Gift Subscriptions for Libraries

It's the end of the year and you're giving gifts and writing checks anyway, so why not give a gift that keeps on giving the whole year? No Clark Griswold, I'm not suggesting the "Jelly of the Month Club," but I am suggesting that you share your hobby interests with your whole town.

Give a subscription to your favorite hobby magazine to your local library.

Budgets are never high enough for libraries, and magazine subscriptions are among the first things cut in order to maintain other services. Opportunities to share our hobbies exist beyond specialty shows and events, and we rarely take advantage of them. Educating and informing others about your hobbies is the first step to attracting new enthusiasts, and that's a vital component to the health of every hobby from bass fishing to old cars to antiques to...you get the idea.

Take a moment to talk to your local librarian -- don't forget to bring in a copy of the magazine -- and explain that you'd like to give a gift subscription to the library. Once you get the green light from the librarian, it's pretty easy to add that extra subscription on to your existing account.

By the way, those gifts are tax deductible for you, and that's always a welcome thing this time of the year.

Art History Tutorial for Kids

I found a cool article in today's Chicago Tribune -- yes, the paper as printed on newsprint paper, not an e-article from the Trib's site -- and I decided to share it here. I'll save my lecture about how actual newspapers are still wonderful things for later.

From the Chicago Tribune, Monday, Decmber 14, 2009
by Vikki Ortiz Healy

Your 6-year-old may be all about Zhu Zhu pets and Hannah Montana this holiday season, but is he or she equally excited about Claude Monet and Norman Rockwell?

Kids should be, says Deb Herman, an associate professor of art and art education at Concordia University Chicago, who has just launched an ambitious online program that aims to make first through eighth graders as conversant about art history as they are about Bakugan.

"There are other countries that do a much better job of really totally embracing art," said Herman, who worked with the John and Frances Beck Foundation in Chicago to develop the free online lessons for teachers and parents to download at cuchicago.edu/artlessons.

The 10-lesson packets--Henri Rousseau and Vincent Van Gogh in second; Georges Deurat and Leonardo da Vinci in fourth--are designed to have kids recognizing 80 masterpieces by the eighty grade. Lessons through fifth grade already are posted. She says sixth grade will come by spring 2010, with seventh and eighth to follow in 2012.

Herman insists that once exposed to the stories behind the artwork, the children are engaged, fascinated and knowledgeable on several levels.

"What we're trying to do is to get the children to start using higher-level thinking skills," she said.

Click on the links above for more information. To expand on the information in the Trib's story, each grade level contains 10 lessons -- one lesson for a specific artist. As of this writing, not all of the links will work, but I'll update this post as more of them go active.