Classroom & Curricula

In adopting the Common Core State Standards, U. S. educators are part of a larger educational reform movement. From England to Japan countries around the world are debating a national curricula. Why are so many nations considering one? And where does the impetus to do so come from? Marc Aronson ponders these questions in his latest Consider the Source column.

The ability for teachers and students to embed their own content into digital texts, write notes, and get feedback on student reading—classroom reading just got a lot more dynamic. SLJ columnist Jeff Hastings test driives Gobstopper and Subtext.

Whether it’s a class assignment or a novel in verse, poetry expresses our deepest desires and fondest memories. It's National Poetry Month, and the editors at the Junior Library Guild have selected the following new titles to motivate students to voice their own poetic thoughts.

In honor of National Poetry Month, acclaimed poet Naomi Shihab Nye—whose anthology This Same Sky (Simon & Schuster, 1993) continues to be used in both college and fifth grade classrooms—offers us five of her “very favorite lovingly-used poetry collections.”

From The Canadian Press: A recent dust-up between Wikipedia and Canada’s largest university raises questions about how collaborative the popular website that bills itself as “the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit” truly is. The online information portal recently took a professor from the University of Toronto to task for one of his classroom assignments. [...]

In honor of National Poetry Month, children's poet laureate J. Patrick Lewis picks his favorite collections for kids.

With its emphasis on research, learning, investigating, and arriving at one's own conclusions, History Day is a perfect complement to the new education guidelines.

It’s spring! Just like the narrator says in the 1947 educational film Body Care and Grooming, "Ah, spring. When birds are on the wing, when flowers bloom... Spring, when a young man's fancy likely turns to...."—Author unknown. The answer has to be testing! High-stakes testing! Advanced Placement testing! American College Testing or even the SAT! Students feel pressured to work hard to prove themselves in this world of achievement.

From a teen eyewitness account of the Battle of Gettysburg to an investigation of those pointy-nose Darwin frogs (with some very unusual brooding habits) to an examination of science myths, we’ve selected a few nonfiction books publishing this month that you’ll want to display, booktalk, and put in the hands of your patrons.