Career Prep for Teens with Disabilities

Employment for teens with disabilities is notoriously low, with 16.6% of teens with disabilities ages 16-19 having jobs. On the other hand, 29.9% of teens with no disabilities are employed (“Youth Employment Rate”). Libraries can help local teens land jobs—for the summer or beyond—by hosting career preparation workshops. These workshops should be open to, and helpful for, teens with disabilities and without, but some of the advice is exclusively for teens with disabilities.

See the whole "debate" at YALSAblog.

STEM vs. STEAM

I just wrote a curriculum of STEM programs for a rural library to hold for special education high school students. I was initially intimidated by the concept because I am a liberal arts major, a creative writing fellow, a librarian for the love of books. Thankfully I found tons of research and ideas for STEM programs online, especially on the YALSA wiki. The program ideas I came up with on my own, on the other hand, seemed more…artsy. Given my background, that’s not a huge surprise, but I felt defeated when I’d come up with what I thought was a great idea just to realize it’s too artsy.

See the whole "debate" at YALSAblog.

Hoot Owl Storytime

A project for my LS5343 Youth Programs class was to design a storytime program. I picked one of my son's favorite books, Hoot Owl, Master of Disguise by Sean Taylor. Check out my program ideas on Glogster to see the song and craft, too!