Okay Gals, Play Ball!

I received a couple enthusiastic emails about my Women in Baseball post, so when I ran across this little documentary of the Racine Belles, thought I'd drop it in here for my readers.

Explore the Wild Side with Sylvan Dell

I am not a lazy teacher; far from it. That's exactly why I appreciate a publisher like Sylvan Dell that has so much to offer students, teachers, and parents.


The award-winning science and nature books which define their niche are extremely colorful and well-designed. As a teacher who often reads books upside down (so that younger students can see the pictures more easily) I definitely appreciate the no-nonsense fonts!

What I especially like, however, is that each Sylvan Dell picture book features an educational section called For Creative Minds which features a number of teaching ideas and resources. For example, Sort it Out!(obviously intended for lower grades than this blog's target audience) features two pages of sorting cards which can be used for classification (a table is included for this) or Memory. But what teacher would want to cut apart such a beautiful book? Here's the good news. Each book's For Creative Minds is available for pdf download from the publisher's site. Check out the quality of the pages that accompany Sort it Out!.

How the Moon Regained Her Shape is an example more appropriate for fourth grade. It's a terrific Native American-influenced folktale which can be used to study that genre, or the phases of the moon, or even bullying. As you can see, the teaching materials for this book are a little more elaborate and mature. Turtle Summer: A Journal for my Daughter is on one level deceptively simple as a picture book, and yet on another level incredibly insightful as a journal of scientific observation of nature. Again, the For Creative Minds section provides parents and teachers with ideas which are as simple or involved as you choose. This kind of resource instantly increases the value of this book as an instructional tool in the classroom.

This, however, is just the beginning of what Sylvan Dell offers as educational supports for their books. At their site you'll also find Teaching Activities (30 or more pages!) for each title. These guides feature questions, cross-curricular activities, charts, vocabulary lists, games, glossaries, cloze activities, maps, and more. For the teacher who wants to take the picture book experience beyond the read-aloud, these Teaching Activities are priceless. Check out the Teaching Guide for Ocean Hide and Seek. Dozens of options (yes, options; don't try to do them all!) to support a simple, beautifully illustrated book which students will want to view over and over again.

Still need convincing? How about online, self-checking, interactive quizzes? Alignment to state standards? Online Ebook previews of each title?

I'm impressed. This is one publisher that definitely fulfills their end of the bargain. Go and see for yourself what an amazing website this young company has created, and explore some more titles while you're there.

I love it when my job is so easy!

Teacher Book Wizard

Scholastic's Teacher Book Wizard is a truly awesome resource for teachers. I highly recommend you check out the video tour of all the features.

At its simplest, the Book Wizard is a database of 50,000 books, available from different publishers. You can search by author, title, key word, reading level, or themed book lists. Book results contain author information, vocabulary lists, and age-appropriate extension activities. The Leveled Search option allows you to search by interest and reading levels, language, book type, and even genre.

Teachers who try Book Wizard seem most excited about the BookAlike feature which allows you to find books similar to one you've already read. For example, if a student loves The Magic Treehouse series, you can enter that title to see other books which may be appealing. The slide feature allows you to return results that are at, above, or below the original level. So for that fourth grader who picked out Shiloh but finds it too challenging, the BookAlike feature would recommend Ribsy or Stone Fox as more appropriate grade-level choices. In my experience I've had lots of parents ask for book suggestions at parent-teacher conferences. Having the BookAlike feature available makes such suggestions a breeze! Students could even be taught how to use this resource for themselves.

List Exchange allows teachers, authors, and celebrities to share lists of favorite books. These are searchable as well. See a list you like? You can save it and then customize it to make your own.

A final feature allows you to use search results or book lists to create online purchase orders. One click formats the book list as a purchase order, with all math done online. But truthfully, for the average classroom teacher, that's probably the least impressive function.

Lee & Low Books: Globally Aware Picture Books

Here in New Jersey and in many other states across the nation, educators are encouraged to focus on 21st Century Skills, and with them, global awareness.

Teachers often lament, "How can I teach students about the world when they barely know about themselves, their families, and their own community?" I think this is answered beautifully through multicultural picture books, and one of the preeminent publishers of multicultural titles is Lee and Low.

I've been a fan for a while now; Ken Mochizuki, author of Heroes, Baseball Saved Us, and Be Water, My Friend (a biography of young Bruce Lee) publishes with Lee and Low. I recommend those three titles highly, but a fourth, Passage to Freedom: The Sugihara Story, is especially recommended to those readers of this blog who wrote in to thank me for the Holocaust books featured in a recent post. In this little-known true tale, Japanese diplomat Chiune Sugihara makes the difficult decision to help thousands of Jews escape the Holocaust through Japan, against his government's orders. This books truly speaks to children about doing "the right thing" for others, no matter how little we seem to share in common with them.

What I didn't realize (until visiting their website and reviewing other titles) was that Lee and Low's specialty is multicultural children's books. Once again my job as a teacher and a blogger of picture books is made easy because the site features well-written, in-depth teaching guides for their titles. For the above-mentioned Passage to Freedom, for example, you'll find an Author Talk as well as a Teacher's Guide available either on the site or as a separate pdf download. The Guide features readability scales, themes, a summary, before and after reading questions, writing activities, ESL ideas, and extension lessons across the curriculum. So even if you're not studying the Holocaust or World War II, this Guide would help you understand how to use in the book in several other meaningful ways with your class.

What else will you find at their site? Homeschoolers will find several project and fundraising ideas. Teachers and homeschoolers alike will discover ideas for teaching current events by visiting the Calendar page. And finally, unpublished writers of color can enter to win the New Voices Award, which recognizes promising new authors.

I look forward to including Lee and Low titles in my future posts, but for now, do yourself a favor and head to their site. You'll be impressed by the diversity of their titles, as well as the resources they offer teachers and parents.

Picture Book Previews

Originally created as book talks and mini-commercials for book fairs, the sixty-five book videos at Scholastic provide power previews and instant incentives for young readers.

I recently used the book trailer for Swindle by Gordon Korman to get my students excited about that novel. This video in particular plays out like a movie preview. Other videos, such as that for Chasing Vermeer, are traditional book talks with engaging questions for the reader, while others, such as Lily Brown's Paintings, provide students a peek behind the author's process of creating a book.

For whatever reason, these videos aren't easy to find on the site, and typically don't show up in the search results for the individual authors. But now you've got the link to explore them all, so off you go! See for yourself what great resources these videos can be.