Children's Literacy and Reading News Roundup: Mid-August

The mid-August children's literacy and reading news roundup, brought to you by Terry Doherty, Carol Rasco, and me, is now available at Terry's blog, The Family Bookshelf. Terry has a lot of great links. Some highlights:

• "It started with a post by Shannon Hale Why Boys Don’t Read Girls (Sometimes). Then Liz Burns (A Chair, a Fireplace and a Tea Cozy) offered her thoughts & vignettes in Boy Books or Girl Books,  and then Shannon picked it up again with some additional, poignant remarks from readers." - This has been a fascinating discussion. I especially liked this point made by Shannon (in yet another post on the subject): "Here are two first steps for my hoped-for changes: 1. boys and girls cease to mock any boys who read a “girl” book. 2. Adults become more aware about how we talk about books and our tendency to only recommend books about/by boys for male readers." 
• Yoda as a force for children's literacy.
• "Thanks to Leila Roy at Bookshelves of Doom Jen discovered “some very nice 2012 #kidlit and #yalit booklists from Bankstreet College of Education.”  The main part of the page offers great ideas for parents; the lists – which are as a PDF – are on the right-hand side. As Jen points out in her tweet this is “a great resource for parents.”" 

And here are a couple of additional tidbits:

• As previously promised, School Library Journal has made the Fuse #8 Production Top 100 lists of children's fiction and picturebooks available in gorgeous PDF format. Go here and here to request your copies. 
• I learned from a post by Pernille Ripp at the Nerdy Book Club about the Global Read Aloud project. Participants sign up to read a selected book aloud over a four week period, starting October 1st. This year's choices are “Charlotte’s Web” (for younger readers) and “The One and Only Ivan” (for older middle grade readers). 
• NPR published the results of their "Top 100 YA novels" poll. It's not really the best novel ever published (and some of them aren't really YA), but rather the novels that voters selected from an NPR-generated list of 235 choices. There are some great books on the list, but also some concerns over a lack of diversity in the selections. 
• A new study at Oregon State University found that "Young children who are able to pay attention and persist on a task have a 50 percent greater chance of completing college". (via @tashrow)
• Here are some excellent suggestions from @TrevorHCairney on Getting Young Readers into Chapter Books. Trevor also talks, in another post at Literacy, Families and Learning, about Why Questions are Critical for Children's Learning & Reading.

I've been sharing various other links on Twitter this week @JensBookPage (catching up after a vacation last week). I'll post some of the highligts on Friday. And Carol will be back with more children's literacy and reading news at the end of the month. Thanks for reading, and for caring about children's literacy.