The Ivy Street Blog is a community-driven platform dedicated to sharing and discovering book recommendations. It's a place where book lovers can curate and share their own booklists, browse public booklists created by others, and find inspiration for their next great read.
At its core, the Ivy Street Blog is powered by the passion and knowledge of its users. Whether you're an avid reader, a librarian, a teacher, or simply someone who enjoys sharing their love of books, you can contribute to the community by creating and sharing your own booklists.
One of the unique features of the Ivy Street Blog is the ability to create and share public booklists. These curated lists of books can be organized around any theme or topic you choose, allowing you to share your literary discoveries and recommendations with others who share your interests.
In addition to creating and sharing booklists, you can also browse the public bookshelf to discover new books and booklists created by others in the community. You can search by the curator's public profile name, making it easy to find booklists that align with your reading preferences.
This is a public booklist. A public booklist is a curated list of books that the owner has chosen to share with the world. Anyone can view the books in a public booklist, but you need to log in to be able to add them to your reading list, booklists or give recommendations. Sign up is fast, free, and easy.
Public booklists are a great way to discover new books and get recommendations from others who share your interests. You can browse the public bookshelf or even the curator's public bookshelf.
Once you're logged in, simply click the "Add to Reading List" button to save it for later. You can also click the "Add to Booklist" button to add the book to one of your own booklists, making it easy to organize and share your own curated booklist. To give a recommendation, the booklist must be open to recommendation and then you can recommend books from your collection to the booklist.
You can use the share button to share this booklist several ways, including by text, email, or a QR code that can be made into a sticker or something.
To leave a recommendation, find a booklist that is open to recommendations using the public bookshelf located in the footer. On the public booklist page, scroll to the bottom, and there should be a tile available for you to select a book from your collection to recommend to the booklist.
If the book you want to recommend is not in your collection yet, add it to your collection first, and then select it and add your reason for recommending it to the booklist.
To review your recommendations, go to the "My Bookshelf" page, and if there are any recommendations people have left, a yellow link will appear on your booklist. Click that link, and you can approve or reject the recommendations.
Final BookSet Project
This website is the final project I have for submission. It is for the kids in my neighborhood as well as my son. It’s intended to accompany our little free library and be a resource where readers can share booklists with each other. One of the things I learned during this class is how books can be a window into someone else’s life and might be beneficial for some people to have access to a common set of books to discuss. I chose social/emotional development as the theme that ties my book selections together. Since the start of the class, my son and I have been making weekly trips to the library, keeping around 15 books checked out, aiming to read 3 per day. We don’t make it through all of them, but I’ve been keeping my eye out for good ones for social/emotional development. My midterm draft had a few good ones, but I also recall a few more. It’s been hard to choose and I have a list of over 96 books we’ve read since the start of this project. It was really hard to winnow them down. There had to be good balance, combined with an intriguing story to make the final 6. I live next to a middle school and these books might be a little young for their taste, but I appreciated them as an adult, so perhaps they might find value in them after all. I’m still questioning what selections could be better and why, but I need to submit the assignment and so I must move forward. The real challenge of this project is to provide this working website where others might share books with me.
Description: This book is about emotions where each emotion is represented by a color. It does a good job of separating emotions into different ideas that can be recognized and better understood and worked with by children. Further, it demonstrates how we all have a spectrum of emotions, which can be helpful when teaching children to be empathetic.
Age: 2-6 years
Publication Date: October 1, 2008
Publisher: KO Kids Books
Source: Given to my son by my sister in law for our baby shower.
Description: This was a fun book about a boy who thought it was crazy hair day, when in fact it was picture day, the opposite of what he wanted it to be. He was so embarrassed he hid in the bathroom and didn’t know what to do. I remember feeling like that when I was young and I thought the way the school rallied around him and made him feel better was such a great message to send. The power of kindness is awesome.
Description: This is a great book that shows how this one fish is special, because he has sparkly scales. However, other people get jealous of him and ask to wear some of his scales. The book is laden with sparkles and when he says no, they get their feelings hurt and don’t let him play with them. He realizes it’s good to share and learns a valuable lesson.
Age: 1-5 years
Publication Date: January 27, 1999
Publisher: North-South Books
ISBN: 1558580093
Source: This was also given to us by someone at my son's baby shower.
Author: Helena Ku Rhee (Author), Pascal Campion (Illustrator)
Description: This was a ‘staff pick’ that turned out to be well worth it. It’s about a boy who has to go with his parent to their nighttime janitorial job in a corporate office. At first he is so bored and doesn’t want to go because the place is kind of scary. Eventually, he uses his imagination to make it a fun adventure. This book shows how to make a bad situation into something alright just by changing your perspective.
Description: This one was a bit of a dark horse. I don’t know why I kept thinking of this book days and weeks later, but I found it so intriguing. There was something about the illistrations or the kindness shown by the man in the story that I really felt. There is this girl who loses her doll and this man finds out and fabricates this story about her doll going on a trip. He starts giving her letters from her doll and she somehow becomes ok with her doll being gone as long as the doll is happy. It’s a touching story of unlikely kindness.
Age: 4 - 8 years
Publication Date: March 9, 2021
Publisher: Viking Books for Young Readers
Source: Picked it up off the shelf at the library. Totally random chance.
Author: Blair Thornburgh (Author), Kate Berube (Illustrator)
Description: This was a fun book for my son and I to read together. He has a toy banana and so we make jokes about bananas. The story has some funny punchlines about this kid who is in a play, but has to play the 'second banana', apparently the lousiest part in the production. Lol. He’s soo miserable about it, but eventually finds a solution and the show is able to go on. It was a fun and memorable book that we enjoyed.
Age: 4 - 8 years
Publication Date: August 11, 2020
Publisher: Harry N. Abrams
Source: Picked it up off the shelf at the library.