Reading isn’t just for girls. It’s cool. It’s very cool. In fact, at Spring Lake Park High School in Minnesota, all the boys know that real men read.
It’s hard to miss this slogan while walking through the school’s hallways. There you’ll find 35 large posters of men enjoying a good read. And these role models aren’t celebrities or authors—they’re real men who the students encounter every day. more » » »
The International Reading Association provides online resources for use in the home or the classroom, to encourage reading and develop literacy skills. Created and collected by experienced educators (or, in the case of Choices booklists, by experienced kids) they're designed to make your teaching task a little easier and a lot more effective. The detailed, research-based lesson plans and activities are available from Kindergarten up to year 12.
Philip Pullman, Anne Fine, Michael Morpurgo and current Children's Laureate Michael Rosen are leading a rapidly growing movement of writers, illustrators, librarians, independent booksellers and others working in children's books to hit back at the publishers forthcoming age-guidance on children's books. Under the campaign slogan "No to Age Banding," the campaign is swiftly gathering signatures.
Introduced for sales reasons following research that showed that consumers wanted some age guidance to help them in choosing books (see our story from April), the first books are becoming available just as this considerable backlash is launched. Thus far, resistance has been unspoken: several publishers, including Bloomsbury, David Fickling and Walker Books, while not willing to say that they are against age guidance, are not putting the ranges onto their books.
In an unusual breach between publishers and their authors, the opposition campaign leaders seek to "disavow publicly any connection with such age-guidance figures," according to their statement, on the grounds that age guidance is ill-conceived and will damage the interests of young readers. They state a number of reasons against, including stigmatizing readers and their "passionately held conviction that everything about a book should seek to welcome readers in and not keep them out." read more
In cultures that have had little or no exposure to books, handling a book properly is a skill that must be learned.
" ... kids function best when they're real clear about exactly what's expected of them ..."