Tonight from 6-7 pm, if you are between the ages 8-12 please join us for our reader's theater event, also known as "Cathy's Creativity Club". We're going to take some classic fairy tales and twist them up to make them our own. Then we'll act it out, either with puppets or with ourselves! Join me, its not too late!
If we actually get a video of it on the green screen I might have to put it up on the website. :)

Okay back to Open Hours. You can borrow one of our "green stickered" items and play with it in either the Make-A-Story Room or in the children's room. If you decide on something new, you can return it to the reference desk and get something new!
If you want to play with something a little more "serious" like our yellow or red stickered items, you can fill out a form that lets you know you are responsible if something breaks while you are playing with it. You can also get trained to use our 3d printer and cricut machine. With the 3d printer you have to pay for the wire we use and for the cricut machine you have to bring in your own supplies.
Any questions, just ask!

It occurred to me at some point that blogging regularly at the beginning of the week over blogging regularly at the end of the week makes way more sense. If I was going to tell you everything that was going on this week, it would make more sense to tell you before it happened rather than after it happened.
That's okay though. Only took me a year to think about that. :)

So like now I can tell you that this week's storytime theme is YETIS!
We had our Toddler Time (2-3 years) today at 10am, but we still have Tuesday at 10am for Preschoolers and Thursday at 10am for everyone. Join us! Its a blast and this week you can find out "Are We There Yeti?" 
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And today we are going to have Minecraft at 6pm. We are still having a blast with Minecraft, so I say come join us!

Tonight is our first monthly Makerspace open hours! Play with Miss Jill with all of our gadgets. Build, create and play. What could be more fun? 

... oh technology. I had written a lovely post and you then managed to disappear into the ether...
So tonight was technology night. We had some of our favorites out and some new things too. We had Osmo Monster and Dash the robot, but we also had a new portable green screen, Ozobots and Bloxels. What are some of the new technologies that you would like to see or learn about at the library? If I can't get it, I would still love to learn about it.
One of the technologies i would really like to learn about more, while its not new, its still really interesting to me. Podcasting. I really want to work out how to do a podcast. First I need to figure out the tools (I have gone to some training, so I have a list of the tools, just need to find the list) then I need to find the enthusiastic kids/teens that would like to express their interests. Then we need to find topics that would be easy to keep talking about and would be interesting to the general population. Easier said than done, I'm sure, but I am determined. I want to do it!
Any thoughts? Please, pretty please, let me know!

Somehow I managed to go a whole month without posting! ARGH. I want at least one of my resolutions to go on! My jogging resolution has fallen apart, but I have not yet given up. The winter is a horrible time to be a new year. I think we should make new year's resolutions when its spring (like real spring, not "my so called spring") because many of the things people make resolutions on NEED good weather. Things like cleaning, organizing, exercising, to name a few. Winter snow is not a great way to start those resolutions.
(^^^Picture above of me actually getting to sit for a moment on our trip.)

Anyways, I was away for one national conference, then a trip to Disney World (which was so busy during spring break) and finally a state conference once I got back from my vacation. PHEW! So much to take on so quickly, but so much fun and learning (I learned in Disney that I have some pretty awesome kids that I don't have to argue with too much)!

So one of my many favorite things that I learned was how to create easy and cheap engineering kits that we could let people check out and play with at home. It might take some time to get them started, but I think it could definitely be a fun addition to our Thursday Explore Your Imagination programs.

I also went to a program called Ditching Dewey, where they got rid of the number system that we all know and moved onto a new type of number/color system that makes sense to real people. That would be a HUGE time commitment, but I think a real useful one, because it would be way easier for you guys to find books.

So what do you guys think? Time to ditch dewey? :)

I love when I fall upon neat articles that encourage me to let my kids explore science and math more.
Kids can be citizen scientists too
In this article in the magazine Popular Science, they encourage kids (and adults) to be "citizen scientists". They say that just because you don't have a science background, you don't have to say no to playing and exploring. For example there is an app where people are studying birds and sending information to the Audubon Society, and the 1 millionth person to send information? ... A twelve year old!
This is where the library comes in! We have tons of science toys that you can learn new science things without even realizing that you're learning something! And this is NOT just for the kids. There is plenty of things for the teens and parents to play with too. We want you to let your citizen scientist mind to flourish as well!
On the second and fourth Tuesday from 2-3pm and the second and fourth Wednesday from 6-7pm we have an open house where you can play with all the goodies in our new makerspace!
On Thursdays from 5:45-6:45pm we explore our imagination in a more condensed format: 1st Legos, 2nd Engineering, 3rd Art, 4th Technology and 5th is a mystery (even to us sometimes)!

Now I've decided that my Girls Who Code club is officially here and officially awesome. Right now we have five girls (I am mad that our Buffalo girl wasn't here) and they were all absolutely fantastic. They gave me such enthusiasm and energy that I totally didn't want it to end. They were all so excited that we are going to work on creating a website.
The girls decided very quickly that the topic was going to be soccer and that part of it was going to be letting everyone know how many amazing female soccer players there are. *** I WANT YOU ALL TO KNOW *** Yes, our girls have started, but they are a very friendly group of girls and I know that they wouldn't mind having more people to join them. I'm just letting you know now that you must like popcorn and sour patch kids because I promised the girls that I would have some.
Also I want you all to know that you DO NOT need to know anything about coding, computers or creating websites. What you do need is to: 1. be a girl between 9-13 years and 2. be friendly and willing to make new friends!
Hope to see you there on February 7th at 6pm! (We meet the 1st and 3rd Wednesday every month.)
Happy Thursday everyone!

So first ... what do you think? Are schools going to be closed tomorrow? They do like to frighten us, don't they? However even if school isn't cancelled ... WOW! Just found out that Rush-Henrietta is closed tomorrow. So anyways, even if school is open make sure to wear nice warm mittens. 

Onto Girls Who Code. I was really excited and hopeful for the program. That girls would just flock to the library in order to be a part of this program. But no. Not yet. I am still very hopeful however. I think that with a little more advertising, it will be extremely popular.
We did have one girl who was in the library and we made her join us to learn about Girls Who Code and eat candy. We asked her to bring some of her friends and she said that she actually LIVES IN BUFFALO but comes to Chili because her knows and feels comfortable here. Miss Jill and two of our pages Miranda and Laura were in the room as well and you could hear and audible "awwwwww" driving that far to get to the library? That made the event totally worth it, even though the girl to lady ratio was definitely off. Oh well. A little advertising and a few more weeks and it will be awesome. I hope to see you there! WE HAVE CHOCOLATE!

So here we go ...

I decided that we needed to do a Girls Who Code club.
 
There are tons of articles in which they describe how there are far fewer women getting computer science degrees vs men, even though the need for people with those degrees has gone up. In this NPR article, Colleges Have Increased Women Computer Science Majors: What Can Google Learn?​  they discuss how one college changed things around to make women feel more comfortable in the program. So now, that one college is at about 50/50 with women/men, unlike many other colleges which are 20/80 women/men. With increasing job needs, we need more people, and women have lots to offer.

Then I listened to this episode of the NPR podcast Hidden Brain. The Edge of Gender. In it there was an interesting discussion based on a personal memo sent out by a Google employee on how women and men are inherently different and therefor it makes sense that there are so much less women in computer science.

How does that make you feel ladies? I know that there are differences between men and women and how they react to different situations, but each person could be useful no matter their gender.

This is a VERY long-winded way of saying that we really need to find a place where girls are comfortable coding and using computers without feeling insecure around the guys. Which is why I am doing this program.

I will let you know that my knowledge of coding is very limited. I know bits and pieces, but that's it. Plus I'm making Miss Jill and her daughter Laura participate in this (I know, you're surprised, aren't you?) and they claim to know even less.

This is my way of saying that we will learn together. We can teach each other together and become stronger people because of it.

So, if you are a girl between 10-16 and are available the 1st and 3rd Wednesdays at 6pm. I expect to see you there. There's a ton we can learn together. I just know it.