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Tuesday, January 29, 2013

Sign Up for February Programs Now!

It's almost February--don't forget to sign up for these great programs!  You can sign up in person at the library, by phone at 973-835-5044, by email at riverdalelibrarykids@nac.net, or online by clicking here.

Teen Movie Night
Wed. Feb. 6
5:30-7:45 p.m.

Come hang out with friends and enjoy popcorn and a movie.  With love in the air this month, we're showing "Valentine's Day" with Jennifer Garner.





















Teen Advisory Board
Thurs. Feb. 14
5-6 p.m.

Come discuss what you want your library to be like.

Teen Book Discussion Club
Wed. Feb. 20
6-7 p.m.

Enjoy a pizza party and chance to talk about what did and didn't like about the book of the month.  This month's book is Going Bovine by Libba Bray.  Free copies are available at the Circulation Desk.





















Teen Crocheting
Wed. Feb. 27
6-7 p.m.

Learn basic techniques to stay busy and warm this winter!  Yarn and hooks provided.

Monday, January 21, 2013

President Obama's Inauguration

Barack Hussein Obama was sworn in today, Martin Luther King Day, for his second term as the 44th president of the United States.  You can watch his inauguration speech here:





Sunday, January 20, 2013

Cool Websites

January doldrums?  Check out these cool links for awesome facts and photos!

Astronomy Picture of the Day:  This site from NASA features a different daily image of the universe with a brief explanation written by a profession astronomer.  Today's picture is this amazing ancient Greek sailing mechanism.  http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html



A.Word.A.Day.  Build vocabulary via daily e-mails or visits to the site.  Each week usually has a theme.  Can you guess what this week's is by these words: melancholy, sang-froid, seminal, lymphatic, and salivate?*  http://wordsmith.org/words/today.html

Bartlett's Familiar Quotations: This page on Bartleby has more than 11,000 quotes, searchable by subject, title, and author.  Need something to sum up this weather?  "Oh, the long and dreary Winter!  Oh, the cold and cruel Winter!" (Henry Wadsworth Longfellow)  http://www.bartleby.com/100/

Citation Machine:  Writing an essay and totally confused about the bibliography?  This excellent citation tool aims to make it so easy for students to cite their information, they virtually have no reason not to.  www.citationmachine.net

Cool Math:  Check it out for lessons and help with prealgebra, algebra, precalculus, and calculus, plus puzzles and games to keep your mind stimulated.  www.coolmath.com

How Stuff Works:  An explanation of how everything in the world functions, broken into categories like Adventure, Auto, and Entertainment.  Today's mind-blower?  Ten amazing things people's brains have done.  www.howstuffworks.com

On This Day in History:  Enter a date between 1800 and 2003 to discover the headlines of the day, top songs, average prices, and more.  The number one song on this date in 1900?  "Strike Up the Band" by A.B. Sterling. dmarie.com/timecap/final.asp

Snopes:  The site for urban legends, myths, folklore, and rumors.  Categories include Coca-Cola, Lost Legends, and 9/11.  A myth about Coke?  A tooth left in the stuff will not dissolve overnight.  www.snopes.com

Virtual Frog Dissection Kit:  Go virtual--save a frog!  From the Berkeley Lab, users can dissect Fluffy the Frog and learn more about animal biology.  http://froggy.lbl.gov/virtual/


*They're all words that come from body fluids--gross!




Tuesday, January 15, 2013

Martin Luther King Jr.'s Birthday/Just Like Martin

Today is the birthday of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.  Dr. King was born Martin Lewis King, Jr. in Atlanta, Georgia.  When he grew up, he changed his middle named to Luther in honor of the Protestant leader Martin Luther.  After graduating Morehouse College, King entered the ministry and Boston University where he received a PhD.  He received many awards for his nonviolent, direct-action approach in seeking equal civil rights for all Americans.  Time magazine celebrated him as the Man of the Year in 1963 for his leadership in the protests against segregation in Birmingham, Alabama.  On August 28, 1963, Dr. King addressed more than 200,000 Americans who gathered at a march in Washington, D.C. to protest racial inequality in the United States.  It was there that he made his famous "I Have a Dream" speech.  The following year he became the second black American to receive the Nobel Peace Prize.  On April 4, 1968, Dr. King was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee while fighting for the rights of that city's sanitation workers.  The United States observed a national mounring period of six days in memory of this great civil rights leader.  In 1983, Congress designated the third Monday in January as a federal holiday to honor his life and ideals.




For those interested in reading more about this period in history, check out Just Like Martin by Ossie Davis.  The year is 1963, and 14-year-old Isaac "Stone" Stone's father, Ike, won't let him travel with the rest of his church youth group from Alabama to the civil rights march in Washington.  His mother has just died, and his father worries that something will happen to the boy. Besides, ever since Ike came back from the Korean War filled with bitterness, he has kept a gun in the garage. He opposes his son's devotion to nonviolence and belittles his admiration of Martin Luther King.  When the church youth meeting room is bombed, killing two friends and maiming a third,  Stone organizes a children's march. Ultimately, these efforts and the assassination of President Kennedy force Ike to confront his feelings and support his son. 


This book is not available at Riverdale Public Library but can be requested through interlibrary loan by clicking here

 

Monday, January 7, 2013

January Teen Book Club/Looking for Alaska

Did you love The Fault in Our Stars by John Green?  Then don't forget to sign up for January's Teen Book Discussion Club, because this month we're reading Green's Looking for Alaska.  Currently number four on the New York Times Young Adult Best Sellers List, Looking for Alaska tells the story of Miles “Pudge” Halter.  Miles is done with his safe life at home, feeling his whole life has been one big non-event.  Craving adventure, he heads off to the sometimes crazy and anything-but-boring world of Culver Creek Boarding School, and his life becomes the opposite of safe. Because down the hall is Alaska Young. The gorgeous, clever, funny, sexy, self-destructive, screwed up, and utterly fascinating Alaska Young.  She is an event unto herself.  She pulls Miles into her world and then steals his heart. And after that, nothing is ever the same.

Looking for Alaska was the winner of the Michael L. Printz Award, and American Library Assocation Best Book for Young Adults, a Los Angeles Times 2005 Book Prize Finalist, a 2005 Booklist Editor's Choice, and a 2005 School Library Journal's Best Best Book of the Year.

Come see what all the praise is about Wed. Jan. 16. from 6-7 p.m.  Don't forget to register.  You can register by in person at the library, by phone at 973-835-5044, by email at riverdalelibrarykids@nac.net, or online by clicking here.







Wednesday, January 2, 2013

New Books for January!

Look for these new books coming soon to Riverdale Public Library!

Dodger by Terry Pratchett:  A storm. Rain-lashed city streets. A flash of lightning. A scruffy lad sees a girl leap desperately from a horse-drawn carriage in a vain attempt to escape her captors. Can the lad stand by and let her be caught again? Of course not, because he's . . . Dodger.  Seventeen-year-old Dodger may be a street urchin, but he gleans a living from London's sewers, and he knows a jewel when he sees one. He's not about to let anything happen to the unknown girl—not even if her fate impacts some of the most powerful people in England.  From Dodger's encounter with the mad barber Sweeney Todd to his meetings with the great writer Charles Dickens and the calculating politician Benjamin Disraeli, history and fantasy intertwine in a breathtaking account of adventure and mystery.  


Etiquette and Espionage by Gail Carriger:  It's one thing to learn to curtsy properly. It's quite another to learn to curtsy and throw a knife at the same time. Welcome to Finishing School.  Fourteen-year-old Sophronia is a great trial to her poor mother. Sophronia is more interested in dismantling clocks and climbing trees than proper manners--and the family can only hope that company never sees her atrocious curtsy. Mrs. Temminnick is desperate for her daughter to become a proper lady. So she enrolls Sophronia in Mademoiselle Geraldine's Finishing Academy for Young Ladies of Quality. But Sophronia soon realizes the school is not quite what her mother might have hoped. At Mademoiselle Geraldine's, young ladies learn to finish...everything. Certainly, they learn the fine arts of dance, dress, and etiquette, but the also learn to deal out death, diversion, and espionage--in the politest possible ways, of course. Sophronia and her friends are in for a rousing first year's education.  
 
The Cavendish Home for Boys and Girls by Claire Legrand: Victoria hates nonsense. There is no need for it when your life is perfect. The only smudge on her pristine life is her best friend Lawrence. He is a disaster—lazy and dreamy, shirt always untucked, obsessed with his silly piano. Victoria often wonders why she ever bothered being his friend. (Lawrence does too.) But then Lawrence goes missing. And he’s not the only one. Victoria soon discovers that the Cavendish Home for Boys and Girls is not what it appears to be. Kids go in but come out…different. Or they don’t come out at all. If anyone can sort this out, it’s Victoria—even if it means getting a little messy.


Under the Never Sky by Veronica Rossi:  Since she’d been on the outside, she’d survived an Aether storm, she’d had a knife held to her throat, and she’d seen men murdered. This was worse.  Exiled from her home, the enclosed city of Reverie, Aria knows her chances of surviving in the outer wasteland—known as The Death Shop—are slim. If the cannibals don’t get her, the violent, electrified energy storms will. She’s been taught that the very air she breathes can kill her. Then Aria meets an Outsider named Perry. He’s wild—a savage—and her only hope of staying alive.  A hunter for his tribe in a merciless landscape, Perry views Aria as sheltered and fragile—everything he would expect from a Dweller. But he needs Aria’s help too; she alone holds the key to his redemption. Opposites in nearly every way, Aria and Perry must accept each other to survive. Their unlikely alliance forges a bond that will determine the fate of all who live under the never sky. 

Pure by Julianna Baggott:  Pressia barely remembers the Detonations or much about life during the Before. In her sleeping cabinet behind the rubble of an old barbershop where she lives with her grandfather, she thinks about what is lost--how the world went from amusement parks, movie theaters, birthday parties, fathers and mothers . . . to ash and dust, scars, permanent burns, and fused, damaged bodies. And now, at an age when everyone is required to turn themselves over to the militia to either be trained as a soldier or, if they are too damaged and weak, to be used as live targets, Pressia can no longer pretend to be small. Pressia is on the run.  There are those who escaped the apocalypse unmarked: Pures. They are tucked safely inside the Dome that protects their healthy, superior bodies. Yet Partridge, whose father is one of the most influential men in the Dome, feels isolated and lonely. Different. He thinks about loss--maybe just because his family is broken; his father is emotionally distant; his brother killed himself; and his mother never made it inside their shelter. Or maybe it's his claustrophobia: his feeling that this Dome has become a swaddling of intensely rigid order. So when a slipped phrase suggests his mother might still be alive, Partridge risks his life to leave the Dome to find her.  When Pressia meets Partridge, their worlds shatter all over again.
Every Day by David Levithan:  Every day a different body. Every day a different life. Every day in love with the same girl.   There’s never any warning about where it will be or who it will be. A has made peace with that, even established guidelines by which to live: Never get too attached. Avoid being noticed. Do not interfere.  It’s all fine until the morning that A wakes up in the body of Justin and meets Justin’s girlfriend, Rhiannon. From that moment, the rules by which A has been living no longer apply. Because finally A has found someone he wants to be with—day in, day out, day after day. 


The Miseducation of Cameron Post by Emily M. Danforth: When Cameron Post’s parents die suddenly in a car crash, her shocking first thought is relief. Relief they’ll never know that, hours earlier, she had been kissing a girl. But that relief doesn’t last, and Cam is soon forced to move in with her conservative aunt Ruth and her well-intentioned but hopelessly old-fashioned grandmother. She knows that from this point on, her life will forever be different. Survival in Miles City, Montana, means blending in and leaving well enough alone (as her grandmother might say), and Cam becomes an expert at both. Then Coley Taylor moves to town. Beautiful, pickup-driving Coley is a perfect cowgirl with the perfect boyfriend to match. She and Cam forge an unexpected and intense friendship—one that seems to leave room for something more to emerge. But just as that starts to seem like a real possibility, ultrareligious Aunt Ruth takes drastic action to “fix” her niece, bringing Cam face-to-face with the cost of denying her true self—even if she’s not exactly sure who that is. 
 
 
Grace, Gold, and Glory: My Leap of Faith by Gabrielle Douglas: In the 2012 London Olympics, US gymnast Gabrielle Douglas stole hearts and flew high as the All-Around Gold Medal winner, as well as acting as a critical member of the US gold-medal-winning women gymnastics team. In this personal autobiography, Gabrielle tells her story of faith, perseverance, and determination, demonstrating you can reach your dreams if you let yourself soar.

Tuesday, January 1, 2013