Friday, February 3, 2012

Love of Reading



A love of reading is essential to the future development of all students, especially in their formative years. This blog focuses on middle- and high school students (aka YA literature), ages 11 through 18.
As always, we at InfoEN invite your suggestions and comments !

This blog, SelectReads, is updated periodically, so visit us often!

To the wonders of books, see The Fantastic Flying Book of Mr. Morris, a 14-minute cartoon about the love of reading !!

A love of reading (listening, watching, performing) is essential in our advisory programs (for fiction, non-fiction works, poetry, musicals, film, animation). We typically start with the following assumptions and/or questions:
  • Understand your learners and match reading interests with reading materials
  • Promote reading across all formats, media, and subjects
  • Customize as much as it is possible reading preferences, capabilities, and needs
  • Align reading for pleasure (loosely) with assigned projects to provide the context, point of view, and a broader understanding of issues
  • Use Learning technologies (Web 2.0 tools) and social networking services (FaceBook, wikis, blogs, twitter) to enhance and facilitate sharing and collaboration
Some of this is described in "Letting students use Web 2.0 tools to hook one another on reading," in Knowledge Quest on Futurecasting, 40(3):37-39 Jan/Feb 2012. http://www.ala.org/aasl/aaslpubsandjournals/knowledgequest/archive/v40no3

The program described in that paper started at the time when blogging was sort of a novelty; seeds of that early era were captured in students' enthusiastic comments.

Now three years later, we have learned a lot but some basic sources for YA reader advisories, collection development, and reviewing sources remain as important as before blogging and SNS.

Good sources to get you started are:

National Book Festival by the Library of Congress
My Catalog of some 300 books
YALSA Booklists

So this blog goes to the basics: selecting best sources, selection criteria, genres.

Evaluation criteria for historical fiction:
  1. How authentic is the setting (the place, region, time, events, communities)?
  2. How believable are characters in the story?
  3. How authentic are the relationships between the characters?
  4. How close are your students to the presented content, language, and emotional level in the historical fiction? Are there any gaps, bias?
  5. What is the format of the presented materials (textual, visual, multimedia, symbolic)?
  6. Censorship (next time) & on how to tell the difference: selection v censorship
  7. Reading habits (more to come)
Selected review sources (many more are available, print and on the Web):


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1 comment:

  1. unaFebruary 13, 2012 at 11:28 AM

    Nicely organized. Appreciate the links. While this blog focuses on young adults, would also like to see some select reads for other audiences- mid-30 range?

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