Lynn: It’s a great season for baseball fans! Not only is our favorite game in full swing, but there’s a full field of new books about baseball to enjoy when the games are over. Bookends reviewed two last week. Here are two more recent titles to join the lineup. The Game Can’t Love You Back, by […]
Lynn: Sometimes you just want silliness! No lessons, no moral to the story, just a fun, goofy book. Here are some picture books guaranteed to get the giggles going. A Couch for Llama, by Leah Gilbert This is a ridiculously funny story that begs to be reexamined and laughed at again and again. […]
Lynn: Are you still watching videos of Meghan and Harry’s wedding on YouTube? Yup, me too. If you and your teens are ready to move on to royal-watching in a different format, here’s a delightful new book that checks all the boxes for fans of crowned-heads-on-anything. Gorgeous clothes? Check. Handsome princes? Check. Behind-the-scenes secrets? Check. […]
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 […]
Lynn: Author Sarah Albee makes it clear right at the beginning of Poison: Deadly Deeds, Perilous Professions and Murderous Medicines (2017) that her book is NOT a how-to manual for murder! Rather, it’s a history with far more than murderous intentions. But what mystery fan doesn’t want the inside scoop on this crime-writer favorite method? Authors from […]
Lynn: Small children have so many things to learn, and dealing with frustration and anger is one of them. As parents and teachers know to their sorrow, some toddlers resort to chomping the object of their ire. It’s a tough problem, and when I read a book recently that addressed biting, I told Cindy I […]
Lynn: Itch! Yikes, the very word makes me want to scratch! What makes us itch and why? Here to answer questions every child has about this irritating phenomenon is Itch! Everything You Didn’t Want to Know About What Makes You Scratch (2017) by Anita Sanchez. I’ve been itching to get my hands on this fall book […]
Lynn: Well, Brian Selznick has done it again: reinvented a format, that is. This time, it’s a whole new incarnation of an early chapter book, and what a delight it is! Selznick and David Serlin’s enchanting Baby Monkey, Private Eye (2018) has 192 pages—long for the format, but in these innovative hands, it works so […]
Cindy: As a middle school librarian, I know what to do each fall: Order a half dozen copies of the newest Wimpy Kid book for each of my libraries and start the hold queue. Jeff Kinney needs no promotion at this point, so I haven’t read one of Greg Heffley’s stories since the original Diary […]
Lynn: For 200 carefully selected teens, a hangar in the cornfields of Iowa is where their future will be decided. They’ve made it this far, but now the tests have gotten really tough. Only two young people will be chosen to join NASA’s Interworld Agency, which has decided to add a third team to its […]
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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