Town School for Boys Library

April 22nd is Earth Day, a day for reflecting on ways we can all help protect our planet. In honor of the holiday, the library is highlighting some of the environment-themed books on our shelves. Take a look at this week’s spotlighted books:

The Down-to Earth Guide to Global Warming, by Laurie David and Cambria Gordon Global warming is having some unexpected and very nasty effects. For instance, poison ivy is growing bigger and itchier. The maple syrup season is shortening, leading to less deliciousness on your breakfast pancakes. Disease-carrying mosquitoes are moving further and further north, bringing Lyme disease, malaria, West Nile Virus, and yellow fever to places where these diseased once did not exist. Read about more scary stuff that happens as the earth warms up, and how you can help prevent further climate change.

Why Are the Ice Caps Melting: The Dangers of Global Warming, by Anne Rockwell The earth is warming up, the ice caps are melting, the polar bears are disappearing. But it’s not too late! There’s still stuff you can do to stop the amount of harmful greenhouse gases in our atmosphere from increasing. This book explains exactly why the earth is warming up and suggests some simple ways kids and adults can help fight this climate change.

You’ll find these books on the “Spotlight On” table, right up front near the entrance to the library.

So, library patrons (and fifth-grade scavenger hunters), what are you doing to save the earth? Leave a comment and let us know!

April is National Poetry Month, and you can be the poet!  Even though March isn’t quite over yet, we’re already in poetry-writing mode.  Today we posted two magnetic boards on the library door and stuck magnetic poetry pieces all over one of them.  Come create your own magnetic poems, and maybe we’ll even post the results on the library blog!

We’re proud to say that the Town School library has more than 24,000 titles in its collection.  That said, sometimes it can be hard to choose the next perfect book to read.  Our new “Spotlight on…” series is designed to help busy students choose their next book to check out.

 The first book in this series of spotlighted books is The Alchemyst: The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel by Michael Scott.

From Publishers Weekly
Twin 15-year-old siblings Sophie and Josh Newman take summer jobs in San Francisco across the street from one another: she at a coffee shop, he at a bookstore owned by Nick and Perry Fleming. In the vey first chapter, armed goons garbed in black with “dead-looking skin and… marble eyes” (actually Golems) storm the bookshop, take Perry hostage and swipe a rare Book (but not before Josh snatches its two most important pages). The stolen volume is the Codex, an ancient text of magical wisdom. Nick Fleming is really Nicholas Flamel, the 14th-century alchemist who could turn base metal into gold, and make a potion that ensures immortality. Sophie and Josh learn that they are mentioned in the Codex’s prophecies: “The two that are one will come either to save or to destroy the world.” Mayhem ensues, as Irish author Scott draws on a wide knowledge of world mythology to stage a battle between the Dark Elders and their hired gun—Dr. John Dee—against the forces of good, led by Flamel and the twins (Sophie’s powers are “awakened” by the goddess Hekate, who’d been living in an elaborate treehouse north of San Francisco). Not only do they need the Codex back to stop Dee and company, but the immortality potion must be brewed afresh every month. Time is running out, literally, for the Flamels. Proceeding at a breakneck pace, and populated by the likes of werewolves and vampires, the novel ends on a precipice, presumably to be picked up in volume two.

Can you name two inventions by Jacques Cousteau?  What about a book by Esther Hautzig?  Do you know which month Oklahoma City celebrates the Festival of the Horse?  Or which sport Mark Roth excelled in?

If not, don’t worry.  You can still give the library’s Factfinder Challenge a try.  Each month, the library posts four new questions on the bulletin board in our reference section.  Each question also comes with a Dewey Decimal Number clue that will help you figure out where to find its answer.  If you answer all four questions correctly AND cite your sources for each answer, you can be entered to win our monthly grand prize.  For the November/December competition, the prize is an AMC Movie gift certificate, good for movies and snacks at any AMC theater.

Among our current library displays is a presentation on the history of technology. Along the tops of our bookshelves, we’ve arranged a collection of books about science and technology in years past, as well as an assortment of technological artifacts. Our “gallery” now includes a typewriter (remember those?), a slide viewer, a floppy disk, an old LP, and photographs of all kinds of scientific innovations from decades and centuries past.