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?"
We strive to make the TeachingBooks.net collection and site relevant for our customers, so it’s always a pleasure to produce or add new multimedia resources about the books you are studying.
This post introduces a new category of posts on…
I’m just back from the American Library Association’s (ALA) 2009 annual conference, which was held in Chicago, IL. This was my first time at ALA and it was incredible.
I was deeply touched by the passion for learning, reading, and…
In this post, I offer a selection of online book-based activities that can be shared at home to further encourage family participation with literature and reading. Web sites offer a wealth of material that can stimulate discussions about books. Video and audio interviews with authors, for example, provide fresh insights about their work. Novel units, now available online, can guide conversations about books, making it possible for busy family members to know more about what their children are reading and to ask questions about particular books. The Internet’s potential to bring people and information together adds dynamic new possibilities to extend family involvement in reading.
One of the wonderful things about stories is their ability to allow us to explore and make believe. Whether as a reader or a writer, stories give us the chance to try on different hats. To see things from a new or different perspective. Or to share a bit of our own perspective with others.
In this post, I invite you to introduce a multimedia dimension to your students’ series reading. Children love series fiction. They enjoy the familiarity of the storylines, become comfortable with the formulas, and delight in the characters’ idiosyncrasies. Educators appreciate that these titles are accessible to all children—from the voracious readers who never put a book down to the English Language Learners who build on the successful completion of one volume to move confidently on to the next.