Ideas

Remember Google Search Story?   Google now offers the opportunity to tell stories by animating simulated Docs with its Story Builder. Each document can host up to ten participants and ten actions that may include staged edits.   Storytellers may add a soundtrack from a library of six styles.  Because no login is required to create [...]

Friday night a team of teacher librarians, and a few friends, hosted AASL’s first unconference. It all started with a conversation with Susan Ballard at a CiSSL Retreat at Rutgers this summer. I wondered if AASL would consider the idea of a participant-driven unconference event. Sue said, why not? and that she’d check on it [...]

How does a filmmaker adapt Markus Zusak’s bestseller The Book Thief, written in Death's candid point of view? Director Brian Percival tackles that question and more in this atypical family movie set in Nazi Germany. Starring Geoffrey Rush, Emily Watson, and Sophie Nélisse, the adaptation expands to theaters nationwide in the coming weeks.

At a tween-only library in Stockholm, the only patrons allowed are children between 10 and 13—a group that often feels too old for children’s sections but not yet ready for full-on YA experiences.

To compile our 2013 list of best audiobooks, we asked some audio-savvy school and public librarians for their recommendations. The following selections have been chosen for their outstanding text, narration, sound quality, and how well the audio enhances listeners’ appreciation of the written work.

Chair of the American Library Association’s Intellectual Freedom Committee Pat Scales responds to questions about book challenges, dystopian novels in elementary school, and the age-appropriateness of Bullying Prevention displays.

When the new social studies and the Common Core standards are used together to plan curriculum, the result is a truly powerful, integrated approach to learning. Here's a lesson that shows the way.

For those who can’t wait two more weeks to see Catching Fire, relief is at hand. The taut How I Live Now offers a slimmed down dystopian world at its most bucolic—a survival tale meets hot-and-heavy first love with a punkish swagger. The screenwriters have tweaked the snarky-but-soft-hearted narration of Meg Rosoff’s absorbing novel (Random, 2004), but given the heroine a still-defiant voice.

SLJ has compiled an expansive page of diversity resources—including materials on people of color, non-American cultures, LGBTQ issues, and disability—to help librarians better serve children and teens. From author interviews to collection development tools and from blogs to news coverage, these articles and reviews aim to give insight into issues that are becoming more relevant for kids each day.