Monday Blurb: March-ing Forward with Literacy News

Happy Monday!

The end-of-February children’s literacy and reading news round-up, brought to you by Jen Robinson,  Terry Doherty, and Rasco from RIF is now available at Carol’s blog: Rasco from RIF. Over the past couple of weeks Jen Robinson, Carol Rasco, and I have collected plenty of content for you about literacy & reading-related events; literacy and reading programs and research; and suggestions for growing bookworms.

There is lots of news all month long, and I really enjoy all of the neat stuff that Carol packs into her monthly wrap-up. If she can pack this much into just a few paragraphs, can you imagine how stuffed her luggage must be when she travels?! A couple quick hits …

• Carol has links to the latest rounds of book awards, including 2011 NCTE Notable Children’s Books in the Language Arts (led by our own Mary Lee Hahn), the Annual Golden Kite Awards, and the Sid Fleischman Humor Award.
• She also tells us that John Bemelmans Marciano, grandson of Ludwig Bemelmans has published a new book, Madeline at the White House. Carol shares a bit of the story-behind-the-story, too. [Sidebar: We have a review of Louie! a picture book biography of Ludwig Bemelmans in the Reading Tub.]

As if she isn’t crazy-busy enough trying to ensure that RIF continues for millions of children, Carol is also hosting Nonfiction Monday today.

Here are a couple of other newsworthy tidbits.

The big event of the week is Read Across America Day on Wednesday.  There are lots of great events, and our friend Mrs. P. (TV Star Kathy Kinney) will be making an in-person appearance at Rosemont Middle School in West Linn, OR, to read Kids Writing Contest Winner Bill Wang.  From the press release:  www.MrsP.com, the popular, award-winning children’s website, will participate in the National Education Association’s Read Across America campaign today by releasing videos of the winners of its 2010 writing contest for kids. The two grand prize-winning stories of Mrs. P’s Be-A-Famous-Writer contest will be released on iTunes and can be downloaded for free.  Mountain Dog, written by Briana Beebe, 8, from Colorado, and Lucky the Bamboo Chopper, by Bill Wang, 12, of Oregon, are bundled together with a total running time of 16:30.

In this morning’s mailbox, Education Week sent me an email with links to a set of Spotlights for Creating Readers and a set of articles on middle and high school literacy. Now, to read the full articles, you have to be a paying customer. Even so, you can get a couple of the intro paragraphs for free (helpful for assessing content) and they are nice, neat archives on a topic, as the articles go back a few years.