting BookWings!
