News & Features

Newbery-winning author Rebecca Stead’s Liar & Spy has won this year’s Guardian Children's Fiction Prize, a literary award that annually recognizes one children’s fiction book written for children or young adults that is published in the United Kingdom. Stead is the first American author to earn this distinction, only recently available to US writers since 2012.

If schools want their students to become readers for life, then school libraries should be sure to include fiction ebooks as they build their digital collections, Debbie Swartz, Library Technology Facilitator, Mesquite (TX) Independent School District (ISD), noted during her “Meeting Students Where THEY Learn,” presentation during The Digital Shift: Reinventing Libraries, hosted by Library Journal and School Library Journal.

World Book Night has selected 35 books for its annual celebration dedicated to spreading the love of reading. In its third year, the program will mobilize tens of thousands of volunteers on April 23 to distribute half a million paperback editions of the chosen titles, nine of which are for children’s and young adult readers.

Librarian Misti Jenkins, formerly an English teacher at the Nashville, TN, high school she now serves, shares her experiences in adapting from a predominately Spanish-speaking population of English Language Learners (ELL) to one that is comprised largely of Nepali and Burmese refugees. Here are her recommendations for ways to reach out to all students, regardless of their backgrounds.

Critters glide, jiggle, cavort, and giggle as confetti flies in Loud Crow Interactive's latest app by Sandra Boynton, 'But Not the Hippopotamus.'

A group of aspiring Latino writers gathered in Brooklyn, NY, earlier this month at the second annual Comadres and Compadres Latino Writers Conference held at Medgar Evers College. Approximately half of the 75 writers and publishing professionals in attendance to exchange advice, tips, and words of inspiration participated in panels dedicated specifically to children’s literature.

Coupled with the much-anticipated Google Play for Education store, the Nexus 7 bolsters Google’s growing claim to the K–12 tablet landscape.

Star Wars: Jedi Academy Written and drawn by Jeffrey Brown Scholastic, $12.99 Cartoonist Jeffrey Brown made a name for himself in the 2000s with a series of self-published black-and-white, highly confessional autobiographical graphic novels, like Clumsy, Unlikely and AEIOU. More recently, Brown has made many more fans with his Darth Vader & Son and Vader’s [...]

Learning history is learning about the rise and fall of empires. And what type of stories are our students pursuing in their leisure reading? Could it be the rise and fall of empires? This author has some theories.