Announcing UkeLit
The Ukulele Lending Library (Got Uke?) has become UkeLit! MISSION To introduce music literacy to school and library settings by providing a ukulele, the user-friendly, starter instrument, for circulation and to represent the benefits of creating music through the inclusion of a children’s book featuring musical characters and plotlines within the ukulele case. See the creation of the UkeLit: Rockabilly Goats Gruff! BACKGROUND Piloted at the Portland Public Library in Maine in Spring ’13, the four ukulele’s have maintained a 96% circulation rate. The only barrier to an increased circulation...
Read MoreGet Your Extraordinary On
Congratulations to Sarah Dillard! Her Extraordinary Warren: A Super Chicken is a Finalist for the Cybils! The Extraordinary Sarah reached out to Curious City looking for ways to get the word out about her two forthcoming picture book/early reader/comic book chicken-hero releases. As with each new client, we started with a brainstorm, That brainstorm looked like this… Makes perfect sense right? The result of the brainstorm was the decision to create a Story Hour Kit where readers could become “extraordinary” themselves. Together Sarah and I developed three...
Read MoreStoryWalk: The Bugliest Bug of Them All!
Some days you would not trade for all the tea in Buckingham Palace. After a year of hard work and creative solutions the City of Portland, Health and Human Services Dept, Public Health Division, the Portland Public Library, and Portland Recreation unveiled a StoryWalk for the picture book, The Bugliest Bug by Carol Diggory Shields and illustrated by Scott Nash (Candlewick Press). What’s a StoryWalk? Picture book pages spread through an outdoor space to create an active, engaging read aloud experience for kids. Here is a kindergartener waiting to unveil a StoryWalk...
Read MoreGobble, Gobble at Maine Audubon
Illustrator/author Cathryn Falwell read and “talked turkey” about her new picture book Gobble, Gobble (Dawn Publications) as part of Maine Audubon’s Apple Day. Maine Audubon staff shared facts about the wild turkeys, young naturalists followed the tracks of Maine wildlife in the Gobble Trail Game, and created nature journals with the wildlife facts they gathered. Cathryn signed her many nature picture books throughout the event. Share...
Read MoreBenny and Penny in the Library!
Curious City created madcap game for Geoffrey Hayes the creator of the early reader comic series, Benny and Penny . Young readers stepped, stopped, and spun to the comic book frames of the books, Benny and Penny in the Big No-No and Benny and Penny in the Toy Breaker to win a bucket of comic books from Toon Books. Hayes later signed his book at Casablanca Comics. The event was sponsored by The Portland Public Library, Casablanca Comics, and Curious City. See the Event Album. Share...
Read MoreNest, Nook, & Cranny Trail
Nest, Nook, & Cranny is a book for all ages featuring tongue-in-cheek sonnets and lyrical free verse by poet, Susan Blackaby. The collection of poems explores the many kinds of homes animals make for themselves. Readers experience different habitats–desert, grasslands, shoreline, wetland, and woodland–and the animals that call them home. “As a writer, I’m often asked where I get my ideas, and I usually say that I poke my nose out the front door. I suggest you do the same,” says author Susan Blackaby, “If you stay on the lookout for quirky, curious, and...
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