Check out these great book trailers created by students in Chris Pastro's class and posted by Robert Michalove on the Randy Smith Middle School Library Weebly.  
What fun!!                                                                                                                 Katie

Some of you may have read about this website in Jacque Petersen's weekly post. I spent a little time looking around in the site and I think abookandahug.com would be a great link from your home pages. The sites author/owner is a children's bookseller/librarian/parent/grandparent all rolled into one. Her page on Books for Boys has some new tips and categories worth investigating and she is developing a Books for Girls page. She also has a page of videos from her TV program, Books Alive, where she interviews authors. And I really liked the number of "If you like xxxxxx" links for those patrons who have read an entire series and need suggestions as to where to go next. My only complaint was in Firefox, on my screen, some of the text spilled over from the white background to a darker background and was a little difficult to read.  Check it out for yourself though!                 Katie

Share this NPR feature by Robert Kruwich which includes information and a video demonstrating a most clever device designed by a team at Harvard.  Young and old alike will marvel at it and hopefully some may feel challenged to figure out just how it works!! Be sure to check out the link in the article to OTHER great little videos of Newtonian wonders.                 Katie

Hosted by the American Museum of Natural History, the Hayden Planetarium website includes a space show,  a digital universe which is a 3-D atlas and a blog with ongoing sky reports.

Just when you thought you'd seen it all out comes a new product!  Some of us are still learning about the value and charm of PlayAways... the little books-on-tape cleverly disguised as an MP3 player. Well, the same company has just released the PlayAway View, a small handheld device looking very much like an iPod Touch which will hold 3 to 6 or so videos preselected by the company. I was  surprised to delve further and discover that the videos seem to be selected by vendor so there is one with six videos from TumbleBooks, another with three from National Geographic in the Amazing Planet series, another with four American History videos from Schlessinger and yet another with nine videos on animal habitats from 100% Educational. So quality sources and topics that seem to be grouped by theme. The prices appear to range from $90 to $120 each.  The group I was looking at were being marketed for libraries and appeared to be primarily for the elementary level. Let's keep an eye out for reviews and be thinking about if, how and where these might be useful for our patrons.               Katie

For all those Wimpy Kid fans in your midst here is a contest, running from May 10 to June 10.  It's a do-it-yourself comic contest!! What fun and what a great way to start the summer.                                     Katie

For someone we've all heard so much about, there are few biographies about her. Intended for young readers, these biographies do what a good picture book is supposed to do: inform, entertain, and nourish the reader. Please check out the article from the New York Times that follows: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/15/books/review/childrens-books-about-jane-goodall.html?_r=1

There is also an associated video. Enjoy! Jim