
We all know about the summer reading slide. This summer, 180 students from two Buffalo (NY) suburban school districts spent four weeks with grad students working on their reading and writing skills, hoping to reverse that effect.
September 18, 2013
The world's largest reviewer of books, multimedia, and technology for children and teens

Back in the fall of 2010, SLJTeen reported on one librarian’s dream to build a library at the Jambo Jipya Academy in Mwtapa, Kenya with the assistance of the organization Reason2Smile. The fundraising is almost complete and Jambo Jipya is hoping to expand and purchase the land adjacent to the school to become the future home of the school library. Donna Rosenblum brings us up to date on her quest to build that library.

Storytime is the premium service for children in public libraries across the country. For many youth librarians, it’s the most treasured part of their job. A storytime veteran shares her best practices.

The Lockwood Lions crosstown rivals, the Grovehill Giants, seem to have it all. Or do they? When the cheer squad and the football players get together, it always gets intense. But there are two sides to every story—whose side are you on? Five lucky winners will get a collection of leveled readers, including the new Truly Fine/Forever Hot from Saddleback.

U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan hosted the first Let’s Read! Let’s Move! event of 2013 on Wednesday, July 10, at the U.S. Department of Education headquarters in Washington, D.C. Along with Rep. John Kline of Minnesota; Sam Kass, executive director of Let’s Move!; and Michelle Kwan, member of the President’s Council on Fitness, Sports & Nutrition and Olympic figure skater, the celebrity guests read to a group of students. Kwan then led the children in a session of fun, physical activities.

How to counter the “summer slide”? Simple, kids during the out-of-school months should read more books, according to journalist and author Annie Murphy Paul. And libraries play a critical role

Research has long supported the importance of play in early literacy, yet many parents remain mystified about how to engage with young children in fun activities, particularly at the pre-verbal stage. Enter the library.

The Institute of Museum and Library Services and the Campaign for Grade-Level Reading today unveiled a new report on the role of museums and libraries in early learning, and issued a call to action for policymakers, schools, funders, and parents to include these institutions in comprehensive early learning strategies.

Lovers of children’s picture books and early literacy advocates gathered earlier this month at Bank Street College for “Literature for Early Childhood: What Do You Need to Know?” an inaugural mini conference sponsored by the Bank Street Writers Lab. The event brought together child development experts, educators, and creators of children’s literature.

From Belarus to Brooklyn, the world’s students, teachers, and librarians marked the fourth annual World Read Aloud Day on Wednesday with a diversity of celebrations and special events. The special day was created by Pam Allyn and Lit World, a nonprofit organization she founded that encourages a global celebration of the invaluable practice of reading aloud.

In addition to best-selling mysteries and thrillers for adults, James Patterson also writes for young readers, and he’s extremely proud of his “Middle School” series. The latest entry, I Funny, is told from the point of view of a middle schooler who uses humor to help him cope with a physical handicap and the loss of his family. In this case, laughter really is the best medicine for Jamie Grimm, the narrator of I Funny.

Although I didn’t come up with this column’s name—YA Underground—I’m appreciating it more and more. The kids I serve are living underground both metaphorically and literally. My library is in a 350-bed lockdown facility Amy Cheney juvenile cellthat serves adolescents ages 11 to 19, and it’s in one of three rooms with windows. I have the only room with windows that are at eye level. The sunlight streams in and looking out, you can see trees, grass, clouds, sky, and sunsets beyond the barbwire. When Jonas (not his real name), an avid manga fan, was in the library on his every-other-week visit, I heard him describe the library as “a lonely bright spot.” He was talking about books—but aren’t books windows?

“ How long will it take me to pay off my credit card?” “How do I create a budget?” “What is a trade deficit?” Students can find the answers to these and many other financial questions using Rosen’s most recent entry into the digital realm.

If your school or public library is looking for some ideas for teen programming, the following sessions from NCTE’s recent annual conference are bound to inspire you. While most of the presenters focused on older teens, their programs can also be adapted for middle schoolers. And there are many more sessions that can be explored on NCTE’s 2012 website, such as But I Hate Poetry, Using Signal Words in Graphic Novels for Sequence and Cause/Effect, or Ah Ha Allusions!—Pop Culture Allusions & Dystopian Literature, to name just a few.

Over the next few issues of SLJTeen, I’ll be posting brief summaries of many of the sessions I attended at the annual National Council of Teachers of English annual conference, held in Las Vegas, Nov.15-18, 2012. Hand-outs for many of the sessions are available from the NCTE 2012 website. This round up includes sessions on nonfiction resources for English teachers, literacy efforts for incarcerated youth and adults, and faeries in young adult literature.

Thousands of students are meeting the challenge to start and complete a novel over the course of a month this November for National Novel Writing Month (or NaNoWriMo). Librarians and teachers trying to get students interested in writing have a ton of resources from the Young Writers Program, including lesson plans that align to the Common Core.

To expand how learners think about writing, national literacy and educational groups are asking teachers, librarians, writers, children and creators of all kinds to share what they write on Twitter on Friday, October 19, using the hashtag #whatiwrite.

Ten teens, ages 16 to 17, dressed in tan pull-on pants and dark blue sweatshirts with “Alameda County Juvenile Hall” stamped across their chests, are in my library, crowding around me and talking all at once.
“He said he was hit with an electrical cord, but in the book he says it was a snakeskin belt,” says one boy, pouncing on a disparity between what an author told us when he recently visited and what he wrote in his memoir.

Over the past five years, I’ve returned to the New York neighborhood in which I met the children whom I first described in Savage Inequalities, Amazing Grace, and other books I published in the 1990s. The neighborhood is called Mott Haven. It’s the poorest section in all of the South Bronx, which is the poorest Congressional district in America.







By Travis Jonker on September 16, 2013
By J. Caleb Mozzocco on September 16, 2013
By Elizabeth Bird on September 16, 2013
Copyright © 2013 · SLJ Theme on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in
