Oklahoma Librarian

  January has lived as the ward of Mr. Locke as long as she can remember in a house full of locked doors. With her coppery-red skin and unusual name, she lives an isolated, pampered life but dreams of exploring the world with her father who brings home artifacts and curiosities for Mr. Locke and his Archaeological Society. When her father suddenly disappears and the annual Society party takes a sinister turn, January knows she needs to escape. Her situation seems more hopeless than ever with her friends kept away, her loyal dog beaten, too many secrets and half truths, and January herself imprisoned in an asylum with only a book for company. What January needs is a way out—if she could only find a door. With determination, she will free herself and discover the power of words and names that transcend worlds. The Ten Thousand Doors of January is Alix E. Harrow's debut novel and it's a doozy. This is an amazing fantasy book with elements of historical fiction. Many characters in

I have recently made all of my scavenger hunts for one year and wanted to share them in case anyone needs ideas! I started doing these in April. They were so popular that I made two for the summer months since kids were coming in more often. If you are planning to start your own hunt, I'll describe what I do now after a few months of trail and error. I make all the designs in Canva. My library pays for a Pro account which makes it a lot easier to make these. I started off making these too small. We got so many complaints because they were too hard to find. I now make them about the size of my palm and give them a white background so it isn't as hard to find. I learned very quickly that we needed two sets of each theme. We had a few bunnies and weather clouds walk away which makes the hunt impossible to complete. We now have a extra set ready to go at our reference desk.  If you don't already have one, ask for a Cricut and the software that comes with it. It has made the pro

It's Dinovember! We created a super fun event with prehistoric activities, art projects, games, and more! This event was a lot of work but was well worth it. Set Up This took over a week to prep between myself and my colleague. We split tasks roughly down the middle and managed to get everything together in time! I put together a few decorations that will be up through the month. The first was our billboard. This was easy to put together compared to our more elaborate designs. Letters, boarder, dino, done. It looks great in space and I heard about a parent telling their child that dinosaurs indeed did not read and that they are dead because of it. The kid checked out a lot of books that day! Next is our follow the dino tracks passive program. This was simple in theory but took more time to put together than I thought. We purchased colorful masking tape and I did a bit of research on dinosaur tracks. I laminated everything and then taped a border around each picture before putting t

The Pokemon community never ceases to surprise me. I love Pokemon and have been following the games for years. I came up with a trading and playing event for kids that love all things Pokemon. The idea for this is very simple: have a space for Pokemon people to meet up and trade cards. That's all. Set up I held this event the day before Halloween so I purchased the new " Trick or Trade " booster packs. It had 50 packs and each pack and 3 cards. This was perfect for this event because every person got a fun pack to open. I was also fortunate to tell my Pokemon loving friends about this event and they gave me a ton of cards that I was able to give out.  I actually was going to go into this event with nothing but cards to hand out. However, I remembered that I'm a librarian and Pokemon books exist. As you can see in the pictures below, there area ton of Pokemon books. I also printed off 10 pages that had all 9 of the current generations of Pokemon. I put them on the wall