Reading News & Children’s Literacy Roundup – mid-February

Jen opens the mid-month edition of the Reading News and Literacy Roundup with one of my favorite topics: The Children’s and Young Adult Bloggers Literary Awards! They are an annual gift to my To Be Read list!

There is other great news to share, too. Today is Random Acts of Kindness Day here in the States … so if you are a lurker, go over to Jen Robinson’s Book Page and offer a comment. There is a lot of kindness packed into a simple “hello.” [no movie reference intended!]

The first two weeks of March are going to be P-A-C-K-E-D with fun, engaging literary events.

March 2 is the birthday of Theodor Geisel (aka Dr. Seuss) … it is also National Read Across America Day. I LOVE this year’s featured book: The Lorax. Reading Rockets has a particularly good collection of Read Across America Day resources. You’ll find information about a live reading of The Lorax in all Target stores, at Target.com.

Five days later its LitWorld’s World Read Aloud Day. This is the third year for this international event, and one that is close to our hearts. In her post Make Every Day Read Aloud Day @ the Book Whisperer, Donalyn Miller eloquently reminds us of the power of sharing a book together! When you can make fourth graders moan because they want you to keep reading, then you’re on to something!

In fact, World Read Aloud Day falls right in the middle of this year’s Share a Story – Shape a Future blog tour. With our theme The Culture of Reading, we’ll be talking about exploring new worlds through reading, building a reading culture (at home, school, and across age groups), asking readers how they see the world, and ways to build a reading culture that doesn’t involve books. If you’ve got an idea for a mini-theme or want to be part of the tour, just send me an email shareastory [at]  thereadingtub [dot] com

O’Reilly’s Tools of Change conference was in New York this week. The Conference bills itself as a “knowledge aggregator, bringing together stakeholders from the global book publishing and technology ecosystems.” Yes, it is a business conference, but you can’t talk books without talking readers. These two articles in Publisher’s Weekly were particularly insightful (via Scoop.It)

The first is TOC 2012: LeVar Burton, Libraries and The Bookstore of the Future by Calvin Reid. Many of us know LeVar Burton (who was the Keynote Speaker) through his association with Reading Rainbow. He was clearly a reader long before that …

[Burton] delivered an inspirational keynote speech focused on the role of reading—in particular science fiction—in his own life. Describing the impact of the science fiction— what he called the power of “what if” —Burton said the genre offered him “a process of imagining a world we’d like to see and explore,” emphasizing that reading was an “elemental” force in his home growing up.

The second – which is admittedly a little more publisher oriented – is about the need to continue creating “traditional” books. TOC 2012: Children’s Books Must Exist in Digital and Print by Gabe Habash summarizes several points by Junko Yokota, director of the Center for Teaching Through Children’s Books.

“It’s not really an either/or conversation for me,” Yokota said, but rather, it’s about which direction, print or digital (or both) is right for each title. Using a series of examples, Yokota showed how titles could fit better in digital than in print and vice versa.

Happy Friday, everyone … and happy reading, too! Thanks for sharing your love of reading and literacy with the bookworms of tomorrow.