Picture Book Parade families reading

Picture Book Parade

This season, if you visit Minneapolis’ Midtown Farmers Market, you’ll stroll by a harvest of picture books by Minnesota authors: Picture Book Parade—a new initiative by children’s authors Sarah Warren and Catherine Urdahl.
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We Are the Future

We Are the Future

We Are the Future: Poems with a Voice for Peace is impossible to read without being deeply moved by the open hearts and minds of refugee and immigrant youth in the Seattle area, guided by poets and teachers Merna Hecht and Carrie Stradley.
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mother selecting books with her son

Children’s Literacy Foundation

Imag­ine the joy of a child who nev­er had the priv­i­lege of own­ing a book being able to choose new hard­cov­er or paper­back edi­tions for free out of hun­dreds dis­played in front of him. The Children’s Lit­er­a­cy Foun­da­tion doesn’t have to imag­ine. Staff have seen the excit­ed smiles on these young faces for the past 23 years, and they hear the same ques­tion wher­ev­er they go.
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Margo Sorenson

A Good Word

As teach­ers and writ­ers, we all love words. Would­n’t we love to be able to infuse that same love into each and every one of our stu­dents! Teach­ing Eng­lish to mid­dle school­ers and high school­ers for years gave me plen­ty of oppor­tu­ni­ties to try out dif­fer­ent ways of attempt­ing to kin­dle enthu­si­asm in my stu­dents for becom­ing avid lexophiles.… more
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Shhhhhh

This is the sound of walk­ing into retire­ment for me and so many teach­ers this spring. Although friends are already email­ing to con­grat­u­late us on this new jour­ney, we’re all alone while pack­ing up our offices and class­rooms for the last time. There will be no big par­ties, no for­mal farewells, no cozy get-togeth­ers where every­one dredges up the good, sad, and fun­ny days of our teach­ing careers.… more
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Margo Sorenson

The Gems: Revolutionize Your Teaching of Writing

The stack of stu­dent papers lurks on the cor­ner of your desk, just wait­ing to be marked and grad­ed. Yes, the rubrics and grad­ing stan­dards will be applied con­sci­en­tious­ly, paper after paper. Your stu­dents wait, some in dread, some in hope­ful antic­i­pa­tion, for your final judg­ments on their papers. But wait — there’s anoth­er way to eval­u­ate stu­dent writ­ing — one that I read many years ago in the Eng­lish Jour­nal.… more
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Rachel Snyder, Lemont Public Library

Timeless Tales Program

Cre­at­ing a Con­nect­ed Com­mu­ni­ty of Read­ers: Inter­gen­er­a­tional Storytime After see­ing a hand­ful of arti­cles about nurs­ing homes open­ing up preschools in a shared space, as well as the ben­e­fits from this part­ner­ship, I want­ed to find a way to cre­ate the same inter­gen­er­a­tional con­nec­tion in a library set­ting. We already had a rela­tion­ship with our local retire­ment home as our Cir­cu­la­tion Super­vi­sor does month­ly out­reach and book check­outs for the res­i­dents, so I approached their staff with the idea.… more
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#OneStatelinerStory

Modeled after the One School, One Book premise, Phillipsburg School District Elementary ELA & Social Studies Curriculum Director Darlene Noel created a school-wide event called #OneStatelinerStory: Every Classroom. Every Student. Every Family. The fundamental purpose of this event is to build a community of readers through a shared reading experience. Think of it as a really large book club!
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Paul W. Hankins

When We Reach Them

We’re out of school today in obser­vance of Oaks Day here in our area. This morn­ing, Ani­ta Sil­vey, chil­dren’s lit­er­a­ture expert and resource, remind­ed us on Face­book that Pete Seeger cel­e­brates a birth­day today. 100 years. I might not have known that with­out her post. How many of us would? How many of us would have known that Ani­ta Sil­vey has writ­ten one of the best non­fic­tion looks at Seeger’s life and work?more
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