Tag Archives: child rearing

Follow us on Pinterest

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Pinterest! It’s all the rage lately, and we’re happy to finally be joining in the fun!

If you haven’t already  stumbled into the Pinterest craze, let me fill you in: Pinterest is basically an online set of your own, personalized and organized bulletin boards. Think of it this way: do you tend to clip pictures and articles out of magazines, or recipes, or newspaper articles then save them to be lost forever in a drawer? Pinterest is a way to organize these things for yourself and to browse what others are clipping, or pinning.

The vast array of ideas people are finding are evident everywhere! Just this week someone asked me about some garlic monkey bread I brought to a potluck dinner. When asked where I found the recipe, I responded simply, “Pinterest.”

Now your favorite library (that’s us!) is on Pinterest, too! Find us at pinterest.com/pgtpl. We’ve got pin boards for movies, music, and books we love, as well as boards for money saving, John Green stuff, tech tips & tricks… the list goes on, and just keeps growing! We invite you to follow us and enjoy our pins, and we’ll follow you back so we can enjoy your favorite things, too 🙂

Check out a few of our pinteresting Pinterest boards…

Every Child is an Artist!

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Every Child is an Artist!

There’s an art wall by the project table in the Children’s Room, where kids can always find supplies to sit down and make something creative. They can take their projects home, leave them to display, or make two, one to take and one to display.

The projects that go on the table are great for tactile learners and creative kids. They all support one of more of the five practices of the Every Child Ready to Read Initiative of the American Library Association.

The leaf project was to decorate a paper leaf with colorful paper bits. It’s amazing how different they were from each other! It tied in with the Writing aspect of the initiative. Picking up the mosaic bits and working with a glue stick helps develop the fine motor skills needed to write, and reading and writing go hand in hand.

 There’s a lot to do in the Children’s Room these days. When kids visit the library they can CREATE (project table,) DO (crawl through the giant caterpillar, play a board game,) READ (book, magazine,) PLAY WITH (train table, computers,) LISTEN TO (snuggle up with together on a cozy couch,) or ATTEND something (a library program- see what there is for your child!).
~Jan

Tales of a Library-aholic

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Michelle Peltier

Hello all. I’m Michelle, and I’m a Library-aholic. 

I have loved coming to the library since I was young. I remember walking into the old children’s room and seeing Paula Gilmour’s smiling face at the desk. I remember the yellow and orange paint. I remember picking out Mary Poppins to watch with my grandma. The library was always a fun place when I was little.

Fast forward to 2007…I just moved back to Plainfield after an out-of-state move. I was a new mom, new wife, and moving home after being away for six years was a little scary. I began stopping by the library as often as I could because it felt familiar, even though the building, staff, and I had changed. I took comfort in knowing that I could learn something new every time I checked out a book: from trying to figure out how to raise a kid, to learning about how to deal with financial stress, to figuring out how to cook dinner without making something from a box every night.

I have been jealous of my friend Laura Brack, the PPL Tech Goddess, because of her library gig she started over 10 years ago. In October 2010, Laura informed me of a 12 hour per week job opening in Youth Services, so I jumped at the chance to interview even though I was already working 40 to 50 hours per week. I scored the position, started in November 2010, and continued to work my full time job and part time at the library until the day before I gave birth to my youngest son. After I came back to work from maternity leave, I left my full time job and took the Librarian’s Assistant position in area T. I now work primarily with the YA fiction collection.

Even though I work at the library, I still bring my kids in on my days off. I feel like it’s important to instill a respect and admiration for libraries, learning, and play. I love reading to my oldest son at bedtime, and I hope to add my youngest to our book club when he’s old enough to not chew on the books when he sees them.

And even though I’m busy with two kids under the age of four, a husband, a dog, a job, a garden, I could go on…I still make myself read every day. I think if one stops reading, one stops learning, and that’s important enough to me to keep on.

~Michelle