Year: 2014
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Effingham County Students Make Dramatic Reading Gains in 2013-14 School Year
Springfield, GA – Students in Effingham County’s READ 180® classrooms made dramatic gains in reading in the 2013-14 school year, with nearly half of them advancing the equivalent of two years …
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How To Create Safe Space From Slut-Shaming: A Librarian’s Guide
“As people who work with youth, we must continually examine our culture and engage with teens to break down these harmful stereotypes. One way to do this is through collection …
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CBC Diversity: Subjective Reality
Full disclosure up front: this is a post that asks more questions than it has answers.
I was speaking with a librarian the other day who told me that one of her challenges was handling the myriad restrictions parents put on their kids’ reading. In one specific case a mom complained about a middle grade novel that discussed how to tell the gender of one of the character’s pets. The parent felt this type of discussion was inappropriate. Of course it is important to be sensitive to a parent’s wishes when it comes to their children, and it brought into stark relief the difficult task that both teachers and children’s librarians have in recommending books to their students and patrons.
But my immediate reaction upon hearing that story was disbelief: surely, biology was not an off-limits topic in middle school? And the immediacy of my reaction forced me to face my own prejudices.
Although I was raised in a conservative Muslim family, there was one thing that was never policed in my household, and that was books. Maybe this was partly self-preservation on the part of my parents. As one of five kids, there was no way they would be able to keep up with helicoptering all of us. And maybe it was also a function of how we were being educated. My parents sent us to a Catholic school because they wanted remembrance of God to part of our daily life, and taught us our own faith through active discussions of the differences and similarities between what we were learning in school, and what we believed at home. I got used to learning all things comparatively, comfortable in the gray areas, and my knee-jerk assumption is that this is the best way to teach kids.
It’s not. Of course it’s not. It’s just one way.
What does this have to do with diversity in children’s literature? I think a lot about how individual kids are, and how what’s an appropriate book for one kid would not be suited for another, just based on their level of maturity and reading comprehension. But there is another element at play, and that is parents.
To state the obvious, not all parents are the same. But most do share one common goal: to protect their children. Sometimes that means protecting their kids from the very stories I believe are the most important to share. They want to create a reality for their kids that is in keeping with their worldview. They want to create a strong foundation of family values. This means reading books that are mirrors not windows. And that is where things get tricky. I don’t have the answer to this but it’s something I’ve been thinking a lot about—at what age does protecting your kids become a form of censorship in itself?
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‘Who Was…?’ Wrap Your Head Around History!
NEW YORK, NY — Since its launch in 2002, Grosset & Dunlap’s Who Was…? series has sold more than twelve million books, making it the most popular biography series for children. …
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Your Favorite Quinquagenarian Books
These books got away with stuff that likely wouldn’t fly now (Veruca Salt being sent down the ‘bad’ egg chute to almost certain death, anyone?). PC or not, they’ve all …
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Vote for the Fairest Book of Them All!
Everyone is invited to submit nominations and vote for the “Beauty and the Book” award, which is the Stiftung Buchkunst and Frankfurt Book Fair’s international audience prize for the best-designed …
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Amanda Hocking Writing New Young Adult Series
The story stars a character named Bryn Aven, a tracker and an outcast. Macmillan will release the first book on January 06, 2015. (Entertainment Weekly)
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Educational Psychologist Recommends That Adults Read YA
“Just as there are good and bad adult novels, there are good and bad YA novels. To snidely pan the entire YA genre as being an embarrassment for any adult …
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‘Looking For Alaska’ Challenged in Wisconsin, Second Challenge to a John Green Book This Summer
NEW YORK, NY — Kids’ Right to Read Project and other organizations have expressed concern about a request for a district-wide ban on John Green’s award-winning novel Looking For Alaska in Waukesha, Wisconsin …
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Penguin Group Announces Mad Libs Pop-Up Booth at Comic-Con International San Diego
New York, NY — Penguin Young Readers Group announced today that the classic fill-in-the-blank word game Mad Libs will exhibit for the first time ever at Comic-Con® International: San Diego. The pop-up booth …
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Kid Lit City: A New York Itinerary
“For kids—and writers of kids’ books—New York City is magic. The sights and streets of NYC have been inspiring literary folk from the time of Herman Melville, but as much …
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“Steig’s Books are Like Perfect Smooth Stones”: Jon Klassen on His Hero
“Most of the time, when you find someone whose work you admire so much, the impulse is to try to parse it, to find some seams, to open them up …
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Bookopolis Launches 1,000 Minute Summer-Reading Challenge
’20 minutes is pretty standard for a daily reading assignment for elementary school students around the US. Check out this great graphic displaying the cumulative effect of reading 20 minutes a …
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Lee Peters Named Senior Vice President, Strategic Marketing for Scholastic Education
NEW YORK, NY – Scholastic (NASDAQ: SCHL), the global children’s publishing, education and media company, today announced the appointment of Lee Peters as Senior Vice President, Strategic Marketing for Scholastic Education. …
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US and International Organizations Protest Singapore National Library Board’s Decision to Pulp Children’s Books Over LGBT Content
NEW YORK, NY — The National Coalition Against Censorship (USA) has been joined by freeDimensional and PEN International in issuing a statement ( read online ) opposing the decision of the Singapore National Library Board to remove and pulp three children’s books:And …
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Curious George: Your New NYC Ambassador
“Since the ambassador program launched in 2009, family visitation has grown by 26.5 percent. NYC & Company says that’s about 30.8 percent of the total number of city visitors.” (Yahoo.com)
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Hans Christian Andersen: Not-Your-Fairy-Tale Houseguest
Five weeks is a long time for even the most charming of guests, but Andersen had a habit of riling his hosts. While he stayed with the family, he was …
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Rainbow Rowell to Read Her Own ‘Harry Potter’ Fan Fiction at LeakyCon
The story is set in the future and it features Harry Potter and Draco Malfoy as a couple raising children together. For Rowell, it’s about the two boys “dealing with …
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David Levithan to Pen ‘Hold Me Closer: The Tiny Cooper Story’
Readers will soon get all the details about Tiny’s theatrical creation in David Levithan’s forthcoming project, Hold Me Closer: The Tiny Cooper Story. The book itself will be written in …
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Scholastic to Launch Tombquest, A New Multi-Platform Action Adventure Series, in February 2015
New York, NY – Scholastic, the global children’s publishing, education and media company and the pioneering publisher of the bestselling multi-platform properties The 39 Clues®, Infinity Ring® and Spirit Animals™, announced today that it will publish …
