Integrating books throughout content areas and encouraging collaboration between library media specialists and classroom teachers are central to my work with TeachingBooks.net. In this post, I present opportunities for you to partner with art teachers as you invite illustrators to share their passion for art in a classroom setting.Nick’s Picks: Focusing on illustrators
Integrating books throughout content areas and encouraging collaboration between library media specialists and classroom teachers are central to my work with TeachingBooks.net. In this post, I present opportunities for you to partner with art teachers as you invite illustrators to share their passion for art in a classroom setting.
Twitter’s momentum as a social networking service has been extraordinary; just last December more than one billion tweets were sent. These text messages of up to 140 characters can incorporate links to Web sites, movies, audio recordings, or any address on the Internet. But how are educators harnessing this tool to support K-12 pedagogical practices? In this month’s post, sample TeachingBooks.net tweets that were posted to demonstrate to educators easy and fun ways to integrate multimedia into their author and book studies.
Historical fiction is a complex genre. It can strive to be as absolutely accurate as the writer can make it (as I attempted in Crispin: Cross of Lead) or it may go no further than to create a general sense of time and place (as in Midnight Magic). The work that is merely dressed up in a general sense of time and place is rather like a musical comedy. There is nothing inherently wrong with this approach, and in fact there are some real advantages. The primary advantage is that one can deal with very modern ideas and simply place them where one can have the most fun.
Engage students with technology as you explore best practices in writing. By integrating the online resource listed in this issue into your curriculum, students can have award-winning authors model the application of specific writing tips and techniques.
I went to Ghana several years ago and was overwhelmed by the beauty of the land and people, as well as the history of the place that hovered just out of reach. When I visited the slave castles, where millions of Africans were housed like cattle before being shipped as cargo and sold as slaves, I felt their spirits crying out to me. Crawling on my hands and knees through the Door of No Return, which led from the darkness of the prison to the incomprehensible vastness of a beach, I knew I must tell the story of someone who had passed that way.
While the pressures in education today are very real, the joy, passion, and commitment that teachers bring to the profession can assist them when the challenges are great. This month’s column highlights online resources that are sure to bring a little levity to the classroom and elicit a few smiles and laughs.