Day Two - Overall

We made it! Margaret and I finally got back tonight just before 7 safe and sound!

It was another great day! Same great company, no rain (which I do like, but nice not to walk in it), and some more interesting sessions!

It was really interesting attending this conference with a focus on families and reading. ALA and CLA have so much to cover overall - academic / business / public libraries - all of the many things we do and facets of ours service library programming / new directions - staying relevant / programming. It was very exciting to focus on the people and "the book."

It was very inspirational (hearing speakers like Wes Moore), exciting (new ideas - like play kits to go with stories), informative (staggering stats about brain and language development - 1950 - avg. 1st grader 4,000 words vs. 1999 avg. 1st grader 1,000 words), and motivating (we are the people who can make the change!).

Today we went through the exhibits and gained some good info -

- contact with our scholastic representative Barbara (offered to bring free donations to us! - and offered us to sign up for a program with discounts and free shipping)
- parenting resources (a distributor)- some neat stuff (games Margaret found), some good books on brain development, brain development flashcards, and some great book titles
- Aztec - has a really neat booth set up (sending info about their display)
- Poster sessions - I spoke with "Raising a Reader" a national program who has been working with a group of evaluators to develop an evaluation program (which works with an excel table).

There program is about book bags that expose children to 100 books, focusing on children ages 0-6.

I asked - the different evaluators had grants already and worked with this group for free. evaluators mainly include - Pacific Consulting Group, Universities, and their "online data collection tool" was developed by sociometrics. I think the big thing the groups did was help to develop questions (how often do you read with your child at night) and the consulting groups / sociometrics figured out how to get data entered where needed. There wasn't a lot in the way of details being offered, but I thought any info. data collection would help with any upcoming grant reporting with "Welcome baby".

Sessions today

"Picture This! Picture Books and Literacy in Child centered Settings"
A

Relationships between Parents Literacy Skills and their Children's Emergent Literacy Skills)
B+

Once Upon a Tim - The Importance of Storytelling
B+

Again, I'll do individual posts and attach my notes, should you want more detail. I appreciate the chance to collect info. and hope it's as helpful to any interested as it was to me.

Thank you!