Books, Glorious Books!
Would anyone care to guess how many items we have checked out from the Minneapolis Public Library system in the past year? Last fall our library system introduced a feature that allows users to track what they’ve checked out when they log into their accounts. I checked today, and my history tracks back just a couple days more than a year…
…And including the almost 30 items we checked out today, we checked out 645 items! It seems like a lot, but it’s only an average of 12 per week. While we don’t make it to the library every week, our check out receipt usually lists 15-20 items, so I guess that all adds up. I would estimate that maybe 25% of those items were books for me, music CDs, movies, or educational computer games. That means we read close to 500 children’s books from the library in the past year or so.
Many times we just find books off the shelves, looking for topics or titles that sound good or books from authors we know we enjoy. I’ve also used a few other sources to find great books to read. The book lists from Sonlight’s preschool curriculums and The “Before Five in A Row” and the “Five in a Row” series of books have many great titles. Several websites also compile lists of favorite children’s books:
New York Public Library’s “100 Picture Books Everyone Should Know”
“The 100 Best Children’s Books” at Parenthood.com
Kidsreads.com “Classic Picture Books” list and “New Faves for Ages 3-8” list.
While I haven’t used them very much yet (so many books, so little time!), there are also several sources on the web to find lists of award-winning children’s litereature. For example, this Children’s Book Awards page lists the most recent few years of winners of several different awards with convenient links to the books on amazon.com, while this page at the Scholastic website provides a basic list of winners of three of the most well-known awards through the years. The Database of Award Winning Children’s Literature can be used to search through award lists to find books meeting various criteria.
Happy reading!
Good stuff! Thanks Kirsten!
I love book lists because I am a total book junkie – I am in the library 4 days in a week! I would usually scour the library shelves and borrow books from authors from my days in college and high school — I would read contemporary authors like James Patterson or more classic ones like James Joyce. If you’re looking for book lists, I recommend this reading journal I found called “Read, Remember, Recommend” from http://www.bibliopages.com — it’s just this great little resource with Awards Lists (including the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, Los Angels Times Award for Fiction and National Book Award for Fiction), Notable lists (Oprah’s book club is one of them) and Author Pages. It’s really helped organize my reading. (I’ve finished half of the Awards list) Check it out – reading becomes so much more enjoyable with it. Now my reading has much more direction and I feel more well read.
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