Coming Attractions By Nathan Huber - 05/01/2008
What does the future hold for video games? You could ask Professor Trelawney, the divination instructor at Hogwarts, but she can sometimes be unreliable. Luckily, you won’t need a crystal ball to discover that there are a host of great console video games scheduled for release later this year that promise to be exciting, innovative, and lots of fun.
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Consider the Source: Star Power By Marc Aronson - 05/01/2008
I’ve written books for young readers for more than two decades, and I once ran an imprint that published edgy titles, like Gary Nash’s Forbidden Love (1999), which is about America’s secret history of race relations, and Judd Winick’s Pedro and Me (2000, both Holt), a graphic novel about his roommate on the reality show Real World who later died of AIDS.
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Killing Me Softly: No Child Left Behind By Jordan Sonnenblick - 05/01/2008
I feel like the last marine who got out before the siege of Khe Sanh. I feel like the one Titanic band member who overslept, missed the voyage, and lived. In my darkest moments, I feel like a traitor. I was an urban teacher for 14 years. I am still an urban teacher in my dreams, in my bones. For the last 14 months, I have been on a leave of absence from my eighth-grade English classroom in New ...
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First Steps: Play It Again By Renea Arnold and Nell Colburn - 05/01/2008
A quote from George Bernard Shaw hangs in our office, guiding our daily interactions: “We don’t quit playing because we grow old; we grow old because we quit playing.” These days, we feel a strong need to defend playtime for children, too. According to Howard Chudacoff, a cultural historian at Brown University, today’s children have less time to play than children of pre...
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Scales on Censorship: What’s Going On By Pat Scales - 05/01/2008
When I was in high school, I don’t remember anyone ever challenging the books we read in English class. Why has there been a sudden increase in the number of challenges? And what do I tell our English teachers who’ve become “gun-shy” about selecting books for their classes? I don’t think there’s been a sudden surge of book challenges.
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Circulating Video Games By Trevor Oakley - 04/01/2008
The experience we’ve had over the past year at the Guilderland Public Library in upstate New York has proved that building a substantial collection of video games is a great way to attract young adults to the library. It takes only a modest financial commitment to launch a circulating collection of video games and the return on investment is huge—teen patronage increases and the lib...
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Consider the Source: Cracking Open By Marc Aronson - 04/01/2008
Teens don’t know enough about history and literature to tie their own shoelaces. That’s more or less the conclusion of a study I read about in the New York Times (see “Survey Finds Teenagers Ignorant on Basic History and Literature Questions,” February 27, 2008). Common Core—a nonpartisan research and advocacy group that favors more teaching of the liberal arts in ...
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Podcasts are a great way to expand learning beyond the classroom or library. Here are more recommendations from Tech Chicks Anna Adam and Helen Mowers, following up their Dec. 2007 article Listen Up!
K-Gr 7–Children’s music doesn’t get much better than these 16 songs by Pomes in a Pail. What began at a writer’s workshop resulted in an amazing collaboration that combined the clever words of Alexander Jenny and the music of Karena Mendoza and Stephanie Snow.
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