Johnson Public Library: 2016

Thursday, December 1, 2016

Keeping the programs rolling throught the coldest months of the year!

Check out

the latest calendar

for after-school programs!

It is shaping up to be a mighty cozy January!

All are invited to help us make a Gingerbread Village!

Tuesday, November 22, 2016

Library provides means for escape

Whether you're traveling this Thanksgiving or staying home, gathering with family or dining alone, it may be wise to think ahead and bring a plan for escape. There is so much planning and preparation for a big feast day, and even the most delightful of family get togethers can bring a special kind of stress. But-aha!- the library has something for each and everyone of you that is guaranteed to diminish the stress of the holiday season- books! They're the instant escape hatch, providing everything you need to disappear into a world with no dirty dishes. And we've got tons of them, from page-turning mysteries to literary memoirs and everything in between. We stay very up to date on the latest installment of all the best selling authors (James Patterson, John Grisham, Jodi Picoult, Louise Penny, Janet Evanovich, Liane Moriarty, Sandra Brown and more), as well as those winning awards and gaining accolades from Kirkus, NPR, and Booklist. So hurry up and pop into the library for a last minute escape option- because our holiday hours will be limited!

Thanksgiving Holiday Hours at the Library:
Wednesday, 11/23: Open from 11-2pm (no storytime in the morning)
Thursday, 11/24: Closed
Friday 11/25: Closed
Saturday 11/26 open 10-1pm

Thursday, October 20, 2016

And a little dash of magic...

Kids who love SUSHI

TODAY WE LEARNED HOW TO MAKE OUR OWN NORI ROLLS IN THE CRAFT-ROOM-TURNED-KITCHEN, RIGHT HERE AT THE JOHNSON PUBLIC LIBRARY.

The kids were PUMPED.

We brought the sushi outside to eat (upon the pottery they made for just such an occasion), drank hot tea, and had a little party in the golden leaves and sunshine.

Deeelish.

Tuesday, September 13, 2016

The Fall Calendar of Fun and Free Youth Programs!

Wednesday, August 31, 2016

Storytime Calendar for September and October!

Storytime is coming back, Storytime is coming back- Hip Hip Hooray!
Well folks, next week will be the start of a new era of Storytimes at the library. As we bid farewell to the dearest dear Ms. Pam, and wished our preschool and kindergarten friends good luck as they move up in the world, we will start our new era of storytimes with some serious MOVIN' & SHAKIN' & WILD ADVENTURING with Ms. Becca! Check out the new Storytime calendar for September and October above, and prepare yourselves for a fun-filled hour next week with the theme JOURNEY: Run, Walk, Skip, Hop, Fly, Row- LET'S GO! We we journey far and wide through a few amazing books and across all kinds of terrain, using our bodies to balance across fallen logs, roll down squishy hills, weave through tall grasses, crawl through dark tunnels- and we might even see a bear- all without leaving the library! Becca will use her years of experience teaching gymnastics- plus a few key pieces of equipment- to start the fall storytimes with a bang!

**and PS: stay tuned for the calendar of after school youth programs soon!**

Wednesday, August 24, 2016

ICE CREAM PARTY!!!

Friday, August 12, 2016

PHENOMENON: 92,355 MINUTES READ BY KIDS IN OUR SUMMER READING PROGRAM!

Greetings, folks! I wanted to take a moment to brag about all the voracious little readers in our community, as this year's Summer Reading Program at Johnson Public Library was OFF THE CHARTS. With close to 90 kids between the ages of 3-18 signing up this year, we embarked upon the 2016 Summer Reading Olympics, combining a ton of incentives for reading and exercise, as well as 2 or 3 crafty workshops and outdoor sporting events each week. At the library, the three of us librarians continually found ourselves inspired, awed and validated by the troops of kids crowding our little library, simply beaming with pride as they announced the number of tickets they earned the past week (1 ticket equals 15 minutes of reading or 15 minutes of exercise). In total, we gave out OVER 6,000 tickets for reading alone!
Let's put that number into perspective:
6,157 tickets.
= 92,355 minutes read by children in our community.
That makes 1,539.25 hours, or 64 straight days (and nights) of reading.

It's AWESOME.

As for exercise, we had one family in particular who rode their bicycles EVERYWHERE they went this summer- whether it was to come to the library for a program or to trek over to the Hyde Park playground, and each of the 3 kids in the family earned 258 tickets for exercise- which equals 3,870 minutes! Super inspiring.

The kids were divided into 4 teams upon signing up by using the "Sorting Wheel of Fate" (shout out to Harry Potter fans), and they all enjoyed seeing their team's progress on our giant bar graph which tracked and tallied ticket totals. The bar graph grew and grew and GREW all summer, climbing up the wall, stretching across the ceiling, and starting to make it's way down the opposite wall. Check it out next time you're in the library- we will keep it up for a few more weeks! In the end, it was a VERY close race, but the orange team climbed ahead from last place, and took the gold! We had planned an ice cream party for the winning team, but after all was said and done, we were so awestruck by ALL the kids participating in the program, that we decided to open the invitation to the ice cream party to ALL kids who participated in the summer reading program. And thanks to a quick last-minute grant, we are able to provide ice cream for about 60 people- woohoo! The ice cream party is scheduled for Friday, 8/26 at 2pm.

For now, we are all recovering from the super fun summer mayhem, preparing for a super fun fall program. Stay tuned!

Thursday, June 30, 2016

Magical Broom Making was a blast!

Tuesday, May 17, 2016

We were awarded a grant for many new Audiobooks!

Well, it’s no secret that reading improves people’s minds, but have you heard the about the studies proving that reading actually improves people’s lives as well?

Studies show that people who read are more likely to vote,exercise and be more cultural. Reading literary fiction has been proven to enhance a person’s empathy and ability to understand others. Reading improves your memory and wards off Alzheimer’s disease, improves one’s writing abilities, and is more impacting on children’s cognitive development than their parents’ level of education.

And most people know that listening to audiobooks is quite fun and entertaining. Many folks are aware of audiobooks being used in schools as an aid for struggling readers or kids with differing learning styles. Audiobooks allow the listener to retain their visualization skills without the task of “decoding” the words on the page and losing the meaning. HOWEVER! Recent studies (and trend) indicate that listening to an audiobook can be a helpful way for anyone to access and enjoy the powerful benefits of reading books. New research shows that reading and listening are strikingly similar cognitive processes, proving that the benefits of reading can be transferred to listening to books. Additionally, audiobooks enable a child to listen to books above his or her current reading level, providing a cognitive bridge to more advanced ideas and thinking.

So… SHABAM, right?

I bring all this up as a way to introduce the very exciting bit of news that your very own public librarians have really got your back. Our audiobook collection for kids and teens has been woefully understocked, and we decided it was high time to do something about it. In order to keep our book collection vital and up-to-date, the budget for our collection is used primarily for books, with less opportunity to add to our audiobook collection as they are significantly more expensive and would dramatically eat into our book budget. Which is why we decided to ask good old Ben and Jerry for some help! We wrote and were awarded a grant from the Ben and Jerry’s Foundation for $750 to spend exclusively on audiobooks for the kid’s and teen’s collection! We were able to purchase 34 new books on cd, all of which are ready and waiting to be checked out at Johnson Public Library. (Full list is forthcoming)

And with this fabulous influx of audiobooks to the collection, we truly feel it will be possible to keep the audiobooks rolling in (1 or 2 a month) in order to continue to build the collection at a doable rate.

And now for the list:

Children’s and Middle Grade Titles:

The entire series of “Percy Jackson and the Olympians” by Rick Riordan