Books to Bring a Spark to Your Library
Imagination Soup-- A blog full of books & fun learning resources written by a mom, writer, former educator and literacy trainer, Melissa Taylor
I could share so many relevant and useful blog posts from this blog, so narrowing it down to three to five was a bit difficult. I can't recommend her blog enough. Here are several blog posts that I thought would be beneficial for librarians.
1. Teaching Information Literacy with Children's Books
This post is written by a guest blogger, Geralyn Westervelt, a a recently retired school librarian. In this blog, Westervelt shares what information literacy is, why it is important to teach it, and how to teach it to students using picture books. She explains how students are exposed to an abundance of information in today's tech-rich world, and it is imperative that we teach our students how to read information and how to determine it's accuracy. She shares this graphic that explains what information literacy is: research skills, digiital competencies, media literacy, and academic literacy. We have a challenging job: teaching children and young adults how to find reliable resources and news outlets, how to use critial thinking skills to analyze the information, and then what to do with the information we have at our fingertips.
In the post, Westervelt shares many picture books that you can use to teach this skill in the library setting. Here are two that looked like good choices to me that I have not seen before!
2. 35 Best Nonfiction Books of 2023 for Kids
One week during our classwork we were to read nonfiction books. Personally, I have found that reading aloud nonfiction can be one genre we often shy away from, but we shouldn't. I challenged myself to read more nonfiction aloud to my students and personal child. It is important that just as they hear fiction be read aloud and learn the story structure, it is also important that they hear nonfiction read aloud and modeled for them how to read nonfiction. Nonfiction sometimes gets a sterotype as a boring genre to read, and all to often, it is avoided. I chose this blog so that I could find some new, exciting, award winning nonfiction to read aloud. Taylor emphasizes this same point in her blog. She says often her students struggled more with nonfiction comprehension than fictional comprehension and it was really because of a lack of exposure and practice. "Reading nonfiction builds the very important skill of reading for meaning." (Taylor, 2023) It is a great idea to read nonfiction often to model this important skill and to give students practice as well. This post shares 35 different new nonfiction picture books and a short summary for each one. I am excited to check out these new titles, most of which I have not read.
3. 70 Best Christmas Books for Kids
I could really spend hours digging through this blog and the numerous book lists. One way I searched was by going to the blog tab and clicking on the "by topic" choice. This has a long list of books organized by various topics in alphabetical order. Since Christmas is coming up, I chose to click and read through this post. In this post Taylor recommends her favorite Christmas picture books, chapter books, middle grade books, and activity books.
The remainder of the post shares various Christmas books, both old and new. Some books were classics and well known books like The Polar Express and Red and Lulu. But there were many others listed that I had never heard of before, so I appreciate her list of newer titles that aren't read and reread. In the library I like to try to find books students have not heard many times and expose them to new literature and a variety of diverse texts and authors. However, rereading some classics just never gets old, like The Polar Express. Children often enjoy hearing their favorites read time and time again.
If you're looking for a book to read, and you need the perfect read aloud recommendation, this blog is a go-to that will be a valuable resource to your professional tool box when working in a library setting.
Enjoy, & happy reading!
What I am reading this week:
We were to read comedy books this week. Reading funny books is a must in the library! I chose to read the books shared in the blog I found this week mentioned above, and this is perfect timing for the upcoming weeks at school. Taylor shared these top picks on her blog for funny Christmas books which will make for great read alouds in the library! Here's what I am reading:
Emily, what a great find! Anything that gives me lists of books, I love it! This will be really great to use when you are trying to decide on a book for storytelling. It is separated by age, genre so it will be a great resource and a place to start. I really liked the post about teaching information literacy becuase you are right, trying to teach what a reliable source is, is hard so using this blog post and the titles included to teach about reliable sources is something I am going to use when I teach argument writing. Thank you for sharing this.
ReplyDeleteKristin