Cindy: What a surprise awaits inside these pages! The warning in the title, Do Not Lick This Book (2018), should be heeded—it is, indeed, full of germs! But don’t let that steer you away from reading it. Journey along with Min, a microbe who travels, via your finger, from the paper of the book’s pages […]
Cindy: Monopoly has an interesting history and Tanya Lee Stone has produced a thought-provoking picture book about it: Pass Go and Collect $200: The Real Story of How Monopoly Was Invented (2018). Originally called The Landlord’s Game, it was created by Lizzie Magie, who was looking for a way to demonstrate the unfair relationship between landlords and tenants […]
Cindy: Lynn and I teased Bookends readers about this fascinating book in an earlier post after we both read it on the plane home from the ALA Annual Conference. This week, we’re participating in the blog tour for Spooked! How a Radio Broadcast and The War of the Worlds Sparked the 1938 Invasion of America (2018). For […]
Lynn: There’s nothing more fun for kids (and many adults) than grubbing in the dirt. Any gardener or small child knows that there are a lot of fascinating things to be found there—many of them wonderfully wiggly. But I had no idea of either the huge variety of critters to be found there or their […]
Marking the triumphs of Midwestern authors published in 2017, the Society of Midland Authors announced the winners of its annual award today. The ceremony will be held in downtown Chicago on Tuesday, May 8th, to commemorate the winners and their works from the last year. The winning and honored titles, linked to their Booklist reviews when possible, are […]
Lynn: Barb Rosenstock and Katherine Roy’s new picture book, Otis and Will Discover the Deep: the Record-Setting Dive of the Bathysphere (2018), is the fascinating story of how the groundbreaking submarine came to be. It is also a celebration of curiosity, persistence, and the unexpected places those qualities can lead. Otis Barton and William Beebe, […]
Lynn: Not too many kids (or adult reviewers) can resist the allure of books about elephants. In fact, we have two outstanding books on that large subject. The first is a nonfiction “fact” book, How to Be an Elephant: Growing Up in the African Wild (2017), by Katherine Roy. This is no dry, ordinary, facts-about-animals […]
President Obama’s historic December 17, 2014 order to “normalize relations” between the United States and Cuba began the restoration of diplomacy after more than half a century of hostile restrictions. His 72-hour visit to Havana in March 2016—the first made by a sitting president since Coolidge in 1928—opened and encouraged travel in both directions. The thaw, […]
Lynn: Every now and then, a book comes along that makes us want to cheer and wave wildly. Picture us doing that right now for Her Right Foot (2017), by Dave Eggers. Full of fascinating facts about the iconic Statue of Liberty, it tells us the statue turned green around 1920, and that it was shipped […]
Cindy: There have been a number of YA fiction books with the title “Two Truths and a Lie,” but we’ve found a creative, informational book for middle-grade students that reinforces evaluating information for truth. Fake news, anyone? Two Truths and a Lie: It’s Alive (2017) by Ammi-Joan Paquette and Laurie Ann Thompson is the first […]
Encouraging Middle-Schoolers to Choose Books
There’s been a lot of discussion among the librarians I know about what to do with middle-schoolers: they just don’t seem to read as much as they used to. I know that here in Chicago, we have a unique perspective on this situation, since our schools run K–8. In my former school system in Maryland […]
Getting Started with the Global Read Aloud
The 2017 Global Read Aloud kicked off yesterday, and I’m here to help. Author and educator Pernille Ripp founded the program as a way to connect students and teachers from different locales around the topics of books. (Think One Book One School or One Book One City, but on a global scale.) Each year, Ripp […]
TWO TRUTHS AND A LIE: Practice Recognizing Fake News
Cindy: There have been a number of YA fiction books with the title “Two Truths and a Lie,” but we’ve found a creative, informational book for middle-grade students that reinforces evaluating information for truth. Fake news, anyone? Two Truths and a Lie: It’s Alive (2017) by Ammi-Joan Paquette and Laurie Ann Thompson is the first […]
Encouraging Middle-Schoolers to Choose Books
There’s been a lot of discussion among the librarians I know about what to do with middle-schoolers: they just don’t seem to read as much as they used to. I know that here in Chicago, we have a unique perspective on this situation, since our schools run K–8. In my former school system in Maryland […]
Getting Started with the Global Read Aloud
The 2017 Global Read Aloud kicked off yesterday, and I’m here to help. Author and educator Pernille Ripp founded the program as a way to connect students and teachers from different locales around the topics of books. (Think One Book One School or One Book One City, but on a global scale.) Each year, Ripp […]
TWO TRUTHS AND A LIE: Practice Recognizing Fake News
Cindy: There have been a number of YA fiction books with the title “Two Truths and a Lie,” but we’ve found a creative, informational book for middle-grade students that reinforces evaluating information for truth. Fake news, anyone? Two Truths and a Lie: It’s Alive (2017) by Ammi-Joan Paquette and Laurie Ann Thompson is the first […]
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