Teens

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.

Encourage your students to harness their creative energies, follow their interests and passions, and put their 21st-century skills to good use. That's exactly what a contest for K–12 students from ThingLink and Rosen Digital aims to do. Thanks to the new contest, kids have an opportunity to create interactive ThingLink images, connect multiple resources into a cohesive presentation, and share their projects with a large community. And even better, they can win an iPad Mini or an annual subscription to one of Rosen Digital's online databases.

This sci-fi thriller from Universal Pictures opens in theaters on April 19, 2013. Based on a yet-to-be-published graphic novel (Radical Publishing) by movie director/writer Joseph Kosinki, Oblivion (PG-13) is set 60 years after Earth is attacked by alien invaders. The entire human population has been relocated, and Jack Harper (Tom Cruise), a drone repairmen and part of a large-scale venture to extract vital resources, is one of the few remaining individuals stationed on a planet left in ruins. Update your collections with a selection of novels that prophesize an often earth-shattering (sometimes literally), tantalizingly thought-provoking, and always page-turning future for our planet and humankind.

Get read for summer reading with three mysteries by popular writers: Mary Jane Clark’s Footprints in the Sand: A Piper Donovan Mystery, Frances Brody’s A Medal for Murder: A Kate Shackleton Mystery, and Alan Bradley’s Speaking from Among the Bones: A Flavia de Luce Novel.

In support of New York Times best-selling author Laurie Halse Anderson’s classic young adult novel, Speak, its publisher, Macmillan, is teaming up with RAINN (Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network) to raise funds for programs to end sexual violence. The campaign, nicknamed #Speak4RAINN, will be launched on April 2 (coinciding with the National Sexual Assault and Awareness Day of Action) and will run through April, which is Sexual Assault Awareness Month.

This month's star listings include That is Not a Good Idea by Mo Willems, among others.

Youth Services of Tulsa, OK, has announced the addition of Tulsa City-County Library’s branches as official Safe Place sites for teens. Safe Place provides runaways and other youth in a crisis a safe place in their own neighborhoods, where they can seek help with issues like abuse, serious family conflicts, and other dangers.

I fully admit that this may seem strange to many readers of this blog, but one of my favorite things to do after reading a historical novel is to read up about the facts of the history the novelist used.  Similarly, if a novel I’m reading revolves around some particular subject–anthropology, math, whatever–I tend to [...]

Over on my personal blog, my mom, co-blogger, and Adult Books 4 Teens reviewer, Sarah Flowers, has a post up about a workshop on YA servives she’s teaching.  As an icebreaker, she asked participants what books they were reading when they were 15.  My response is somewhat muddled, because I don’t remember my reading from that particular [...]