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- Written by: Jan Cook
LAKEPORT, Calif. – The Lake County Library continues to adapt to the ever-changing pandemic situation with new services and social distancing variations on existing ones.
The library has just expanded its website with a colorful page devoted to the library’s educational and recreational resources and activities for children.
On the library’s website, click on the “For Kids” link to see the full array of online services that require nothing more than a library card to access.
On hoopla you can activate kids mode by signing in and then clicking Kids. Hoopla has movies, television shows, music and audiobooks for kids.
On Libby or on the Overdrive website you can find kids’ content by clicking the Kids tab at the top. Libby by Overdrive has ebooks, audiobooks and special read-along books.
For children and teens the library also offers three online services ABCmouse, Britannica, and TeachingBooks.
ABCmouse.com is the leading and most comprehensive fun digital learning resource for children ages 2 through 8.
Britannica School and Britannica Escolar are both educational sites for students to use for homework help, projects, or learning at home or at the library.
TeachingBooks.net is a multimedia website that generates enthusiasm for books and reading with engaging author programs and K-12 book resources for children and teens.
Patrons can check out ABCmouse accounts for home use on their computers or devices. The award-winning ABCmouse.com curriculum, created by Age of Learning, Inc., is designed to help young children ages 2 through 8 and beyond build a strong foundation for future academic success.
ABCmouse.com is 100-percent educational, with more than 8,500 learning activities across all major subject areas-reading, math, science, social studies, art, and music. ABCmouse is one effective early learning resource that’s available for you to check out from the library and use with your children at home.
When you check out an ABCmouse account from the library with Bring Learning Home, you will get full access to ABCmouse from the convenience of your home or anywhere you have an internet connection. You will also have access to the Assessment Center, which allows you to track your child’s progress in key early literacy and math skills over time. Funding for the ABCmouse Bring Learning Home program was provided by Doug and Laurie Dohring of Bell Haven Resort.
Britannica School and Britannica Escolar are both educational sites for students to use for homework help, projects, or learning at home or at the library.
Britannica School is the go-to site for research – the core of any inquiry learning model – offering thousands of up-to-date, curated, and curriculum-relevant articles, images, videos, audio clips, primary sources, maps, research tools, recommended Web sites, and three separate databases. Britannica Escolar is the leading knowledge-building resource that is universally trusted for accurate and age-appropriate content in Spanish.
Choose from two or three levels of learning – elementary, middle, and high school – for a wealth of unique content to explore. Select an article and adjust its complexity with a single click while maintaining the age-appropriate look – ideal for classes of students at multiple reading levels! Read-aloud functionality and a font size changer are just a few of the features specifically helpful for students with special needs.
Nonfiction, cross-curricular content in Britannica School is updated daily by the editorial team with new and revised articles and multimedia – at least 1,200 entries per month – to keep users informed and engaged. Britannica offers accurate, up-to-date content aligned to the common core and state standards.
Use handy how-to-conduct-research tools to build essential information literacy skills. Group together related content types for activities or projects using the easy-to-use Content Collector. For educators, review and adapt ready-made lessons on various subjects or create your own with the intuitive Lesson Plan Builder. Access to Britannica School and Escolar is provided by the California State Library.
TeachingBooks is a dynamic PreK-12 reading and library service that strives to deepen everyone's connections to the books they are reading. With 170,000+ engaging video, audio, and online resources, TeachingBooks brings to life the books that are enjoyed in your community. TeachingBooks is a database of resources for children's and young adult books and their authors and illustrators. Use TeachingBooks to search titles, authors and illustrators, and find resources to engage readers. The resource collection includes short movies, audiobook readings, book discussion guides, and more. Access to TeachingBooks.net is provided for Lake County Library by the California State Library in conjunction with Riverside COE.
In the pre-pandemic days library employees visited local schools to read picture books with younger children and to share with older children about library resources. With in-person visits no longer available, the library invites local teachers to request library visits to their virtual classrooms. Teachers can submit the requests through the link on the library’s For Kids page and an employee will contact them to make arrangements.
The library’s website gives information about library programs, services and policies. To speak to a library employee, call 707-263-8817.
Jan Cook is a library technician for the Lake County Library.
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- Written by: Kara Manke
Past discriminatory housing practices may play a role in perpetuating the significant disparities in infant and maternal health faced by people of color in the U.S., suggests a new study by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley.
For decades, banks and other lenders used redlining maps to deny loans to people living in neighborhoods deemed too risky for investment.
These maps, first drawn in 1935 by the government-sponsored Home Owners’ Loan Corp., or HOLC, shaded neighborhoods in one of four colors – from green representing the lowest risk to red representing the highest risk. These designations were based, in part, on the race and socioeconomic status of each neighborhood’s residents.
To investigate the link between historical redlining and infant and maternal health today, the team obtained birth outcome data for the cities of Los Angeles, Oakland and San Francisco between 2006 and 2015 and compared them to HOLC redlining maps.
They found that adverse birth outcomes – including premature births, low birth weight babies and babies who were small for their gestational age – occurred significantly more often in neighborhoods with worse HOLC ratings.
“Our results highlight how laws and policies that have been abolished can still assert health effects today,” said Rachel Morello-Frosch, a professor of public health and of environmental science, policy and management at UC Berkeley and senior author of the study, which appeared online this month in the journal PLOS ONE. “This suggests that if we want to target neighborhood-level interventions to improve the social and physical environments where kids are born and grow, neighborhoods that have faced historical forms of discrimination, like redlining, are important places to start.”
Non-Hispanic Black women living in the U.S. are one-and-a-half times more likely to give birth to premature babies than their white counterparts and are more than twice as likely to have babies with a low birth weight. Hispanic women face similar, though less dramatic, disparities, compared to non-Hispanic white women.
While the legacy of public and private disinvestment in redlined neighborhoods has led to well-documented disparities in income level, tree canopy coverage, air pollution and home values in these communities, the long-term health impacts of redlining are just now starting to be explored.
“Children born during the time of our study would be the great-great-grandchildren of those who were alive at the time of redlining, whose options of where to live would have been determined by redlining maps,” said study lead author Anthony Nardone, a medical student in the UC Berkeley-UCSF Joint Medical Program. “We chose to look at birth outcomes because of the stark inequities that exist across race in the U.S. today, inequities that we believe are a function of long-standing institutional racism, like historical redlining.”
Earlier work led by Nardone showed that residents of neighborhoods with the worst HOLC rating were more than twice as likely to visit the emergency room with asthma than residents of neighborhoods with the highest HOLC rating. And a recent study from the Harvard School of Public Health found a link between redlining and preterm births in New York City.
In the new study, the team found that neighborhoods with the two worst HOLC ratings – “definitely declining” and “hazardous” – had significantly worse birth outcomes than those with the best HOLC rating.
However, Los Angeles neighborhoods rated “hazardous” showed slightly better birth outcomes than those with the second-worst, or “definitely declining,” rating. In San Francisco and Oakland, neighborhoods with these two ratings showed similar birth outcomes.
This pattern might be attributed to the effects of gentrification on previously redlined neighborhoods, the authors surmised. They added that people in the hardest-hit neighborhoods may also rely more on community support networks, which can help combat the effects of disinvestment.
“We also saw different results by metropolitan area and slightly different results by maternal race,” Morello-Frosch said. “This suggests that maybe the underlying mechanisms of the effect of redlining differ by region and should be investigated further.”
Co-authors of the study include Joan A. Casey and Kara E. Rudolph of Columbia University; Deborah Karasek of the University of California, San Francsico; and Mahasin Mujahid of UC Berkeley.
This research was supported by the National Institutes of Health’s Environmental Influences on Child Health Outcomes (ECHO) program (UG3OD023272 and UH3OD023272), the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (R00 ES027023 and P30 ES0090890), the UC Berkeley Superfund Research Program and a Postdoctoral Transdisciplinary Research Fellowship from the UCSF Preterm Birth Initiative.
Kara Manke writes for the UC Berkeley News Center.
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- Written by: Elizabeth Larson
Dogs available for adoption this week include mixes of Chihuahua, border collie, chow chow, German Shepherd, Labrador Retriever, pit bull and pug.
Dogs that are adopted from Lake County Animal Care and Control are either neutered or spayed, microchipped and, if old enough, given a rabies shot and county license before being released to their new owner. License fees do not apply to residents of the cities of Lakeport or Clearlake.
The following dogs at the Lake County Animal Care and Control shelter have been cleared for adoption (additional dogs on the animal control Web site not listed are still “on hold”).
Call Lake County Animal Care and Control at 707-263-0278 or visit the shelter online at http://www.co.lake.ca.us/Government/Directory/Animal_Care_And_Control.htm for information on visiting or adopting.
‘Tico’
“Tico” is a senior male Chihuahua-pug mix with a short black and white coat.
He is in kennel No. 2, ID No. 13864.
‘Solito’
“Solito” is a male pit bull terrier with a black and white coat.
He is in kennel No. 6, ID No. 13839.
‘Oso Panda’
“Oso Panda” is a male border collie with a long black and white coat.
He is in kennel No. 7, ID No. 13840.
‘Manotas’
“Manotas” is a male German Shepherd-pit bull mix with a long black and brindle coat.
He is in kennel No. 8, ID No. 13841.
‘Pina’
“Pina” is a young female pit bull terrier with a short tan and brindle coat.
She is in kennel No. 9, ID No. 13842.
‘Luna’
“Luna” is a female German Shepherd with a medium-length black and tan coat.
She is in kennel No. 10, ID No. 13843.
Male chow chow
This male chow chow has a medium-length black coat.
He is in kennel No. 33, ID No. 13795.
Email Elizabeth Larson at
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- Written by: NATIONAL AERONAUTICS AND SPACE ADMINISTRATION
NASA and SpaceX are targeting no earlier than Oct. 23 for the first operational flight with astronauts of the Crew Dragon spacecraft and Falcon 9 rocket to the International Space Station as a part of the agency’s Commercial Crew Program.
NASA’s SpaceX Crew-1 mission will be the first of regular rotational missions to the space station following completion of NASA certification.
The mission will carry Crew Dragon commander Michael Hopkins, pilot Victor Glover, and mission specialist Shannon Walker, all of NASA, along with Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, or JAXA, mission specialist Soichi Noguchi for a six-month science mission aboard the orbiting laboratory following launch from Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
Crew-1 will launch in late October to accommodate spacecraft traffic for the upcoming Soyuz crew rotation and best meet the needs of the International Space Station.
Launch will follow the arrival of NASA astronaut Kate Rubins and cosmonauts Sergey Ryzhikov and Sergey Kud-Sverchkov of the Russian space agency Roscosmos aboard their Soyuz MS-17 spacecraft and the departure of NASA astronaut Chris Cassidy and cosmonauts Anatoly Ivanishin and Ivan Vagner from the space station.
The launch timeframe also allows for a crew handover with NASA’s SpaceX Crew-2 mission next spring.
The Crew-1 mission is pending completion of data reviews and certification following NASA’s SpaceX Demo-2 test flight, which successfully launched NASA astronauts Robert Behnken and Douglas Hurley to the International Space Station on May 30 and returned them safely home with a splashdown off the Florida coast in the Gulf of Mexico on Aug. 2.
Demo-2 was the first crewed flight test of a commercially-owned and operated human space system.
NASA certification of SpaceX’s crew transportation system allows the agency to regularly fly astronauts to the space station, ending sole reliance on Russia for space station access.
For almost 20 years, humans have continuously lived and worked aboard the International Space Station, advancing scientific knowledge and demonstrating new technologies that enable us to prepare for human exploration to the Moon and Mars.
NASA is enabling economic growth in low-Earth orbit to open access to space to more people, more science, and more companies than ever before.