Classroom

Knowing the research behind text complexity is critical to understanding the Common Core's call for more complexity, and how reading for pleasure fits in.

School librarians across the country have been actively engaged in implementing the Common Core State Standards. More recently public librarians have joined the conversation, asking their colleagues what they need to know about the initiative and how it will affect collection development, homework help, and reference service. Join us for a chat with Olga M. Nesi, a regional coordinator with the New York City Department of Education, Division of Library Services, and Nina Lindsay, Children's Services Coordinator at the Oakland Public Library, Oakland, CA as they explore the ways in which today's professionals in public libraries are being called on to serve students in their libraries in light of the Common Core. Archive now available!

Common Core’s “Next Generation Science Standards” will be released this month, and although critics say the new guidelines still need work, they're a step in the right direction.

"It was purposeful that the IWitness platform was built with media literacy and school standards around digital education right at the center of its architecture."

It’s Women’s History Month and thus the Kidlit Celebrates Women’s History Month blog is back. I’ll be over there later this month to write about our beloved Bertha; but go over there now to see accounts of the likes of Emily Brontë, Julia Morgan, and Temple Grandin. On a related note, I’ve been enjoying my [...]

The post Women’s History Month appeared first on The Horn Book.

The Smithsonian Center for Education and Museum Studies has introduced a program to encourage research, discovery and creative collaboration with project-based learning. Smithsonian Quests awards online digital badges to students (and teachers!) upon completion of their activities. The projects are aimed at students of various grade levels, and can be done as part of classroom lessons or independently.

It may start this way: you’ve just finished the first lunch period, and because of today's snow, there are massive amounts of students in your library—and a surprising number of them are on task. You’re just now welcoming a social studies class that's here to work on a research project and use the laptop cart and many of your book club students are bursting through the door excitedly.

What's publishing this month? Biographies, poetry, and more!

Schindler’s List is a film that really doesn’t need much of an introduction from me. If you’ve seen it, you’ve seen it. If you haven’t, you probably should. Perhaps more than any other piece of moving-image media it has contributed to the “media construction” of the Holocaust for contemporary audiences, taking its place alongside Night [...]