Saturday Blurbs

I hadn’t anticipated writing during the conference, but my friendly neighbors brought their party home about 4:45 this morning, and that was all she wrote .. which is too bad, ‘cuz I was dreaming about pecan waffles! Lucky for you, though, because I went through the reader AND I can give you an update on the Kidlitosphere Conference.

KidLitCon09 has been amazing so far, and if the chatter at dinner last night was any *hint*of today, it will be fantabulous.

As MotherReader mentioned yesterday, an FTC rep will be joining us this morning. What a coup!

The visit to the Library of Congress was a great way to kick off the weekend.  In addition to a group tour of the Library itself, Pam had arranged tours to view some of the rare books in the Children’s Literature Center and the Rosenwald collection. It was so cool to see books from books printed BEFORE Christopher Columbus sailed the ocean blue! Learning the history of children’s literature was fascinating … in the ‘old days’ books were written for parents to read to their children, they weren’t books for a children’s audience.

I’ll have plenty more later … and if you’re following along today, look for Sheila Ruth and others to be tweeting updates … just search the #kidlitcon hashtag.

At dinner last night, I asked Sheila Ruth about Cybils. There were 944 nominees. My TBR pile is going to explode!

There are a bunch of items in my reader that I’ll catch up with later, but I did want to highlight a new article by Cathy Miller. She draws on a recent speech by the President of the International Reading Association to build out an article about comprehension and helping independent readers think about what they read.