The seed for my newest young adult novel, This Thing Called the Future (Cinco Puntos, 2011), was planted five years ago when I was studying the Zulu language at a university in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa. The Zulu family I stayed with had two young teenage girls—thirteen and fourteen—who were incredibly hard-working girls and always respectful of their elders. Yet the thirteen year old got in trouble while I was there because she was caught kissing her boyfriend at church. Her boyfriend was a man in his thirties.Blog Tour: J.L. Powers
The seed for my newest young adult novel, This Thing Called the Future (Cinco Puntos, 2011), was planted five years ago when I was studying the Zulu language at a university in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa. The Zulu family I stayed with had two young teenage girls—thirteen and fourteen—who were incredibly hard-working girls and always respectful of their elders. Yet the thirteen year old got in trouble while I was there because she was caught kissing her boyfriend at church. Her boyfriend was a man in his thirties.
Author Robie Harris and illustrator Michael Emberley have worked closely together to create nearly a dozen age-appropriate books for children and teens on human development and sexuality, including It’s So Amazing!: A Book about Eggs, Sperm, Birth, Babies, and Families (Candlewick, 1999)and It’s Perfectly Normal: Changing Bodies, Growing Up, Sex, and Sexual Health (Candlewick, 1994). For Harris and Emberley, the entire research process is of the utmost importance when it comes to creating accurate informational books. From finding the right resources to portraying information in word and illustration, these two have insights to share about the inquiry process.
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?"