Money Smart Week

Get your personal finances in-line this week. Here’s a tool which can help – Kiplinger’s Personal Finance magazine. Download it for free from our Zinio eMagazine collection.

How to Get Kids Reading

Parents, it’s up to you, not schools, to find books to get your kids reading. Here’s how James Patterson and his wife got their son to read:

This can often be as easy as teaching children to ride a two-wheeler or to throw a baseball. Case in point: When our son, Jack, was 8, he wasn’t a gung-ho reader. Now, I’m sure my wife, Sue, and I have made a half-million mistakes raising Jack, but during that eighth summer of our stewardship, we did something right: We told him he didn’t have to mow the lawn (hooray!), but he was going to read every day (boo).

We then told Jack we were going to help him find books we promised he would like: the Mom-and-Dad “Reading Can Be a Joy” Guarantee. We picked out “The Lightning Thief,” a book in the “Warriors” series, “A Wrinkle in Time,” “Al Capone Does My Shirts,” a novel from my own “Maximum Ride” series, and a few others. By the end of the summer, Jack had read half a dozen books that he loved, and his reading skills had improved dramatically.

Where do you find books your kids will gobble up?

ReadKiddoRead.com, GuysRead.com, and Oprah.com’s Kids Reading List are excellent resources, and they’re simpler to use than an iPhone. The American Library Association and the Young Adult Library Services Association have recommendations for terrific books, easily found by searching “ALA reading lists.” DropEverythingandRead.com has a “Favorite D.E.A.R. Books” tab on its home page.

Also check out our Hot Topic: Reading is Fun Just for Kids and Reading is Fun Just for Teens. Both are updated monthly with new reading suggestions.

Don’t forget our eMedia Catalog has eBooks for kids and teens.  Reading on an iPad or eReader may be just the spark your child needs to get reading.

Reference eBooks Available Online

Doing homework in your pajamas? Need information? Visit our online reference department  – Gale Virtual Reference Library and get the information you need. As a bonus we added search boxes for all the other information resources.  What’s cool? Search in one of the widgets, and you get  information from the resource and as an added bonus information on the subject from our other resources. Don’t have a library card from LVCCLD? Then download our app – Access My Library - available for Apple and Android devices and select one of our libraries as your ‘home library’. (You have to be within 10 miles of one of our libraries).  Once bookmarked you will have access anywhere.

WildFires, Disaster Relief & the Euro

Credo Reference Online has added three new Topic Pages this week reflecting current events happening around the world.

• Wildfire
• Disaster Relief
• Euro

Topic Pages provide background information on the topic as well as recent magazine and newspaper articles from a variety of other library resources.

Back-to-School Tool Kit: Access My Library App

Access library resources — even when you’re not at the library.
It’s as simple as using the AccessMyLibrary Public Edition mobile app for Gale databases available at the library. AccessMyLibrary uses GPS to find libraries within a 10-mile radius of your location, then gives you free, unlimited access to all the library’s Gale online resources   — without the need of a barcode and PIN!
Get the free AccessMyLibrary Public Edition mobile app for your device using one of the QR codes or links below.