Resources

Each week for the past two years The Daily Telegraph's literary editor has asked a contributor to name and describe his or her "Book of the Century", and today the series concludes with Arthur C. Clarke's choice. The full selection invites comparison with a list drawn up by The Telegraph a century ago; we print both here.

The comparison cannot, however, be exact. All the books chosen in 1899 were fiction - the paper offered its readers the "100 Best Novels in the World", selected by the editor "with the assistance of Sir Edwin Arnold, K. C. I. E, H. D. Traill, D. C. L, and W. L. Courtney, LL. D.".

The modern list includes poetry, plays, history, diaries, philosophy, economics, memoirs, biography and travel writing. It is certainly eclectic, ranging from Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, selected by David Sylvester, to The Wind in the Willows, chosen by John Bayley, and Down with Skool, Wendy Cope's Book of the Century.

So what should you do when a child throws a tantrum? Many parents, determined not to be cruel or counterproductive, latch on to pre-approved language from books. Walk through a Manhattan playground and you’ll hear parents responding to their dirt-throwing, swing-stealing offspring with a studied flatness. A toddler whirling into a rage is quietly instructed, "Use your words." A preschooler who clocks his classmate is offered the vaguely Zen incantation "Hands are not for hitting." A kid demanding a Popsicle is given a bland demurral: "I’m sorry, but I don’t respond to whining." (The preferred vocal inflection is that of a customer-service representative informing an irate caller that the warranty has, indeed, expired.) The brusque imperative "Say 'please'!" has been supplanted by the mildest of queries: "Is there a nicer way to say that?" The efficacy of this clinical approach has not been confirmed by science, but it certainly feels scientific, in part because the parents conduct themselves as if their child were the subject of a peer-reviewed experiment.

In this confrontation-averse age of parenting, in which the "escalation" of emotions is considered a mark of failure, a favorite way of inculcating discipline is the reading of picture books. The language of a good children’s story is precise and consistent, offering a genial way for parents to address misbehavior. The Bank Street Bookstore, in Manhattan, now has a section called "Special Needs," with hundreds of picture books categorized by theme, such as "Manners” and “School" and "Siblings."

Results from this meta-analysis of the impacts of home and parent programs on the literacy skills of young children indicate that these interventions yield a moderate to large effect on oral language outcomes and general cognitive abilities. These effects appear to be robust to variations in children’s ages and demographic characteristics of families. Additionally, the effects of these programs on children’s oral language skills were consistent across measures of simple vocabulary and measures of more complex oral language skills.

Parents were asked how important they thought it was to teach their children certain things to prepare them for kindergarten. Sixty-two percent of children had parents who reported is [sic] was essential to teach their children about sharing, 56 percent had parents who reported it was essential to teach the alphabet, 54 percent had parents who reported it was essential to teach numbers, 45 percent had parents who reported it was essential to teach them how to read, and 41 percent had parents who reported it was essential to show them how to hold a pencil (table 3).

Parents were asked about the frequency with which they or other family members read to the child in the past week. Fifty-five percent of children were read to every day, 28 percent were read to three or more times in the past week, 13 percent were read to once or twice in the past week, and 3 percent were not read to at all in the past week (table 4). For children who were read to in the past week, the mean daily reading time was about 21 minutes.

Reported on a scale of 0 to 500, national average reading scores of 4th- and 8th-graders were higher in 2007 than in 1992, by 4 and 3 points, respectively (table 123). These 2007 scores were also higher than the 2005 scores. The reading score of 12th-graders was 6 points lower in 2005 (the most recent assessment year for grade 12) than in 1992. In the most recent assessment, females at each grade level outscored their male counterparts. For example, 12th-grade females scored 13 points higher than males in 2005. Average scores were higher in 2007 than in 1992 for White, Black, Hispanic, and Asian/Pacific Islander 4th-graders (ranging from 6 to 16 points) and for White, Black, and Hispanic 8th-graders (ranging from 5 to 7 points), while scores were lower in 2005 than in 1992 for White, Black, and Hispanic 12th-graders (ranging from 5 to 7 points).

The 2007 main NAEP reading assessment of states found that the average reading proficiency of public school 4th- and 8th-graders varied across participating jurisdictions (the 50 states, the Department of Defense overseas and domestic schools, and the District of Columbia). For 4th-graders in public schools, the U.S. average score was 220, with average scores in participating jurisdictions ranging from 197 in the District of Columbia to 236 in Massachusetts (table 121). For 8th-graders in public schools, the U.S. average score was 261, with average scores in participating jurisdictions ranging from 241 in the District of Columbia to 273 in the Department of Defense schools, Massachusetts, and Vermont (table 122).

This research focused on what parents do rather than their status. Emphasis was on those ongoing processes considered to be alterable as part of the teaching-learning process. Of the six home processes examined, independence and responsibility, diverse leaisure activities, and, even more significantly, parental encouragement of reading correlated most highly with leisure reading, controlling for gender and socioeconomic status.

The active involvement of children in hobbies, family and individual activities, and trips and outings (whether strictly educational or recreational) was positively related to leisure reading. Children from these homes tended to be involved in more of everything - sports, hobbies, and reading - indicating that rather than displace reading, such activities might nurture reading in a dynamic interactive setting.

Reading is a construction of meaning from written text. It is an active, cognitive, and affective process.

Background knowledge and prior experience are crtical to the reading process.

Social interaction is essential in learning to read.

Reading and writing develop together.

Reading involves complex thinking.

Environments rich in literacy experiences, resources, and models facilitate reading development.

Engagement in the reading task is key in successfully learning to read.

Children's understanding of print are not the same as adults' understanding.

Children develop phonemic awareness and knowledge of phonics through a variety of literacy opportunities, models, and deomonstrations.

Children learn successful reading strategies in the context of real reading.

Children learn best when teachers emply a variety of strategies to model and demonstrate reading knowledge, strategy, and skills.

Children need the opportunity to read, read, read.

Monitoring the development of reading processes is vital to student success.

Increase students' access to informational text.
Increase the time students spend working with informational text in instructional activities.
Explicitly teach comprehension strategies.
Create opportunities for students to use informational text for authentic purposes.

You can't infer a child's reading habits from tests of comprehension or critical reading, nor vice versa.

Region: What have you found in your own research about the effects of schooling on test scores?

Heckman: Very strong effects, much stronger than what Herrnstein and Murray claim in their book [The Bell Curve]. In a paper published last year with Kathleen Mullen and Karsten Hansen in the Journal of Econometrics, we found substantial effects of an extra year's schooling on the Armed Forces Qualifying Test, the same test they used. The point is that the test they used is an achievement test. It embodies knowledge that people acquire through experience.

Region: So it's not nature versus nurture, but rather nature with nurture.

Heckman: Exactly. It's an interaction. Epigenetics is the field that studies this. There are a lot of recent books and scholarly articles on this topic. I was just at the National Institutes of Health last weekend, and part of the discussion we had there was about this. It's a fascinating field.

The people who favor genetic explanations of social phenomena need to be careful about two things. The methods they use for determining heritability assume additivity. They don't allow for interaction. Secondly, when one does the standard additive analysis for different socioeconomic groups, one finds that the socioeconomic status critically affects the so-called heritability coefficient.

A paper published in Psychological Science (2003) by Eric Turkheimer [et al.] shows very strong family background effects on a number of heritability coefficients. Richer families are providing ways for children to override some defective genes and enhance those genes that are productive. We are just beginning to understand these mechanisms. They are very important.

Heckman: There's a very strong bias among economists against some of the basic findings of the child development literature. Many economists assume that family effects operate primarily through cognitive child ability. A lot of formal economic models view the development process solely in terms of raising IQs. Or else they assume that IQ is purely heritable. Neither view is correct.

Enriched early intervention programs targeted to disadvantaged children have had their biggest effect on noncognitive skills: motivation, self-control and time preference. We know that there's a scientific basis for this finding. The prefrontal cortex, which is a center of these noncognitive skills, matures late. The executive function, the very definition of ourselves as people, the way we motivate ourselves, these things are malleable until quite late stages - into the 20s, according to research by neuroscientists. This means that in principle we can modify these behaviors. Noncognitive skills are powerfully predictive of a number of socioeconomic measures (crime, teenage pregnancy, education and the like) as I show in a recent paper with Jora Stixrud and Sergio Urzua.

. . . The standard model developed by Gary Becker and Nigel Tomes implicitly assumes that early and late childhood investments are perfect substitutes, that one can make up later for what disadvantaged families neglect early. They also assume a single market skill.

For the study of early childhood investments, these are bad assumptions. First, skills are multiple in nature. A proper accounting of human skills recognizes both cognitive and noncognitive skills. Second, investments raise the stock of later skills through self-productivity and complementarity. Early advantages reinforce each other through self-productivity and complementarity, reducing the cost of future learning. Because of these life-cycle dynamics, the substitution between early and late investments in children is low. The most economically efficient way to remediate the disadvantage caused by adverse family environments is to invest in children when they are young.

We have found that for severely disadvantaged children, there are no levels of later childhood skill investments that can bring the children to a level of social and economic performance attainable from well-targeted early investments. We find that both social and emotional skills are essential in producing successful people. These findings change the way economists think about the human capital formation process.

If we don't provide disadvantaged young children with the proper environments to foster cognitive and noncognitive skills, we'll create a class of people without such skills, without motivation, without the ability to contribute to the larger society nearly as much as they could if they'd been properly nurtured from an early age. Neglecting the early years creates an underclass that is arguably growing in the United States. The family is the major source of human inequality in American society.

Most macroeconomists think of human capital as education, measured by years of school. Or if they're a little more sophisticated, they measure human capital by test scores like IQ or an achievement test. Neglected are all the noncognitive abilities that are produced by healthy families. Deficiencies in these skills can be partially remediated, as we know from the early intervention programs. Not completely remediated, but certainly gaps can be closed. The things we used to think of as soft and fuzzy have a real effect on behavior.

If a child starts out with low levels of cognitive and noncognitive ability, it becomes much less profitable to invest in the young adult. That's the notion of complementarity. If a child has a low level of ability at age 17, then productivity of investment in that person is much lower than it is in somebody who has ability and motivation. The major contributors to the college-going gap by child family income class have to do with child ability. Richer families are much more likely to send their kids to college, but once one conditions on the ability of the child at age 17, virtually all of the income effect goes away. It's all about the ability that's embodied in the child from a lifetime of early investments. So families play a huge role, but it's in making the kid college-ready. It's human ability, or rather, abilities. This is one place where Adam Smith was wrong, actually. He has a passage in The Wealth of Nations which I used to believe and used to quote in classes. And then I realized that Smith was dead wrong.

Region: As well as dead; he won't be able to respond to your critique.

Heckman: You're quite right. [Laughter] Dimitriy Masterov and I actually visited his tomb last year in Edinburgh, where we presented our work on Scottish skill formation.

But anyway, Smith says people are basically born the same and at age 8 one can't really see much difference among them. But then starting at age 8, 9, 10, they pursue different fields, they specialize and they diverge. In his mind, the butcher and the lawyer and the journalist and the professor and the mechanic, all are basically the same person at age 8.

This is wrong. IQ is basically formed by age 8, and there are huge differences in IQ among people. Smith was right that people specialize after 8, but they started specializing before 8. On the early formation of human skill, I think Smith was wrong, although he was right about many other things. And Dimitriy and I said that in the speeches we gave while in Scotland last year. We wanted to be a little titillating. But I think these observations on human skill formation are exactly why the job training programs aren't working in the United States and why many remediation programs directed toward disadvantaged young adults are so ineffective. And that's why the distinction between cognitive and noncognitive skill is so important, because a lot of the problem with children from disadvantaged homes is their values, attitudes and motivations.

Cognitive skills such as IQ can't really be changed much after ages 8 to 10. But with noncognitive skills there's much more malleability. That's the point I was making earlier when talking about the prefrontal cortex. It remains fluid and adaptable until the early 20s. That's why adolescent mentoring programs are as effective as they are. Take a 13-year-old. You're not going to raise the IQ of a 13-year-old, but you can talk the 13-year-old out of dropping out of school. Up to a point you can provide surrogate parenting.

So, coming back to job training and other interventions targeted toward disadvantaged adolescents, mainstream discussions miss the basic economics of the skill formation process. When we understand how that works, that skills build on each other, it's very common-sensical. It's not just IQ, or achievement measured by a test. That's very hard for many economists to understand. There are interactions among IQ, cognitive ability as measured by an achievement test and noncognitive ability.

This document pulls together existing research about the impact of literacy on five areas in a person's life: economic well-being, aspirations, family life, health and civic/cultural engagement. It presents overwhelming evidence that literacy has a significant relationship with a person’s happiness and success. It gives a clear indication of the dangers of poor literacy and also the benefits of improving literacy for the individual, the community, the workforce and the nation.

The evidence about the benefits of parents being involved in their children’s education in general, and their children’s literacy activities in particular, is unequivocal. For example, research shows that parental involvement in their children’s learning positively affects the child’s performance at school, both in primary (Jeynes, 2005) and secondary school (Jeynes, 2007). The impact is the same regardless of ethnic background, family income, maternal level of education, or child’s gender (Deaher et al., 2006; Jeynes, 2005). There are also numerous studies that have shown that children who grow up in a stimulating home environment – one which has a great emphasis on learning opportunities – do better academically, regardless of socio-economic background (e.g. van Steensel, 2006). According to Desforges and Abouchaar (2003), "parental involvement has a significant effect on children’s achievement and adjustment even after all other factors (such as social class, maternal education and poverty) have been taken out of the equation between children's aptitudes and their achievement".

In addition to higher academic achievement and greater cognitive competence, parental involvement leads to greater problem-solving skills, greater school enjoyment, better school attendance, fewer behavioural problems at school, and greater social and emotional development (Melhuish, Sylva, Sammons et al., 2001).

I created abookandahug.com to help you find a book for your child. It's important to match children up with books they want to read. It can make all the difference in the world if you can figure out his or her "reading personality." So, just who is your child and what does your child look for in a book? A Books For Boys page is coming soon to help you define your boy in book terms. A Books For Girls page will follow on its heels.

The Butler Children’s Literature Center at Dominican University serves as an examination center for children’s and young adult books published annually in the United States, and as an historical collection of the best children’s and young adult literature published nationally and internationally. It also serves as an evidence-based, best practices professional collection in support of the application and integration of children’s and young adult literature in classrooms, libraries, childcare centers, and homes.

Swedes are big readers. In this country of nine million people, 58 million books were borrowed from libraries in 2008. More than 40 million books were sold in the same year. Books are on offer everywhere from supermarkets to gas stations and 83 per cent of Swedes have read one in the past 12 months. As book reading is generally regarded as an admirable pastime, there should be no reason to worry over the Swedes’ cultural habits.

An exchange of experience across borders is essential and it opens new opportunities in a globalised media society as ideas for projects and synergies can be put to a worldwide use. As an information and service portal "Reading Worldwide" intends to inspire a transfer of knowledge and provide support to multipliers in the field of reading promotion.

WARNING - The surgeon general reports that having these many free books at your disposal can be highly addictive.

Over 8,000 online books by 3,500 authors at your fingertips!

This site contains about one thousand books from hundreds of authors. The collection of these books are in the following categories: fictions/novels, short stories, poems, essays, plays. Many of these books are works of American Literature, English Literature, and Irish Literature from well-known authors such as William Shakespeare, Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, Oscar Wilde, Robert Frost, Edgar Allan Poe, Alexander Pope, Arthur Conan Doyle,Jane Austen... and more authors' works will be added to the online collection.

We offer searchable online literature for the student, educator, or enthusiast. To find the work you're looking for start by looking through the author index. We currently have over 1900 full books and over 3000 short stories and poems by over 250 authors. Our quotations database has over 8500 quotes.

UT's Bigler was one of the scholars heavily involved in the process of its creation. Bigler is an adamant proponent of desegregation in schools on moral grounds. "It's an enormous step backward to increase social segregation," she says. However, she also admitted that "in the end, I was disappointed with the amount of evidence social psychology could muster [to support it]. Going to integrated schools gives you just as many chances to learn stereotypes as to unlearn them."

I am not the only one alarmed by modern parental behavior. Randi Jacoby, a speech and language specialist in New York, recently told me in an e-mail message: "Parents have stopped having good communications with their young children, causing them to lose out on the eye contact, facial expression and overall feedback that is essential for early communication development.

"Young children require time and one-on-one feedback as they struggle to formulate utterances in order to build their language and cognitive skills. The most basic skills are not being taught by example, and society is falling prey to the quick response that our computer generation has become accustomed to.

"Parents need to be reminded of the significance of their communicative model."

Angela Duckworth, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania, has spent the last seven years trying to find reliable, repeatable methods to improve self-control in children. When I spoke to her recently, she told me about a six-week-long experiment that she and some colleagues conducted in 2003 with 40 fifth-grade students at a school in Philadelphia.

"We did everything right," she told me: led the kids through self-control exercises, helped them reorganize their lockers, gave them rewards for completing their homework. And at the end of the experiment, the students dutifully reported that they now had more self-control than when they started the program. But in fact, they did not: the children who had been through the intervention did no better on a variety of measures than a control group at the same school. "We looked at teacher ratings of self-control, we looked at homework completion, we looked at standardized achievement tests, we looked at G.P.A., we looked at whether they were late to class more," Duckworth explained. "We got zero effect on everything." Despite that failure, Duckworth says she is convinced that it is possible to boost executive function among children - she just thinks it will require a more complex and thoroughgoing program than the one that she and her colleagues employed. "It’s not impossible,” she concludes, “but it’s damn hard."

There are not yet firm experimental data that prove that Tools of the Mind works.

This is a collection of reviews of great books for kids, ideas of ways to use them in the classroom and collections of books and activities about particular subjects, curriculum areas, themes and professional topics.

The Children's Picture Book Database at Miami University (CPBD@MU) is a bibliography for designing literature-based thematic units for all disciplines, including health education.

Our database contains abstracts of over 5000 picture books for children, preschool to grade 3. Search over 900 keywords (topics, concepts, and skills) to locate books with storylines adaptable to your curriculum or program. Teachers, librarians, parents, students, and other professionals love this multidisciplinary, learner-centered resource.

We are continually expanding our database to include new picture book titles and content weblinks for frequently used keywords. Over 800 weblinks provide you with up-to-date content knowledge for each keyword so you can have ongoing professional development in several disciplines. In short, the CPBD@MU offers you two complementary resources: developmentally appropriate literature for use with young children and up-to-date content knowledge for selected topics, concepts, and skills.

Having the CPBD@MU online gives you the advantage of being the designers of learner-centered curriculum and instruction while meeting the needs, interests, and abilities of your students on a local level. The CPBD@MU can also supplement curriculum resources available from professional organizations, including educational, community, federal, and commercial sources.

The purpose of this database is to create a tailored reading list of quality children's literature or to find out if a book has won one of the indexed awards. I expect the user to be a librarian or a teacher intervening for a child-reader, however anyone may make use of it to find the best in children's literature including parents, book store personnel, and children and young adults themselves.

Welcome to Anastasia Suen’s 5 Great Books blog!

Children’s books have always been part of my life. The author of 115 books, I wrote my first book when I was eleven. I started teaching elementary school in 1977 (K,1,5,6). I read to my students every day, and I wrote for them too.

Now I teach writing at elementary schools as a visiting author. I talk to the students about how a book is made and I guide them as they write. I focus on the six traits of writing because that’s how I have written for years.

Supporting the Helping Books/Helping Families Program Helping Books Connection is a resource center compiled to assist families and caring adults with finding and using quality children’s literature as a tool for individual and group discussion activities. The Literature Database link is a collection of children’s literature titles, both fiction and nonfiction, covering topics that focus on ethical and personal issues relevant to young people. These titles have been reviewed and selected by librarians, teachers, and other trained adults working with children’s literature. Selection of the titles is based on the guidelines for choosing quality literature. The link to Helping Books Resources lists programs, web sites, books, videos, and other tools that provide guidelines for the use of children’s literature to generate discussion.

What is the most important thing for children to learn? Heartwood Institute is a non-profit organization dedicated to helping teach children universal attributes of good character that form the foundations of community. Through research, product development, and support for teachers and families, Heartwood is contributing to a better world for all.Heartwood has been at the vanguard of children's character education for 20 years. Heartwood's literature-based ethics and character education program for children:

Boosts Achievement while Building Character
Reduces Bullying and Disciplinary Referrals
Meets Academic Standards for Language Arts and Social Studies

Welcome to Library Booklists! This website consists of four sections: original booklists on various topics, primarily but not entirely focused on themes, places, characters, and plots of crime novels; annotated lists of other booklists, primarily but not entirely focused on fiction, for adults, kids, and teens; a growing calendar of authors' birthdates, organised by month, with links; and some resources for reading groups (discussion questions, recommended books, how to start a group, etc.).

WorldCat is the world's largest network of library content and services. WorldCat libraries are dedicated to providing access to their resources on the Web, where most people start their search for information.

Publishers of Quality Children’s Literature Since 1984

Publishers of Rea and Rebecca Berg's History Through Literature Study Guides and Fine Children's Literature including the work of award winning authors Ingri and Edgar Parin d'Aulaire, Genevieve Foster, Albert Marrin, James Daugherty, Marguerite Henry, and Brinton Turkle. We are honored to publish yesterday's Newbery and Caldecott award-winners for today’s children.

They say that kids and teens don't read anymore, but "they" don't know Imaginator Press readers. Our readers love books; they camp out at bookstores to see their favorite authors, read their favorite books over and over again, create attractive displays from their favorite series, and always carry a book with them where ever they go. Our readers are highly imaginative and creative, as well as curious about the world. We publish books that feed both the imagination and the intellect.

The largest non-profit trade association representing independent publishers.

Explore. Imagine. Create. Connect. Give Back. That’s what Barefoot Books is all about. It’s exploring other cultures, our planet, ourselves. It’s making time for make-believe and letting imaginations run wild and free. Most of all, it’s about using the power of stories to nourish the creative spark in everyone and strengthen connections with family, the global community, and the earth.

"In large part, our results can be explained by the fact that low-income children who attended higher-quality child care developed reading and math skills in early childhood that likely prepared them for later achievement in middle childhood," according to Eric Dearing, associate professor of applied developmental psychology at Boston College and the study's lead author.

Welcome to Literacy is Priceless! As a literacy and technology enthusiast, I am always sharing fun and free digital tools, reading and literacy resources with my colleagues and friends. This blog is my attempt to share useful ideas, activities and downloads with educators and life-long learners across the globe.

A newly retired, ex-commuting book and opera-aholic personal assistant living in the oldest recorded town in the UK, Colchester

A blog which offers book reviews for young people of preschool to high school ages by a children's librarian with decades of experience in reading guidance.

It is said that the young Alcibiades, visiting a grammar school around 430 B.C., asked the teacher for a volume of Homer and, hearing there was none, struck the hapless teacher and left. Ancient geographers like Strabo thought to learn their art from the blind bard; Stoics studied what they considered Homer's didactic allegories. Military commanders pored over his lays so as to avoid Agamemnon's errors and mimic Odysseus's guile. Socrates called Homer the "best and most divine" of poets, and Plato's dialogues, for all their censure, refer to him, by one estimate, 331 times. Plutarch claims that Aristotle himself prepared an edition of the Iliad for his pupil Alexander, who kept the book "with his dagger under his pillow, declaring that he esteemed it a perfect portable treasure of all military virtue and knowledge." A 2nd-century B.C. marble relief depicts Homer as Father of Humankind, crowned by Time and Space themselves.

It is not enough to teach children how to read, we must, in addition, teach children to want to read.

Saffron Tree brings to you an eclectic mix - children's books from India and the US, and pretty much all over the world that will help children connect to their cultural roots and also appreciate other cultures....

One of the bestselling preschool books of recent times was Walter the Farting Dog. At the same time, the American Library Association named as one of its best books Michael Rosen’s Sad Book, a book in which Mr. Rosen talks about his despair over the death of his son. I believe that, for most of us, what we want lies somewhere between a flatulent canine and overwhelming grief.

Liz B. began Tea Cozy in 2005. What is Tea Cozy? It's a discussion of books, movies, and TV shows; with an emphasis on books for children and teens. Guest contributors sometimes join in the conversation.

An experienced author, presenter and literacy expert for over 13 years, Mrs. Miller focuses primarily on the important world of children and family literacy. Her expertise as a writer and communicator also lends itself of consulting on business writing and communication. You can visit her at www.readingisforeveryone.org

Donalyn Miller is a 6th grade language arts teacher in Texas who is said to have a "gift": She can turn even the most reluctant (or, in her words, "dormant") readers into students who can't put their books down. Donalyn is the author of The Book Whisperer: Awakening the Inner Reader in Every Child (Jossey-Bass/Education Week Press). She first appeared in teachermagazine.org in the popular"Creating Readers" Ask The Mentor column. She writes about how to inspire and motivate student readers, and responds to issues facing teachers and other leaders in the literacy field.

As an English major in college, I used to study in the children’s book section of the university library because it felt like I was among friends. Since then, I’ve achieved my dream of having a home office lined with bookshelves full of children’s books, and I am also a children’s book writer. For a quick look at who I am, read this poem by James Stevenson, "Why": "Why is it/While other people/Are thinking about all kinds of/Important things.../I am thinking about/What it would be like/To jump barefoot/Into an open box/Of jelly donuts?"

The assorted book reviews (and other mostly book-related things) of a Stay-Home Mom with Four Daughters who has an Avid Love of Reading but is cursed with a Bad Memory. She hates wandering the stacks at the library and/or the bookstore looking for something good to read and so thrives off of recommendations.

Considering the data (and we all know it is about the DATA these days), boys score lower than girls on standardized reading tests and report less motivation and interest in reading. I often wonder how much of the disengagement many boys have for reading stems from classroom instruction designed by predominately female English teachers, though. When every class novel and reading activity filters solely through the predilections and worldview of a female teacher, boys can become demotivated and believe that their personal interests and opinions are not valued in English class. It is clear that when selecting books to read aloud, purchasing books for a library, or designing lessons, we must be mindful of the boys we teach and our latent prejudices about the reading material we offer to students.

Boys want the same thing that every reader wants--to open a book and find themselves in the pages. As teachers, invested in creating readers, we owe it to our boys to help them find such books.

Reflecting on my own experiences, it probably helps that I appreciate the same books many boys do. I love fantasy epics and authors like Roland Smith and Eoin Colfer. I am just as likely to pull Scott Westerfeld's new steampunk science fiction novel, Leviathan, out of my bag and recommend it as I am to suggest a title like Helen Frost's The Braid, a book geared toward girls. I don't have strong gender preferences in what I read myself, so providing a balance in the books I recommend to students and choose for us to read together in class seems natural to me.

We create a crisis when we define readers along gender lines, and I think boy readers get a bad rap. They will read fiction, they will read books that explore emotional issues, and they will read books that are longer than 100 pages. They will read. Instead of blaming our boys for their gender, or lowering our expectations for their literacy development, we should scrutinize any system where boys are hailed for their achievement in science and math class and allowed to define themselves as nonreaders

It's not like her to put a professional foot wrong. The much-loved Wilson has, after all, sold more than 25 million books, was until recently the most borrowed author in British libraries, and is a Dame (the first children's author to be so honoured). But last year she dared to suggest that too much freedom and "being invited to engage with ideas that they simply don't have the maturity to deal with" meant that childhood today was over by the age of 11.

One aspect of modern childhood she finds particularly perplexing is the way children have so much freedom in many ways – and in others, none at all. "In most loving families, if a child has a point, they're allowed to make it; they're allowed to argue with their parents. Whereas, in my generation, you'd get a clap on your head if you dared argue with your dad.

"On the other hand, they aren't allowed to play out in the streets any more. They don't play imaginary games. When I was at school, everyone in the playground up to a certain age played imaginary games. They were quite prosaic – cowboys and indians, or the Famous Five. Now, apart from very little kids with teddies being offered biscuits, they don't play imaginatively with each other. Adults are a part of children's lives all the time now. It can be good to protect and encourage children, but it stops children learning to get along with other children."

I’m Monica Edinger and this blog of mine is about teaching, my life’s work; literature, especially that created for children; history, especially as it is taught to and learned by children; Africa, especially Sierra Leone where I was a Peace Corps Volunteer; educational technology (say student blogging ); and other sundry topics as they come to my attention.

storytelling-exploring new ideas in travel,history culture and ...stories that make us...

The first wide-scale research into the use of whole books in literacy teaching in the UK has revealed that a quarter of primary school children are reading just one whole book a year in class. Incredibly, 12 per cent of primary school teachers said they have never read a complete book with their class. If the findings were extrapolated to all primaries across the country it would mean nearly 600,000 children never read a book in class with their teacher, while over 1.1 million would only study one whole book a year in class.

Being a mom and a writer is hard, and the only other people who know just how hard are other Mama Writers. We want you to know that you have a place to come where you belong, where you can feel like part of a real community. And that’s something very special.

Imagine, then, a dystopian horror tale in which virtually all books from the past were destroyed.

At back-to-school night last fall, I was prepared to ask my daughter's eighth-grade language arts teacher about something that had been bothering me immensely: the rise of Accelerated Reader, a "reading management" software system that helps teachers track student reading through computerized comprehension tests and awards students points for books they read based on length and difficulty, as measured by a scientifically researched readability rating. When the teacher announced during the class presentation that she refused to use the program, I almost ran up and hugged her.

Bilingual Readers is a brand new publishing company providing bilingual resources for families and communities. Growing up with two or more languages can be an enriching experience for children, parents and teachers alike, and it can also be a lot of fun!

Our catalogue of English/Spanish bilingual books, games and activities is a constantly growing source of materials, which will help parents to reinforce their children's language skills and instill a love of reading in them from day one.

Welcome! We have created the NCBLA Parent/Guardian Handbook to help you help your kids become lifelong readers and writers.

And, you have not one child, but three, all different ages, all different temperaments, all different interests. Do you read different books to each child individually? That adds up to 45 minutes a day. And how do you know what book to read to each one? Do you read to all three at once? What if your three year old gets up and walks away in the middle of the story? And what if the baby starts crying? And what if your eight year old doesn't want to read "baby books" any more? And what if you've been working all day and you're so bone tired that you can't even keep your eyelids open to read?

I know. I understand. I've been there, too, with three kids, two jobs, and a husband whose work requires him to travel extensively. So here's the bad news. The best thing you can do to help your child succeed in reading and in school is to read aloud to them, period, the end. Why? Because you, taking the time to read aloud to your children, especially when you are so very busy, shows them that you think words and reading and books are very important. Reading aloud to children enriches their vocabularies, models reading behaviors, expands their emotional expression, and introduces them to story, history, folklore, and culture, enlarging their world. They love you. When you take the time to read to your kids, their love for you spills over. It encompasses all that you do together, so they will automatically begin to love books and language, too. And kids who love books and language definitely have a leg up on everyone else when they start school.

Search Institute has identified the following building blocks of healthy development - known as Developmental Assets - that help young children grow up healthy, caring, and responsible.

Search Institute is a leading global innovator in discovering what children and adolescents need to become caring, healthy, and responsible adults. Drawing on extensive research, Search Institute brings hopeful solutions to pressing challenges in the lives of young people and their communities.

But if you go to the Brooklyn Public Library seeking a copy of "Tintin au Congo," Hergé’s second book in a series, prepare to make an appointment and wait days to see the book.

"It's not for the public," a librarian in the children’s room said this month when a patron asked to see it.

The limerick packs laughs anatomical
Into space that is quite economical.
But the good ones I've seen
So seldom are clean -
And the clean ones so seldom are comical.

and

The limerick's callous and crude,
Its morals distressingly lewd;
It's not worth the reading
By persons of breeding -
It's designed for us vulgar and rude.

a safe place t chat about books between cultures

Reflections of an Emergent Literacy Teacher

Reading Trails is the internet's most innovative social network for readers. Browse our network of intersecting trails to discover what to read next. Share your tastes by creating your own trails and writing book reviews.

Here we will meet the writers whose words are presenting nonfiction in a whole new way. Discover books that show how nonfiction writers are some of the best storytellers around. Learn how these writers practice their craft: research techniques, fact gathering and detective work. Check out how they find unusual tidbits, make the facts interesting and write something kids will love to read. Explore how photos and illustrations are integrated with the text to explain an artist's vision of the world. Consider what subjects are flooding the market and what still needs a voice. Rethink nonfiction for kids.

Obsessively seeking children's books of old to share with my son.

When we publish cheaply illustrated books of children's poetry full of bad rhymes or sticky-sweetness or flat prose rhythms we call "free verse," we express a secret contempt for the form. We tell the child, in so many words: You see? It really doesn't matter -- let's just shovel it in.

Whatever the art form being presented to children it must be vibrant, skillful, mysterious, thrilling. The child absorbs a work of art as adults seldom do -- takes it in, I mean, with her whole being. Images from childhood form the adult's vision. We remember in the deep secret places of the psyche the "great green room" of Margaret Wise Brown's "Goodnight Moon," or Robert Frost's "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," or William Carlos Williams's "This Is Just to Say," or Dr. Seuss's "Cat in the Hat." The language of childhood is our purest language -- it may be the last truly shared cultural language we have. We must not debase it -- least of all in our poetry.

For what happens when we, young and old, read imaginative literature? We withdraw. Novelist Philip Roth puts it well: "The best readers come to fiction to be free of all that noise, to have set loose in them the consciousness that's otherwise conditioned and hemmed in by all that isn't fiction. This is something that every child, smitten by books, understands immediately, though it's not at all a childish idea about the importance of reading." The noise to which he refers is that emanating from "a world where everybody else is working to change, persuade, tempt, and control" us.

Welcome to my biblioblog! I'm Carrie, a stay-at-home mom who enjoys reading and reviewing books.

Educational and fun ideas for children and families

These deal with the facts of life, and facts are most important things, but fancies are important too, and the fancies are not much cultivated today.

It is doubtful if fancy can be cultivated directly, it is too subtle and elusive, it must grow of itself, but conditions can be made conducive or the reverse. To be conducted through the realms of poetry and romance by a grown-up person, as one of a class of children all with differing needs and perceptions, at a given rate of speed, is not conducive to such growth.

To gain the greatest amount out of a book, one must read it as inclination leads; some parts are to be hurried over quickly, others read slowly and many times over; the mind will take what it needs, and dwell upon it, and make it its own.

Its connotations are really what make a book of use in stimulating the imagination. As a musical note is richer the more overtones it has, so a book is richer the more it ramifies into trains of thought. But there must be time and space for the thought to develop; the reader must not be interrupted by impertinent comments and alien suggestions.

At first the child merely knows that this story or that story is interesting, that certain other stories are not interesting, he does not attempt to analyse why. Later he will make his first true criticism; he will say, 'It does not seem real,' or 'Nobody would do so.' He has detected bad writing; his imagination refuses to give credence to what its instinct declares not to be true. Gradually these criticisms of matter are added to by criticisms of form, and we have 'Nobody would talk like that.'

What makes the child think that nobody would do thus and so, or that nobody would talk in such and such a way? Partly his knowledge of life as he has lived it, of course. Though he has lived a very small life and his experiences have necessarily been few, yet through the life of his imagination he has been able to live much more, he has gained a conception of life far beyond anything that he has ever experienced.

If one can imagine oneself a child of twelve years old denuded of any knowledge or idea of anything except what he can have known or seen in his daily life, one will at once see how much more meagre his conceptions would be than is actually the case. Therefore what makes the child think that this or that thing that he is reading about is false is the knowledge that he has gained through his imagination.

The power of judgment is like water running up hill; water cannot rise higher than its own level, and judgment cannot go beyond the experience which informs it. To be sure that the judgment is sound, the school in which the experience is gained must be true to life. Only the best in literature and art is this, and it is with the best in literature and art that our children must be familiar.

There is no education like self-education, and no stimulus to the imagination so good as that which it gives itself when allowed to roam through the pent-up stores of the world's imaginings at will.

There is a class of people known to all librarians as 'browsers.' They wander from shelf to shelf, now reading here, now there. Sometimes dipping into ten books in the hour, sometimes absorbed in one for the whole day. If we look back to our childhood we shall see how large a part 'browsing' had in our education. One book suggested another, and as we finished one we knew the next that was waiting to be begun. They stretched on and on in a delightful and never-ending vista. The joy of those hours when we sat cross-legged' on the floor, or perched on the top of a ladder, a new world hidden behind the covers of every book within reach, and perfect liberty to open the covers and enter at will, can never be forgotten.

We talk about 'creating a demand for books' among the children of the masses, and about ' giving them the reading habit,' and the best way to do this is to have a well-stocked reading-room of good books, books for grown-up people as well as for children, and let the children have free access to the shelves. They will be found reading strange things often, strange from the point of view of the grown-up person, that is. But in most cases their instincts will be good guides, and they will read what is best for them.

We love and admire certain things rather inspite of what people say than because of it. We like to compare notes with some one who enjoys the same things that we do, but the real enjoyment was there before. Beauty cannot be proved as a mathematical problem can. If beauty is its own excuse for being, it is also its own teacher for perceiving. Contact with beautiful things creates a taste for the beautiful, if there is any taste to be created.

Two teachers who read. A lot.