The Gem of The Moment I am reading a real wonder of a book — it really ought to be required reading for everyong from 8th grade up — but when I tell you the title, you surely won’t believe me. The book is: Adam J. Silverstein, Islamic History: A Very Short Introduction (here’s a video interview [...]

My Theme For This Passover: What Allows You to Hold On and to Move? For those of you who don’t celebrate Passover, please forgive this aside, it is the one holiday I put a lot of thought and effort into, so it is the natural focus of my blog. I hope this proves to be [...]

It Is Not a Planet But I Still Want to Include It My 5 year old is a November boy, so he misses the cutoff for kindergarten. There are enough kids like him here so a wonderful teacher named Mrs. Tyree has started a kind of preschool plus — where the kids are moving towards [...]

This Just In While Math scores are improving nationwide, reading is not — the only uptick is in scores for readers who were have the most difficulty. One theory is that while we can teach basic reading, there are not enough books that engage and challenge readers as they get older tinyurl.com/ykvmf2x which sound very much [...]

What Do You Need to Listen For In Views You Cannot Stand? Sam Tanenhaus is the book review editor of the New York Times, he is also a historian who has written biographies of Whittaker Chambers and is working on one about William Buckley — in other words he takes conservatism seriously and wants to understand [...]

Site Seeing Ed Sullivan is justifiably cautious about the great new ebook world — we’ve all been hyped before. I was a real CD-ROM enthusiast, until I wasn’t. But there are new things out there coming, or even in place already, that we do need to be aware of — if only to question whether [...]

Bank Street Buzz Every March the Bank Street College of Education gives out its awards for best books for young readers, and publishes its longer list of selections tinyurl.com/yc8bcyu When I first started out in publishing, that breakfast and ceremony was one of the quiet ones that did not get a lot of sizzle, but old [...]

Addiution I’m sure you’ve all seen the news that the administration is proposing a new version of NCLB tinyurl.com/yzno8qf This, like the new national standards, can be really good news for non-fiction. But as we turn back to content, and to an expanded definition of iteracy that includes non-fiction, we come back to an old debate [...]

In the literacy program at my university, we have two required courses that focus on content literacy and the ways in which we approach texts in the disciplines. One is our course, Content Area Literacy. The other is a course called Exploring Nonfiction in the Elementary and Middle School Classroom. I have yet to meet [...]

Nonfiction Is All Over the Blogsphere These Days Not only has the government come out with new standards, but for some reason people in both the adult and kids literarary world have suddenly begun talking about nonfiction: tinyurl.com/ydy9men Here is Anastasia Suen’s very helpful blog on using picture book nonfiction with the youngest readers tinyurl.com/y9fq5p2 [...]