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The University of London’s Institute of Education (IOE) has released a study showing that children who read for pleasure are likely to do significantly better at school than their peers. The study, which is one of the first to examine the effect of reading for pleasure on children’s cognitive development over time, finds that children who read for pleasure made more progress in learning math, vocabulary, and spelling between the ages of 10 and 16 than those who rarely read.
Here’s one Pinterest rabbit hole well worth falling through. I discovered Alida Hanson’s wonderfully comprehensive and attractive Pinterest boards promoting the new books and media at Weston High School (MA) Library, via a recent AASLForum discussion. When I asked Alida if she’d allow me to share her process for organizing those boards, she generously agreed. [...]
It’s all too easy to dismiss colorful, fun books of this sort, with their brief chunks of text and apparently oversized photos, as merely motivational in nature.
YALSA’s Teen Book Finder is one of my favorite apps. I recommend it to my high school students and I/we often take it to the shelves on our iPhones, iPods or iPads for inspiration connected to YALSA’s recommended titles. Good news. This week, YALSA launched an updated version of the free app that now includes titles [...]
The most exciting time for a kindergarten teacher is when a kid looks up and says, ‘Hey, I can read!’” Fostering early literacy is the focus of our very first theme issue. We’re also debuting a new look, with some significant improvements to the all-important reviews section.
Do young fanfiction authors seek the kind of feedback that educators would find “useful” in K-12 settings, and are fanfiction communities really the nurturing environments of peer-critique that some make them out to be?
My high school readers (and most other serious readers I know) are obsessed with Good Reads. And if they’re not, they are connected on either LibraryThing or Shelfari. Socially connected readers seek and trust the recommendations and lists of their networks; reviews purchasing and borrowing opportunities, as well as the attractive shelf metaphors, fun quotes, [...]
Back in May I shared Elissa Malespina’s media-rich, interactive Choices Summer Reading list. She created it for her South Orange (NJ) Middle School readers using Apple’s iBooks Authors. She hosts the list on the Bookry platform and it feels very much like those cool magazine apps we flip through on our tablets. Randie Groden just shared an alternate [...]
Only one in three parents of children ages eight and under reads stories to their kids each night, according to a new survey by the literacy organization Reading is Fundamental (RIF) and Macy’s.
I had to share this wonderful idea from Sarah Mulhern Gross’s recent Infotopia post: Beyond the Book: Infographics of Students’ Reading History! Sarah, a high school English teacher, was excited about sharing her lesson with the school library community. Sarah describes herself as a book evangelist. She shared her interest in having students think about some of the books that have affected [...]
I’m chatting today with Edith Donnell, the Youth/Teen Librarian for the Chelsea District Library. For the last five years she has been one of the driving forces behind the all-ages Kids Read Comics event, which is held at the Ann Arbor District Library – 343 S 5th Avenue in Ann Arbor, Michigan. This year the [...]
I guess there was some cosplay going on, but most participating attendees chose to dress up as publishing executives for some reason.
I hadn’t thought about it till today, but our summer reading list is a snooze. A dinosaur. A relic of a time when reading lists looked like, well, reading lists. Today, two things woke me up. 1. Finished with her AP exam, Sierra asked me for a book recommendation. I excitedly booktalked Libba Bray’s The [...]
My friend Hornberger and I are having a conversation about nonfiction ebooks. In a recent post I chatted about my students’ eager acceptance of the EBSCO e-Book Academic Collection. Karen, the librarian at Palisades High School, as well as our PSLA Tech Committee co-chair and blogger, decided to test drive the database herself. She also [...]
The task for educators is not to drain this sense of open-ended exploration from student-fans but rather to make sure that it is accompanied by the Jiminy Cricket-like voice of critical literacy…
Together we looked for ‘cheese holes’, or spaces in the story that allow the audience to participate in, contribute further to, and augment the original story using their own intelligence and imagination.
If you are a teacher, getting ready for next weekend might involve more than picking up a bucket of wings. While the kids cheer their teams on with their friends and family, they could be thinking a little more critically, by reading the text of commercials. Really. Annually, Frank Baker’s Media Literacy Clearinghouse offers an [...]
I’ve said it before, but last night was further proof of the power of our growing TL network. The live Monday night twitter chat (#tlchat) we began back in September, ran on both Twitter and Google+ Hangouts last night. And our intrepid team managed and archived both platforms. The topic was: Get Those Books Moving: [...]
