Resources

Literacy Center.net - This site "provides safe learning activities for parents and teachers to share with young children. All online lessons are free of advertising and free of charge." The activities include recognizing upper and lower case letters, numbers, shapes and colors as well as some basic spelling. The activities are available in English, Dutch, French and Spanish.

The publisher DK has created a kids page with links to a variety of materials including internet games kids can play, lesson plans, DK books related to school topics, etc.

Sylvan Dell Publishing is a small and relatively new press out of South Carolina producing high quality books for younger children. Their tag line is "science and math through literature". Unlike many efforts in this vein, these are good stories that happen to impart knowledge through good writing and superior illustration. The noble intention of imparting knowledge fortunately does not suffocate the story telling.

They have twenty-five titles in print and if you are teaching kindergarten through third graders anything to do with the environment, ecology, animals and marine life, and related topics, it is probably worth visiting their site. They have lesson plans, activity guides and links to related websites, all arranged by title. They also have their titles aligned to various state and federal standards. Finally they also have them measured according to the Lexile, Accelerated Reader and Reading Count measures. We carry their full range of books.

Slightly Foxed is a delightful British quarterly publication launched in 2004. As they describe their mission:

Eclectic, elegant and entertaining, Slightly Foxed unearths books of lasting interest, old and new, all of them in print. Each issue contains 96 pages of personal recommendations from contributors who write with passion and wit. Slightly Foxed aims to strike a blow for lasting quality - for the small and individual against the corporate and the mass produced.

Their remit is all literature, not just children's, however, probably 20-30% of their articles either are about children's books or touch on them.

I like the fact that they focus on sustaining attention on lasting quality, and the fact that they often cover children's books. However, their strength is simply excellent and compelling writing. The quality of the essays reflects their choice of contributors and the value of what those contributor's have to say.

Of the many thousands of books I have purchased in my life, I doubt I have ever purchased a book on cooking. And yet I found myself reading an essay some months ago by a contributor recollecting and elaborating on a cooking book from the 50's or 60's. And not just reading the essay but thinking to myself, "I need to keep my eyes open for that book".

If you want great writing about neglected books I highly recommend Slightly Foxed to you.

August House is an independent publisher based in Atlanta, Georgia. They have a strong focus on the storytelling aspect of reading, i.e. not only the quality of the story as literature but the story as spoken.

The August House homepage has links to their Learning Center which includes Lesson Plans for many of their books, Story Cove (a collection of animated stories), and other resources.

Just One More Book!! is a wonderful site with podcast interviews with authors, illustrators and others involved in the book industry.

It is so delightful when you find someone who has written a piece on an issue which you might have been mulling over and find that they have written about it much better than you ever could have.

One of the issues motivating the establishment of Through the Magic Door has been to try and counteract the very large volume of unremittingly negative children's books that have come out in the past couple of decades. Some of these are wonderfully well written. Many have been award winners. But there are so many and they are so dark.

It makes you want to take up arms - Optimists of the World Unite!

I have just discovered an author, Barbara Feinberg, who has written a delightful piece which is an exploration of why our children are being burdened with all these negative novels. Please take a look at her article, Reflections on the "Problem Novel" which is adapted from her book, Welcome to Lizard Motel.

With her delightful essay, I can safely point to her words and restrain myself from ranting.

Mathematica Policy Research Inc. is a contractor that conducts a good deal of research on behalf of the Federal government on the efficacy of various health and educational programs. As such, they have a lot of research on many related childhood programs funded by the government.

The Florida Center for Reading Research was established by Governor Jeb Bush in January, 2002. It is jointly administered at Florida State University by the Learning Systems Institute and the College of Arts and Sciences.

The Florida Center for Reading Research Mission:
1. To conduct basic research on reading, reading growth, reading assessment, and reading instruction that will contribute to the scientific knowledge of reading and benefit students in Florida and throughout the nation.
2. To disseminate information about research-based practices related to literacy instruction and assessment for children in pre-school through 12th grade.
3. To conduct applied research that will have an immediate impact on policy and practices related to literacy instruction in Florida.
4. To provide technical assistance to Florida's schools and to the State Department of Education for the improvement of literacy outcomes in students from pre-K through 12th grade.

The National Center for Eduction Statistics is great place to start any project where you are trying to wade through the often contradictory research.

The US Census Bureau can be a fascinating font of information about this incredibly diverse country and it is amazing what nooks and crannies they have statistics on, including books and reading.

If you have not already seen this, The Humanities Resource Center has released an excellent study, The Humanities Indicator Prototype, which attempts to measure, as the name suggests, the nature of and degree of engagement between the humanities and the general culture. Follow the link to the main page.

Part V, The Humanities in American Life, is the section particularly pertinent to those of us focusing on the role of reading and children’s literature. In particular, Section A covers Adult Literacy, Family Literacy, and Book Reading.

This is an excellent collation of information from disparate sources and the general observations and conclusions map well to research we have been doing at Through the Magic Door which is more concentrated on these same trends but with particular focus on young people rather than the population at large.

The one element I do not see addressed is the degree of concentration of reading. Based on only two studies some years apart, it would appear to me that in the US, discretionary reading is highly concentrated. Approximately 50% of the population read nothing for pleasure in a given year, 40% of the population reads about 20% of the books consumed in a year and 10% of the population does approximately 80% of the discretionary reading. The closest the study comes to shedding light on this issue is measurement of levels of prose proficiency. The US comes ninth among twenty-two OECD countries (and ahead of all the big European countries such as UK and Germany) in terms of prose proficiency but it also has one of the most bi-polar distributions. 21% of the population reads at the highest level of proficiency and 21% reads at the lowest level. Three Scandinavian countries (four of the nine countries that are ahead of the US) have similarly high levels of the population reading at the most proficient level but are more effective at minimizing the percentage of the population reading at the lowest levels. For Sweden, Norway and Finland, 24% of the population reads at the highest literacy level (compared to the US’s 21%) but only 9% read at the lowest level (compared to the US’s 21%).
Other interesting findings in this report:

43% of the population read no books for pleasure in the prior 12 months. That figure is for 2002. More recent studies for the US that I have seen all hover around the 50% mark not having read a book in the prior 12 months. In Europe the corresponding figure tends to average 55% but with marked national and regional variations.

While overall voluntary reading has been declining for a number of years, the most marked declines are among the younger demographics. Between 1992 and 2002, voluntary reading declined from 59.8% to 51% for 18-24 year olds and from 63.8% to 58.4% for 25-34 year olds. Remember, this is a measure of people that read at least a single book.

All demographics showed an increase in the habit of daily reading to children in their household, increasing from 53% to 58% between 1993 and 2001. Households with the mother having a college degree education or higher (about 25% of the population) had the highest rates of daily reading to children at 73%.

A neat resource for e-texts and includes a children's section.

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