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Saving Money with Your Public Library

Written on: March 4th, 2010 in Blog Posts

This story caught our attention recently- all the way from Massachusetts’ Cape Gazette:

A library card can be a real money-saver, according to University of Delaware Cooperative Extension educators. A family that spends $12 for two DVD rentals, $6.99 for a paperback and $27 for the reference book a child needs for school in a month could be spending more than $500 a year unnecessarily.
“Don’t give up reading or movies; rather, discover all the free offerings that are as close as your local library,” says Maria Pippidis, a family and consumer science educator with University of Delaware Cooperative Extension. “A library card saves you from pulling those other cards – debit and credit cards – out of your wallet,” notes Pippidis. “If you haven’t been in a public library lately, you may not know about the wide range of print, audio and video items that can be checked out, free of charge.”

(more…)

It’s Thursday:Fiction reading as a learning tool?

Written on: March 4th, 2010 in Blog Posts, Learning, Learning Journeys, Reading

After zipping through 2 fiction titles in one week on my commute and zapping through 2 more over the weekend, I stopped and looked around. My fiction selections for the last few years have been confined to “reading with my ears” as I ride to and from work each day. But over the last few months even this has waned. So, what’s up? It’s the words. I am in need of imaginative narrative, of a beautifully turned phrase. Has this happened to you? Sometimes we need to form mental images of people, things and places that do not exist. Or, maybe they do exist but have been reinvented within a story.

In terms of my learning paths, fiction often provides the context for my non-fiction explorations. It provides color to the pencil drawings. A fellow librarian once said, “Non-fiction helps me learn about my world outside. Fiction helps me learn about my world inside.” Beautiful words, aren’t they? Find many more in my favorite reads from last week: Kostava’s The Historian and Hambley’s Homeland.