Poetry Friday: Margarita Engle
In this audio clip, author Margarita Engle shares the backstory for her 2009 Newbery Honor book and 2009 Pura Belpré-winning book, The Surrender Tree: Poem’s of Cuba’s Struggle for Freedom (Henry Holt, 2008). Learn about the life of the character,…

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.
When I was kid I used to make movies in my head. Many of them were vaguely Arthurian in tone, with a dash of Tolkien reconfigured with strong female characters who liked to read. I tried putting myself in the lead role – warrior princess or pirate queen, say, but not that often. I am, at heart, a profoundly shy person, and even an imaginary spotlight was uncomfortable.