Picture Book Extravaganza!

This weekend, Kristen, Sue and Kristie got together at the Picture Book Extravaganza which was held at the Wright State University's Dunbar Library.  This annual event is a chance for librarians in the area to get together and see many of the latest picture books, readers, board books, etc and spend time reading and discussing the new materials.

Kristen, Sue and Kristie - the Library Village!

This all day event is a great opportunity for the librarians in the area to network.  At this year's event, there were multiple copies of 160 new books arranged in these categories

• Beginning Readers
• Biographies and Social Studies
• Folklore, Poetry and Fine Arts
• Holidays and Seasons
• Math and Science
• Fiction for Babies, Toddlers and Preschoolers
• Fiction for preschool- grade 3
• Books for grades 4+
• Pop ups, board and novelty books.

We were able to spend our day taking a few books at a time to our seat to read and review.  A meeting room was available for open discussion on our favorites.

There were also breakout sessions!  This year was 'Hands On Art II' where we got to try our hand at watercolor, pastel and cut paper collage techniques which are used in some of the picture books we read.

This was our collage work based on the sample by Henri Matisse.  There is a picture book biography about him this year.

The Degas pastel sample freaked us out a little - because it looked seriously hard.  Kristie decided to model her pastel on the book Unicorn Thinks He's Pretty Great.  I think her picture was pretty great!  That's another colleague in the village, Stacie, who was with us today.

I chose to do my pastel on the book Sing (Sing a Song).  I adore this book!  My smudging technique could have used work, but we really had only 10 minutes at each table.

We won't share our watercolors based on Georgia O'Keefe.  We'll just pretend they were so awesome that we wouldn't want to embarrass anyone.  (OK, so we are the embarrassed ones)

We really had a great day and recommend it for any librarian in the Dayton region.  Send us an email if you'd like to get on the mailing list for next year.  This was my second year attending and it really is a fun, inexpensive and worthwhile day.

Oh and one more thing!  There are some GREAT door prizes!  Kristen and I both won goodie bags this year!  Here's most of my cache.  Kristen's bag was different but I am sure she had tons of great stuff too.

Anyway, just sharing something different from our usual story time posts.  I hope that if you have anything like this happening in your area, that you take advantage of it.  The world of youth librarians is pretty small and I am sure there are many opportunities to bump into one another.  Next up for us is the PLA in Indianapolis.  Hope to see you there!