Monthly Archives: May 2016

Parents have a hard enough job without having to worry about the dreaded summer slide. “Summer slide” is the tendency for students to lose some of the achievements they gained during the previous school year. But, there’s good news! Your public library is filled with great resources and programs to help combat that slide and it’s totally free! One such resource, BookFlix, is a personal favorite.

BookFlix is an online literature resource that pairs picturebooks with a nonfiction counterpart. Each fiction/nonfiction pair is divided into one of nine categories: animals and nature, earth and sky, family and community, people and places, music and rhyme, ABC’s and 1, 2, 3’s, adventure, imagination, and celebrations. The homepage always spotlights a featured pair of books which coordinate with seasonal events.

Each pair of books contains five elements to explore. “Watch the story” allows the user to view the animated version of the picturebook, with closed-captioning and read-along options available. “Read the book” focuses on nonfiction content related to the picturebook, where children and adults can either read the story together, or the child can select the read along option to hear the text read aloud. There is a game section located under “Puzzlers”. “Word Match” reinforces the vocabulary introduced in the two stories. Finally, “Fact or Fiction” helps to show the differences between the two book categories. Each pair will also contain a “Meet the Author” and “Explore the Web” section. All links provided through BookFlix have been specially reviewed and contain age-appropriate content.

Parents can benefit from other features, including lesson plans, state and national curriculum correlations, some Spanish Language versions, and an educator’s guide that provides suggestions and tips for parent/child interactions.

With wonderful tools such as BookFlix, avoiding the dreaded “summer slide” just got a bit easier!

Currently there is not an app available, however, the website can be accessed and run through your tablet’s internet browser.

– Gabrielle Bolland, Robinson Township Public Library

Because I spend the bulk of my time in Adult Services, I was determined to reacquaint myself with an electronic resource for kids for this week’s entry. I played around with several interactive children’s resources and finally decided on the TumbleBook Library. Why, you ask? Well, here’s the deal:  TumbleBook Library is easy!

It’s like this

And like this:

And BAM! The kid is like this:

Don’t get me wrong. I’m a librarian, I love the search capabilities of OverDrive, but sometimes our patrons don’t need that. They don’t always have time to login, search, evaluate, and borrow a title for their close-to-melting-down child. What that child needs is story time, and since libraries don’t offer story time 24/7, TumbleBook Library is the next best thing.

TumbleBook Library offers multiple genres and story time features. Kids can follow along with the story, they can read it themselves with an interactive screen, or they can just sit back and enjoy a virtual story time. While it can’t offer all the same benefits of one-on-one story time, TumbleBook Library is a close second. Patrons can utilize the “playlist” feature for theme-based book packs or build their own specific to a child’s preferences. And, when the kids get tired of reading (does one get tired of reading?) there are games based on books in the TumbleBook Library. Again, it’s so simple, even a child can do it!

At the risk of sounding like the anti-librarian, I think we forget that sometimes. We offer complex resources with the ability to drill down to a single item when we only have a nugget of information. But, that isn’t always what our patrons need. Frequently, they are looking for a quick library fix. Yeah, we’ve got that too!

–Alexis Rittenberger, Northland Public Library