Best picture books, chapter books, young adult books, graphic novels and non fiction for kids.
Earth Day — April 22 — marks the anniversary of what many consider the birth of the modern environmental movement that began in 1970. Today is a good reminder to celebrate Earth Day every day and pass lessons on environmental stewardship to our children. To this end, I wanted to share resources for teaching kids about…
My boxing friend Mark has an idea for a reality TV show that makes both of our fantasies come true. The show would set up you and your bully in a boxing ring. It would be a real fight with a set date so that you could train, a pre-determined number of rounds, and a…
It’s been such a great year for those who love both multicultural/diversity/inclusive books for kids AND novels in verse! I picked five amazing favorites that I’ve loved from this past year and hope that the popularity of these books will encourage more diverse books to be published! What are your favorite novels in verse? Please…
I am thrilled to be co-posting with Valarie Budayr of Jump Into A Book for the Book Across America blog tour. I was late to the sign up to my birth state of California was already taken, as well as Massachusetts where I now reside. No matter. Tennessee was open where Valarie lives so I…
Today’s Picture Book of the Day comes from the Multicultural Children’s Book Day Twitter Party. We asked participants to tell us what inclusive, diverse and/or multicultural children’s books they having trouble finding. It’s a heartbreaking topic but kids who live in an alcoholic home were one such request. I researched and found these books at…
It wasn’t easy finding great multicultural easy readers! My town library has about 49 cubic feet of easy readers — an entire wall — but about half have animal characters and most of the remaining books do NOT have characters of color. From my search that day, I’d say that about 2% of the square…
It was so much fun to judge the final round of the Cybils for Best Easy Reader and Early Chapter Book. I felt like our committee really pondered long and hard to come up with the winners in a multi-step process: We procured the books, mostly from the library (copies were sent by publishers if…