The TeachingBooks Blog
Welcome to this new monthly post that reveals approaches to professional writing and research in the words of extraordinary authors and illustrators of books for children and teens.
I was elected to the 2009 John Newbery Award selection committee by the membership of the American Library Association (ALA) division that administers this award, ALSC (Association for Library Service to Children). This was quite an honor, and a real shock to me. You see, I’m not a librarian. I’m a book lover. I’m a professional in the world of children’s books. But I’m not a librarian – and I always thought that librarians and academics in the field were those who got to serve on these committees.
In this post, I encourage you to bring authors into your classroom to add a personal dimension to social studies lessons. Autobiographical accounts, for example, can offer first-person perspectives on events under discussion. And authors who research and write about historical and cultural topics often present their interpretations and sources while revealing their methods and processes.
In this post I've highlighted summer's bounty with a smorgasbord of multimedia materials about books and authors that celebrate food. In her 2004 Charlotte Zolotow Lecture, Newbery Medalist Linda Sue Park commented that she didn't trust a character until she knew what they ate. I wondered, "Would she trust a character that was made of food?"