Students study the holidays celebrated in families and communities around the world to learn about traditions and cultures different from their own, and to honor the diversity in their own communities. For young students, literature is often a portal into these cultural explorations.Nick’s Picks: So Many Holidays, So Little Time
Students study the holidays celebrated in families and communities around the world to learn about traditions and cultures different from their own, and to honor the diversity in their own communities. For young students, literature is often a portal into these cultural explorations.
While young children explore language through the rhythm and rhyme of song, music is one of the important bonds tweens and teens share with their peer group. But no matter what age your students are, it's likely they respond to music, providing you with an enjoyable way to connect with them.
Graphic fiction and nonfiction books are increasingly being used in schools to hook reluctant readers or to present topics in a different format. The multimedia materials recommended in this month's column provide you with instructional support to integrate these graphic books into your lesson plans.
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.