Children's Literature

We celebrate Children's Book Week in November with Web sites on children's literature and authors. Most author Web sites provide information on writing letters to the author and arranging author visits

General | Publisher Pages

General

The Children's Picture Book Database from Miami University gives teachers, librarians, parents, and students a place for designing literature-based thematic units for all subjects. Users may search for picture books on a particular topic, concept or skill. The database contains abstracts of over 5000 picture books for children, preschool to grade 3.

TeachingBooks.Net features video interviews of authors talking about their work, designed to give educators access to "virtual author presentations" from their very own computer. The site also includes teaching guides, author bibliographies, and many links to lesson plans, author and illustrator Web sites and other children's literature resources. Other features include links to audio clips of book chapters and thematic bibliographies created by teachers. There is a subscription fee for the site; however TeachingBooks.net is available free to every school, library and resident in Wisconsin through BadgerLink (Wisconsin teacher sign up here).

The Book Wizard from Scholastic allows you to search for books using a wide variety of variables such as interest level, reading level, topic, genre, etc. It also includes a "book alike" search that allows you to search for read-alikes at different reading levels.

Family Literacy Bags from Reading Rockets provides printable kits to help teachers encourage reading at home and support the role of parents as educators. Each kit suggests a paired set of theme-based fiction and nonfiction books, and provides several related activities that kids bring home from school to share with their family.

National Children’s Book Week from the National Children’s Book Council describes the event and provides suggestions for classroom and library activities.

The Children's Literature Web Guide from the University of Calgary includes many helpful resources for teachers, librarians, and parents, including lists of children’s book awards and teaching ideas for children’s books.

Carol Hurst's Children's Literature Site features a collection of reviews of great books for kids, ideas of ways to use them in the classroom and collections of books and activities about particular subjects, curriculum areas, themes and professional topics.

The International Children's Digital Library provides Internet access to books from around the world. The collection currently contains over 500 books in 21 languages and can be searched by title, author, illustrator, language or publication date. One of the special things about this collection is the "simple search" function, which provides interesting and kid-friendly categories such as color, characters (kid, real animal, imaginary animal), length (short, medium and long as well as picture book or chapter book) and more. The location search is a nice way to integrate children's literature into geography; students can click to spin a globe and find books from a particular continent.

Picturing Books is a Web site about picture books created by a librarian and children's book lover. A neat feature in the Pallette section is information on different artistic media and styles, complete with a list of illustrators and examples of their books.

The Eclipse Project explores the History of the Mother Goose rhymes. In a separate section the site chronicles in great detail the creation of a children's book, Petra Mather's Kisses from Rosa.

Children's Art Activities from the National Center for Children’s Illustrated Literature provides art-related lesson plans for teachers to use with the books of Nina Crews, David Diaz, William Joyce, and others.

ALA Resources for Parents, Teens and Kids includes recommended reading lists, notable books, and more.

A Quick Guide to Authors and Illustrators from the Cooperative Children’s Book Center (CCBC) in Madison supplies author/illustrator interviews and webcasts that feature conversations with authors, including Joseph Bruchac, Jean Craighead George, Lois Ehlert, Naomi Shihab Nye, and others.

The CCBC Online Directory of Wisconsin Children's Book Creators is a searchable database of Wisconsin authors and illustrators of books for children and teenagers who are willing to make appearances at schools and libraries. The site also includes links to online directories from other states and regions.

The Author Page from the Internet Public Library Youth Division features biographies of popular authors.

My Home Library provides Bookplates for students to put in their personal books. These beautiful plates are created by well-known illustrators and may be freely copied except for commercial purposes.

Read On Wisconsin! is a statewide book club for children and young adults, sponsored by First Lady Jessica Doyle. Teachers and librarians can register at the Web site to receive the book list.

The Screen Actors Guild Foundation sponsors Storyline Online, an on-line streaming video program featuring actors reading childrens books aloud. For example, Jane Kaczmarek reads Patricia Polacco's Thank You Mr. Falker, and Sean Astin reads A Bad Case of the Stripes by David Shannon. The site offers an accompanying lesson plan and activity guide for each book.

Book Week is a video program from the series America's Special Days. Viewers visit a book factory, meet authors, visit places where books are made available to readers, and learn more about the importance of books. Wisconsin teachers may tape the program from your local Public Television station, or order a tape from ECB.

Publisher Pages

The Boyds Mills Press Web site includes book information, teaching ideas, brief biographies of authors and illustrators, and information on author and illustrator visits.

HarperChildren’s.com features activities for children and biographies of authors, including Kevin Henkes, Beverly Cleary, E.B. White, and others.

Penguin Putnam Young Readers features author and illustrator information and extensive reading group guides for many books.

Kids@Random offers information and activities for children to accompany popular series such as Berenstain Bears, Junie B. Jones, and the Magic Treehouse.

Teachers@Random includes a thematic index to books, teachers guides, and author and illustrator information.

Author Illustrator Source is a listing of published writers and illustrators who conduct student  presentations or teacher workshops across the country. The list is accessible either alphabetically or by region.

Get Caught Reading, a program sponsored by book and magazine publishers associations to encourage children to read, features downloadable posters of celebrities who were "caught reading."

The Text-only menu provides accessible and printer-friendly access to the Surf Report Archives.

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