reading Archives – Page 12 of 17 – Spokane County Library District

Five early reader books for fall school jitters

Posted in kids, Parents and Teachers on August 28, 2018 at 6:00 am

By Sheri Boggs Most of us are not strangers to the first-day-of-school jitters—that delightful mix of excitement and mild apprehension as one contemplates what the new school year might bring. Such a feeling has as much to do with our need to connect and to be accepted as it does with our need to discover […]

How to Identify a Dragon

Posted in Explore and Discover, kids, Parents and Teachers, Teens on August 21, 2018 at 6:00 am

by Caitlin Wheeler When I was young, I loved C. S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia. I especially loved The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, a book that, in my eight-year-old estimation, had everything a book ought to: quests, nightmares, magic spells, enchanted islands, warrior mermaids, anthropomorphized stars, and of course, dragons. Eustace Claren […]

The Great American Read book list and half-time report

Posted in Explore and Discover on August 7, 2018 at 6:00 am

By Dana Mannino Welcome to August—a great time for a summer reading half-time report! My summer reading looked a lot like this picture of the bulletin board in the staff break room at Spokane Valley Library. Waaaay back in May, PBS launched The Great American Read, a program that highlights 100 of America’s beloved books […]

Happy birthday! A reading list of authors with July birthdays

Posted in Explore and Discover on July 17, 2018 at 6:00 am

By Nathaniel Youmans This one’s for all you with summer birthdays out there. Remember in grade school when the end of the year drew close and teachers, even more burnt out than their students, had to find some reason (summon the willpower) to celebrate students with summer birthdays? At my elementary school, this took the […]

Tags: authors, birthdays, books, fiction, poetry, poets, reading

Road trip! The quintessential American vacation

Posted in Explore and Discover on July 3, 2018 at 6:00 am

by Melissa Rhoades Have you heard of Horatio Nelson Jackson? This under-celebrated trailblazer was the first person to drive an automobile across the U.S. In 1903, ten years before Ford Motor Company began mass producing cars, Jackson left San Francisco in a two-cylinder Winton with a mechanic as his travel companion and a $50 bet […]

Adult reads for Pride Month

Posted in Explore and Discover on June 21, 2018 at 6:00 am

by Caitlin Wheeler June is LGBT Pride Month in the U.S. and the time to spotlight LGBTQ artists and thinkers who might otherwise remain hidden in library stacks. As you may know, the library is an advocate for equitable access and for fundamental values that include equity, diversity, and inclusion and the protection of intellectual […]

The dog days of summer

Posted in kids, Parents and Teachers on June 19, 2018 at 6:00 am

By Sheri Boggs The hot, sticky afternoons of late July through August are typically called “the dog days of summer.” It’s that time when the only thing that sounds good for dinner is gazpacho, and even grownups without kids consider a visit to the neighborhood swimming pool. To the ancient Greeks and Egyptians, the dog […]

Pounce-worthy feline books

Posted in Explore and Discover on June 13, 2018 at 6:00 am

by Dana Mannino Need a great book for a cat lover? You might naturally gravitate towards heartwarming nonfiction works like Dewey and Strays, or others that include fictional cats. But have you considered a picture book? The cat lover in your life may have aged out of the target demographic for picture books years ago, […]

Young adult booklist for Pride Month

Posted in Parents and Teachers, Teens on June 11, 2018 at 6:00 am

by Caitlin Wheeler As I wrote about in a previous blog that spotlighted children’s books, June is LGBTQ Pride Month. You can learn more about Pride Month and LGBTQ representation in that post. For adult titles, check out my Pride Month blog on that as well. Here, I’m recommending some great young adult (YA) literature […]

Confession of a librarian mom: Reading and summer slide

Posted in Explore and Discover, kids, Parents and Teachers on June 5, 2018 at 6:00 am

By Gwendolyn Haley Last summer my family was busy with summer activities: camps, road trips, and camping vacations. We planned highly educational and enriching activities for our youngest daughter, but we did not make reading a high priority. When she started school in the fall, her teacher told me that she had definitely lost ground […]

TAG: reading