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Encouraging middle grade students to be enthusiastic writers is a challenge that countless teachers grapple with. These three guides make this task a little easier, by instructing students how to write in a variety of genres, including journalism, poetry, humor, and more.
Education software outfit Kno has partnering with publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt to offer interactive textbooks for K–12 students. The digital titles, which align with Common Core subjects, are available for $9.99 or less for a one-year rental.
The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) ask students to research to build and present knowledge. For years, this knowledge was shared in written form—reports, essays, projects, and concluding paragraphs. Then came technology. The written format was then superseded by interviews, moviemaker clips, wikis, blogs, Animoto flashy packaged images, Vokis, Crazytalk movies, PowerPoints, Museum Boxes, Prezi’s, and more. We have mapped knowledge, created knowledge products, and delivered other educational messages with engaging technology and Web tools.
As teachers and librarians return to school this month, many will be tasked with implementing the Common Core State Standards (www.corestandards.org) into their lesson plans. The Common Core mission states that: “The standards are designed to be robust and relevant to the real world, reflecting the knowledge and skills that our young people need for success in college and careers.” They aim to promote critical thinking through student engagement with high quality literary and informational [...]
Want to help teachers find high-quality “complex texts,” a key ingredient of the new educational standards? Christopher Harris shows you how.
Seven Title I media centers throughout the district continue to keep their doors open two hours each week, and local kids are welcome to read, check out books, or attend read-alouds. Although it’s not a new concept, it’s the first time Salem-Keizer has kept summer hours—and so far, kids seem to be enjoying it, says Stephen Cox, the district’s library media program specialist.
Although 46 states and Washington, DC, have adopted the Common Core State Standards (CCSS), less than a quarter of the general public knows about the academic standards for K-12 education that are designed to prepare students for college and the workforce, says a recent poll by a nonprofit education reform organization.
What’s the secret to creating riveting nonfiction for young readers? It begins with passion, says kids’ book author Candace Fleming, one of the participants in SLJ’s annual Day of Dialog, on June 4, at New York’s Jacob K. Javits Convention Center. “If I’m going to spend five years working on a book, it has to be something I’m interested in.”
If you want to have a stake in the Common Core, take a page from Tina Edwards Felder, who responds to her teachers’ concerns about meeting the ambitious new standards with a willing, “I can help you with that.”
This is the worst time to be a school librarian and the best time to be one. Our profession is under daily threat of extinction, yet the implementation of the Common Core Standards affords incredible opportunity to make the strongest case for the importance of librarians and libraries in schools. Together we must commit to gaining a deep understanding of these new standards and determine to be at the fore of the Common Core conversations taking place in our buildings. We are uniquely suited for this because the Common Core Standards dovetail elegantly with inquiry, and we know inquiry.
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Several recent and forthcoming titles focus on the American West and offer students an entrée into a place and a pivotal time in our nation’s history. In exploring the relationship between The Horse and the Plains Indians (Clarion, July, 2012; Gr 4-9; photos by William Muñoz), Dorothy Hinshaw Patent offers a glimpse into Native American tribes that had for centuries wintered in North America’s wooded river valleys and its forests and summered on its grasslands. When the [...]
In a recent Pew Internet study called How Teens Do Research the Digital World, AP and National Writing Project teachers said that one of educators’ top priorities should be to teach students how to “judge the quality of online information.” The study reports that 95 percent of our students do online research, but their research skills are only good or fair. Also, for many students, doing research means Googling. Many students see research as a fast-paced process in which they [...]
