Literacy

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 [...]

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 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. [...]

As a self-described nonreader, Matt de la Peña could never have imagined as a kid that books would play an important role in his life. But key encounters with libraries and, more importantly, librarians, who actively sought to engage him, helped open a new world to de la Peña. The author of novels for young adults, including Ball Don’t Lie and Mexican Whiteboy, de la Peña recounted his "path to books" in the closing keynote of SLJ's Public Library Leadership Think Tank, held April 5 at the New York Public Library.

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...

While some readers may view particular story elements as clichés, a fan might see them as enduring archetypes...

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.

SLJ caught up with prolific author and history buff David Baldacci for a candid interview about his new YA book The 39 Clues: Cahills vs. Vespers: Day of Doom (Scholastic), his writing inspirations, the importance of museums and libraries, his lifelong passion for literacy, and his belief that literacy is the key to ending poverty in America.