CMIS Evaluation Fiction Focus

Here’s another terrific free resource from the UK. Everyone’s Reading Plus is a 108-page PDF document listing titles suitable for readers of both genders aged between 11 and 18.  A few Australian authors are included.

This School Library Association publication complements previous free lists Boys into Books 5-11 and Boys into Books 11-14. All are part of the SLA Riveting Reads series.

The titles on the Everyone’s Reading list can also be browsed online in a searchable database on the dedicated website. UK schools can select 15 titles from the list as part of a gifting program.

Everyone’s Reading has recently started on twitter.

We’ve tweeted about the new reading site launched by the Library of Congress at the recent National Book Festival held in Washington. But we haven’t specifically mentioned the joint twelve-month project of the Center for the Book and the National Children’s Book and Literacy Alliance.

The Exquisite Corpse is named after that old game where someone starts a story on a sheet of paper, folds it over and hands it to the next person to write the next bit. You never quite know what the result will be.

This online story started with the contribution by Jon Scieszka, National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature (and is illustrated by Chris van Dusen) and now the next part is online – Katherine Paterson’s chapter, illustrated by James Ransome. KateDiCamillo and Calef Brown come next, with a new chapter every two weeks.

You can subscribe to the updates by RSS or email.

South African-born writer Beverley Naidoo talks about growing up under apartheid and how reading opened her eyes to injustice:

Believe it or not, the library at my school was kept locked! I have no memory of going inside and choosing a book for myself. What’s more, when I asked our vice-principal to sign a form so that I could join the Johannesburg city library, she refused. I can still hear her voice with her Irish lilt… “And what would you be wanting to read more books for, Beverley? Have you not got enough with your textbooks already?”

Again from The Guardian.

We are a little late with this one, but it’s still worth noting.

Philip Pullman, the bestselling author, has warned a school that it will become a ‘byword for philistinism and ignorance’ if it goes ahead with the closure of its library.

Oh dear. As if the global monetary crisis wasn’t enough, here’s some doom and gloom on the literacy front from the UK’s Independent on Sunday newspaper:

Publishers must adapt titles to the demands of modern young readers who spend more time on the internet if they are to succeed in persuading the next generation to read, says Jonathan Douglas, the director of the National Literacy Trust.

He made his remarks as researchers prepared to tell a conference starting today that children’s reading habits slump dramatically after they start at secondary school. The typical eight-year-old reads nearly 16 books a year but, by the time they reach 15 or 16, this has dwindled to just over three books per year. The big drop-off starts after the first year of secondary school, when the number of books read falls from nearly 12 a year to just six.

The study, based on interviews with nearly 30,000 pupils aged seven to 16, also shows a growing trend towards reading comics, magazines, newspapers and online articles, and playing computer games, after the first year at secondary school.

Editorial from Canada’s leading newspaper.

• A great article on reading from the Washington Post, brought to our attention through the OZTLNet listerv (thanks Dianne in Hong Kong)
• Boys’ reading: an initiative from Charlie Higson, creator of the Young Bond series:

Charlie Higson, author of the popular Young Bond series, has launched a computer game set in the world of 007 to help address declining literacy standards in young boys. The initiative comes only a matter of days after time spent at the computer was blamed for a fall in Sats results for English, with one in five 14-year-old boys found to be reading below the level expected for an 11-year-old.

There’s that SATS words again!

• The Queensland Writers’ Centre has sprung to the defence of Requiem: Detractors ask if we really want to read profanity and racist dialogue in our children’s books? But this is an insidious question. What can the reasonable answer be except ‘no’? … But this of course masks the real issue. That ugliness exists. That racism, violence and ignorance are real. And books, especially fiction, are still the best vehicles for exploring confronting ideas.

Current Children’s Laureate in the UK, Michael Rosen, has spoken out about standardised testing and the dangers of teaching to the test -  what is called SATS in Britain, NAPLAN here and something else in the USA and Canada and New Zealand.

This was very much a focus at the May CBCA Conference in Melbourne: literacy versus literature and politicians who don’t seem to understand the difference.

Rosen says:

Only when all children are in a book-loving environment will they achieve literacy, yes, but a lot more: a confidence in handling abstract ideas, an understanding of a multiplicity of viewpoint and the complexity and diversity of human interaction that comes through reading widely and often. At the moment, the government is barking up the wrong tree.

Change the acronyms and what Rosen has to say is relevant to every country that is going down the standardised testing path at the same time that school libraries are fighting for survival.

Britain’s Laureate and the USA’s Ambassador both have the gravitas to speak out for the importance of books and libraries. Don’t Aussie kids deserve a high-profile spokesperson too?

We know that Children’s Book Week will be here in two weeks, with the announcement of the winning books on August 14. School libraries everywhere in Australia are busy fuelling the minds of their readers.

But if you are lucky enough to have travel on your mind, or if you are just interested in what is going on elsewhere, there are plenty of other book-related events happening around the world in August. Thanks to the Papertigers site for keeping us informed.

The current issue of Papertigers is devoted to literacy.

The literacy debate rages, certainly throughout the English-speaking world. Here in Australia, a new title by Monash University’s Associate Professor Ilana Snyder has made front-page news in The Australian newspaper. The Literacy Wars : why teaching children to read and write is a battleground in Australia took up many column inches on the weekend of 2-3 February. A CMIS review will appear in the Resource Bank soon.

In Britain, Prime Minister Gordon Brown has launched the National Year of Reading – an initiative designed to put reading high on the national agenda. And that’s reading for everybody, not just people at school.

Now in the US, a school librarian has put his spin on what he feels are the reasons teens are reading less. We are all reading less, he argues. ‘How long is it?’ has replaced ‘Will I like it?’ in school libraries because the information overload tipping point has been reached. These days we all skim in order to survive. We have become a culture of searchers, not readers. It’s a thoughtful piece, well worth reading. But if he is right, does it mean that reading for pleasure will soon be the preserve of those with the leisure time to ‘indulge’? Hooking kids into books is one of the most satisfying aspects of the teacher-student relationship. Making sure that keeps happening is more important than ever.