Archive for Feature

Have you ever wanted to ask author Beverly Cleary a question about her much-loved books, the vivid characters she created, or her life as a writer? Reading Rockets, a national multimedia project offering information and resources on how young kids learn to read, interviewed Mrs. Cleary using questions from children and adults. Mrs. Cleary talks about her favorite teddy bear, where the character Ralph came from, the pleasures of reading and writing, and much more. Listen to the interview on the Reading Rockets website.

There has been talk of building a new library in our town. Some think it is what this place needs; others are for sticking with what we have. I’m in the latter camp. It’s true our small-town library has no computers, no interlibrary loan system, no DVD collection. There is no self-service checkout where you scan the bar code on your book, just as at the supermarket.

What our town has is unique: The library is more a reading room than a repository with technological aids; more a literary salon—although a loosely structured one—than a hushed space with little interaction among patrons. Read more in The Christian Science Monitor online.

It’s tough to trace the history of April Fools’ Day, or All Fools’ Day, as it was once known, but for some theories about how the holiday came to be, some funny adult pranks that have been played, and some harmless suggestions for kids to torment their families, read this article in The Christian Science Monitor online.

Describing himself as “a great fan of America’s public education,” singer Tom Chapin says he really appreciates the tough job that faces every teacher. “I believe they need all the help they can get: Anything that excites a student, opens their eyes, and hearts and minds is a positive that makes a child invest in school,” he says on a website called Not On The Test, where a song he wrote with John Forster appears.

“Music, art, drama and sports—these are what kept me involved when I was in school. And these very things, that make a teacher’s (and student’s) job easier and more rewarding, are what’s been cut from curriculums across the country. Now we are teaching by rote again—where the test, and only the test, becomes the reason to teach and study.” Check out the song Not On The Test.

Every Monday at 4:00 p.m., fans of Stephen King, Louis L'Amour, James Baldwin, and Malcolm X gather at 2100 Lakeside Men's Shelter in Cleveland to discuss books. At a time when polls indicate that book reading is declining, the homeless men in this shelter are reading two books a month, according to an article by Jacqueline Marino appearing on ABC News online.

Donna Kelly, an outreach nurse with Care Alliance, a health care provider for the homeless, began the club last fall after noticing how many homeless men brought books to the health clinic she helped run at the shelter. The books for the book club are supplied by the Cleveland Public Library.

Kelly tries to bring health literacy into every meeting without disrupting the excitement generated by the book discussions. Sometimes the book club has even inspired its members to change their lives, as when, after a field trip to hear an author's talk, one man acknowledged his alcohol problem and said he was ready to see a counselor.

For further information, read the full story.

Millions of young readers joined the celebration of the National Education Association's 11th annual Read Across America Day on March 3. Aimed at raising awareness about the importance of reading, the nation's largest reading event included special appearances by Dr. Seuss's famous feline, the Cat in the Hat, at thousands of Read Across America Day events from coast to coast—including a red carpet celebrity read-in, Cat-a-Van reading tours, spring training read-ins with professional baseball players, U.S. Senate resolutions, and community reading celebrations at Target stores nationwide.

In Compton, California, dozens of celebrities donned signature Seuss gear and read Dr. Seuss classics to more than 750 local public school students. The reading roster included Emmy Award-winning actress Jenna Fischer of "The Office," hotel heiress Nicky Hilton, Corey Feldman of "The Two Coreys," Khloe and Kourtney Kardashian of "Keeping Up With The Kardashians," and more.

To put the "across" into the special reading day, NEA revved up its engines again this year with three Cat-a-Van tours hitting the road to bring the gift of reading to thousands of schoolchildren. Covering more than 1,200 miles, the Cat-a-Van tours will visit 11 states. Lawmakers also lent their bipartisan support to NEA's literacy campaign and its reading cause. On Capitol Hill, Senators Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Jack Reed (D-R.I.) supported a resolution designating March 3 as "Read Across America Day.”

Visit the Read Across America website for additional information on Read Across America Day and the Cat-a-Van Reading Tour. Visit the following page to see photos.

When Clearview junior Samantha Caltabiano was asked to read her favorite children’s book to a class of elementary school students at Sewell School in Sewell, New Jersey, she jumped at the opportunity. The National Honor Society student, who dreams of becoming an elementary school teacher, thought the service project for the National Education Association’s “Read Across America” campaign would provide great experience.

“I read Morris Goes to School to Margaret Potalivo’s fourth grade class, and it was such a great time for me,” said Samantha. “We told them to keep reading,” she said of the message that the high schoolers brought to the grade school kids. “When that message comes from people closer to their age than teachers or parents, I think it really means something.”

Schools across Gloucester County celebrated Read Across America on Monday, an annual event held nationwide to focus attention on the importance of reading. Read Across America began in 1997 to celebrate the birthday of Dr. Seuss, author of The Cat in the Hat. The project has grown from a one-day event to year-long program of activities for 45 million teachers, students, and reading enthusiasts from across the country. Read more in The Gloucester County Times online.

America’s children aren’t reading very much or very well these days, so the nation’s finest minds have come up with a Big Idea: Find an author who can tap into the richness of children's literature and persuade kids to drop their idle pursuits—their Facebooks, Nanos and Wiis—for the thrill of a good book.

Last month, the Library of Congress and the Children’s Book Council, a trade group, announced the appointment of the USA’s first “ambassador for young people's literature,” a sort of poet laureate for the Harry Potter set. As the inaugural ambassador, they named renowned author Jon Scieszka. For Scieszka, the appointment comes as “a great vote for the importance of humor” to win converts to reading. Read more about how Scieszka keeps kids reading at USA Today online.

R U cycle? Book! Fancy an adds down the sub? There's a gr8 new carnage.

It may look like gobbledegook, but the most streetwise of teenagers would have no trouble translating and responding to it in kind. A new language is being developed by cell phone-addicted kids based on the predictive text of their treasured handsets.

Key words are replaced by the first alternative that comes up on a mobile phone using predictive text. Those expressing excitement with the old-fashioned text phrase “woohoo!,” now use the far more hip “zonino!” instead. The replacement words—technically paragrams, but commonly known as textonyms, adaptonyms or cellodromes—are becoming part of regular teen banter. Read about the trend at Yahoo News online.

There are more than 7,000 languages spoken in the world, but we lose one every two weeks thanks to colonization, globalization, and indifference, according to Kirk Honeycutt of the Hollywood Reporter. A new movie titled Linguists, which showed at the Sundance film festival last month, tracks the efforts of David Harrison and Gregory Anderson as they trek deep into sometimes dangerous territories to record nearly dead languages.

For further information, visit the film's website.

Winter, however cold and snowy, has its sweet compensations. What better time to throw logs on the fire, hole up with a book, and be transported to the realms of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, or drama?

For most people, reading is a solitary, silent act. But some couples also turn it into a joint venture by reading aloud. Their literary equation is: 2 people + 1 book = shared pleasure. Whatever the season, whatever the subject, it’s their personal version of an audiobook.

No one pretends this is a widespread pastime. But talk to couples who do it and their enthusiasm is obvious. In addition to broadening their reading, they find it creates a bond that doesn’t happen when they sit passively in front of the TV. Read about this lovely way of connecting in The Christian Science Monitor online.

According to some surveys, roughly two-thirds of North American readers admit to reading in the bathroom. With that in mind, Robert Philpot of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram offers 20 reasons to continue doing so. The article was found on the website of The Arizona Republic.

Here is a sampling of Philpot's tongue-in-cheek reasons for bathroom reading: you can learn something, it's an intellectual pursuit, it promotes literacy, you can learn a lot about pop culture, and famous people have done it. To see the other reasons, read the full article.

In 1937, 29% of American adults told the pollster George Gallup that they were reading a book. In 1955, only 17% said they were. Pollsters began asking the question with more latitude. In 1978, a survey found that 55% of respondents had read a book in the previous six months. The question was even looser in 1998 and 2002, when the General Social Survey found that roughly 70% of Americans had read a novel, a short story, a poem, or a play in the preceding twelve months. And, this August, 73% of respondents to another poll said that they had read a book of some kind, not excluding those read for work or school, in the past year. If you didn’t read the fine print, you might think that reading was on the rise. Other studies say no, and the decline in reading has serious consequences for all of us. Read this piece, “Twilight of the Books” in The New Yorker online.

It began as a way for John Breen to help his son prepare for the SAT, a standardized test for college admission. Today, some 500,000 people daily visit the vocabulary-quiz website the Indiana-based computer programmer set up. And while word-game fun is part of the draw, players get an extra jolt of “feel good” joy: Every time they get an answer right, they help combat world hunger.

Freerice.com, which debuted in Oct­o­ber, donates 20 grains of rice to the United Nations World Food Program (WFP) every time a player selects the correct definition for a particular word. Paid for with advertising income, 4 billion grains have been won for the WFP so far. That’s 160 metric tons, or enough to feed 200,000 people for one day. Read more about the site in The Christian Science Monitor or visit Freerice.com.

Ethiopia Reads, founded by International Reading Association members, is featured in the October issue of Good Housekeeping. The eight-page feature story, “Hope Volume I,” was written by Melissa Fay Greene, with photos by J Carrier. This spring, Greene spent a few weeks in Addis Ababa and Awassa, getting to know Yohannes Gebregeorgis, Ethiopia Reads’ co-founder and executive director. IRA member Jane Kurtz is the president of the board of directors of Ethiopia Reads. Greene also spent time with children at Shola Children’s Library and the Awassa Reading Center, and saw first-hand the power of books in the lives of children. Ethiopian children—like children everywhere—love books and stories, as well as the sanctuary of a library. You can download a copy of the article here in PDF format.

She is one of the world’s most famous country singers, with a fortune estimated at £110 million. Rotherham is the gritty South Yorkshire town where once the great steel and coal industries of England flourished. Yet, somehow, Dolly Parton and Rotherham have come together to embark on a laudable project to teach children to read. Parton, 61, has chosen the town as the first place this side of the Atlantic to promote her scheme to improve children’s literacy. She will launch her United Kingdom Imagination Library at the Magna science and education centre on a former steelworks’ site in Rotherham on Wednesday, December 5, 2007. Read about the new library in The Telegraph.

A constellation of best-selling authors joined Barbara and George H.W. Bush at the Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center earlier this week for A Celebration of Reading Dallas. But the crowd at the literacy fundraiser wanted Jenna. Jenna Bush was there to read from her new book, Ana’s Story: A Journey of Hope. She read a moving chapter about an HIV-positive teen mother she met while working for UNICEF in Latin America. As many guests wiped away tears, former President Bush said, “I used to worry about following Barbara; now I have to worry about following the grandkids.” Read the article in The Dallas Morning News.

Stuck in traffic? Listen to a good book. That's the premise behind Random House's $200,000 ad campaign to get commuters in Atlanta listening to audio books. Atlanta was chosen for the trial campaign because it has some of the longest commuting times in the nation, according to an article by Ken Foskett in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Four weeks into the campaign, Random House says it has boosted sales. Amanda D'Acierno, director for marketing and publicity at Random House Audio, says the publisher is considering similar ad campaigns in other cities, noting that "there's no shortage of traffic."

For further information, read the full article.

Jenna Bush, the president’s daughter, agreed to sit for her first-ever extended newspaper interview to talk about Ana’s Story: A Journey of Hope, her new book for young adults. The book is a nonfiction account of the struggles and triumphs of a Latin American teenager born HIV–positive. Bush, who has been a teaching assistant and has taught third grade, says she’s hoping to “start a dialogue” with young Americans about HIV/AIDS and other hurdles—poverty, abuse, lack of education—that confront millions of children worldwide. Read about Jenna Bush at washingtonpost.com.

About 16,000 words have succumbed to pressures of the Internet age and lost their hyphens in a new edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. Bumble-bee is now bumblebee, ice-cream is ice cream and pot-belly is pot belly. And if you’ve got a problem, don’t be such a crybaby (formerly cry-baby). Read more of this article from MSNBC.com

It was a serious contribution to the electronic lexicon. Twenty-five years ago, Carnegie Mellon University professor Scott E. Fahlman says, he was the first to use three keystrokes—a colon followed by a hyphen and a parenthesis—as a horizontal “smiley face” in a computer message. To mark the anniversary, Fahlman and his colleagues are starting an annual student contest for innovation in technology-assisted, person-to-person communication. The Smiley Award, sponsored by Yahoo Inc., carries a $500 cash prize. Read more of this article from CNN.com.

Oklahoma has earned the dubious distinction of being one of the five worst “language-loss hotspots” in the world—places where native languages are going extinct the fastest—according to an analysis released yesterday. But Oklahoma isn’t alone. Researchers in Northern Australia have recorded the last known speaker of Amurdag—a man who remembers about 100 words that he last heard spoken by his now-deceased father. Read more of this article from The Washington Post.

A self-proclaimed “book whisperer,” 6th grade language arts and social studies teacher Donalyn Miller says she has yet to meet a child she couldn’t turn into a reader. On average, her students at Trinity Meadow Intermediate School in Keller, Texas, read between 50 and 60 books a year; last year, one of them read 300.

Her methods have produced more than anecdotal results: Last year, her students received a 100 percent passing rate on the reading portion of the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills, with 90 percent receiving a “recommended” score.

In the first of a three-part series in Teacher Magazine, Miller reveals some of her secrets.

In his first book, Daddy Needs a Drink, author Robert Wilder offered a comic, slightly R-rated memoir of parenting. In his new book, Tales From the Teachers' Lounge, Wilder, a longtime English teacher, reflects in similar fashion on his 18 years of teaching—most of them at Santa Fe Preparatory School, a private day school in New Mexico’s capital. Wilder talks about the pleasures of teaching in this interview from USA Today.

College campuses are discovering the possibilities that open up when students, faculty and staff make a point to read the same book. In the process, such “common readings” serve a range of purposes, especially for incoming students who are navigating a big transition. Discover how a common reading led to a meal of free-range organic chicken and organic cranberries on one campus in this article from USA Today.

Outside Santa Rita jail in California on a recent Saturday morning, it was business as usual. Bored adult visitors were standing, some sitting, talking or listening to music, waiting for their names to be called. But this Saturday morning there was a little more life than usual. Visiting kids, who normally would be standing with the adults, or maybe splayed on the ground playing video games, were checking out kid-friendly books like Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing and Ferdinand the Bull. Read more about a program that puts books in the hands of kids in this article from the website InsideBayArea.com.

A university in Venezuela is using a novel method to take books into remote communities and encourage people to read: bibliomulas (book mules). They are helping to spread the benefits of reading to people who are isolated from much of the world around them. The idea of loading mules with books and taking them into the mountain villages was started by the University of Momboy, a small institution that prides itself on its community-based initiatives and on doing far more than universities in Venezuela are required to do by law. Read about the book mules’ travels at BBC News.

Comedian Paula Poundstone was recently named national spokesperson for Friends of Libraries USA, and she says her own intellectual oddity, quickness and curiosity can be traced to a book read to her by her kindergarten teacher. The book was The Five Chinese Brothers by Claire Huchet Bishop and Kurt Wiese. Poundstone knows books both as a reader and a writer, the author of a comedy collection and several funny math textbooks for elementary school children, The Math with a Laugh series. Read more about Poundstone in this article from The Leaf-Chronicle of Clarksville, Tenenssee.

Sipping coffee and flipping through a paperback, Al-Ahram columnist Dina Ezzat considers the new book markets in Cairo in light of the government’s new “Reading for All” campaign.

The city is well dotted with signs promoting the campaign. State-run TV and radio stations are urging the old and young to get into the habit of reading. The government is producing millions of copies of a wide range of titles at fairly decent prices, and the bookstore shelves are full. The resources are all in place. Now, can the Egyptian public be persuaded to return to reading? Read Ezzat’s essay in Al-Ahram Weekly online.

A recent survey suggests British parents’ general knowledge is not much greater than the average 11-year-old’s. Simon Cowell is said to be more familiar generally than the Queen or Prime Minister Gordon Brown. Barely half of parents told representatives of Dorling Kindersley, the publishing company conducting the survey, that they thought they were smarter than their children. In some subjects in a quiz taken by more than 1,500 parents and children aged eight to 12, the youngsters did actually know more. Take the quiz at the BBC NEWS website.

When Barbara Morgan was a wide-eyed 34-year-old schoolteacher, she watched someone who’d beaten her out for the job race into space. Seconds later, the space shuttle was in pieces. Morgan returned to the classroom and shelved her dreams. But not all the way. Now, nearly 22 years later, at 55, she’s set to strap into Endeavour with six colleagues on Aug. 7 and become, after two decades of grief and frustration, the first teacher in space. Read more about Morgan, a member of the International Reading Association since 1986, at PalmBeachPost.com.

The role of pants in the spread of western culture has been wrongly sidelined, according to medieval historians. Rags from discarded pants and knickers led to a 13th century breakthrough in the making of cheap paper, undercutting expensive parchment. Cheap paper was available when William Caxton set up England's first printing press in 1476, and his work has long been credited with the dramatic spread of learning. But Marco Mostert of Utrecht University, speaking at the International Medieval Conference in Leeds, said: "Paper deserves a share of the credit. Its development through the increase of rags undoubtedly helped to increase literacy." Read the article at Guardian Unlimited.

So here we are: at the end of the “Harry Potter” decade. The books have been printed and are under lock and key. (Presumably.) J. K. Rowling has made her choices. Harry is either going to live or die. Severus Snape is either evil or good—or maybe a little bit of both. Ginny will stick with Harry, and Ron will hook up with Hermione. Or not. Eager readers still have to wait a fortnight or so for answers to these questions. Which is why the Op-Ed page of The New York Times asked four writers and one artist to fill the void and draft “Harry Potter” endings of their own. Read more of this article to see how Meg Cabot, Larry Doyle, Polly Horvath, and Damon Lindelof would end the series.

The child growing up in a small town in Michigan thought he would never be able to talk or read out loud. His battle with stuttering often got the best of him and the laughter from other kids left him feeling embarrassed and hurt. The little boy overcame the impediment and grew up to become actor James Earl Jones, one of the most recognizable voices in the world. Read more of Jones’ story in this article from The Buffalo News.

It has been a long, sometimes painful process, but over the years, I’ve learned to separate from my books. Years ago, each one was a little gem that I wanted sitting on my bookshelf even if I had no intention of reading it again. If I lent one to a friend, it was with great hesitation, with my name prominently scrawled inside the cover and after a few months I would start dropping gentle reminders. Only when it became clear that, as was all too often the case, the friend was one of those for whom books were considered disposable currency, would I give up. I can trace my letting-go process to our move to London in 1994. My husband and I looked at our thousands of books and knew some had to stay on this side of the Atlantic. We sold and gave away hundreds and felt purified. Read how to part with your treasured books at The New York Times website.

For pupils across Northern Ireland, thoughts are turning to packing their school bags, closing their books and the long summer holidays ahead. But for the boys and girls in a rural primary school in County Down, when the home time bell rings on Friday, it will be for the final time. Drumaghlis Primary, one of the last remaining Presbyterian schools in the north, is closing its doors after more than 150 years in the Crossgar area. With only 32 children left on the roll, it has been decided it no longer makes financial sense to keep it open. Seven-year-old pupil Mark Savage said, "I'll miss the garden and roaming around. I'll also miss the people and the peace and quiet. I would have preferred it if we all could have stayed together." Read more about the school at BBC News.

For years, reading the Harry Potter books to his daughter, Julia, proved to be an educational experience for Eric D. Randall. The more he read, the more questions Julia had about what certain words meant. Then one day, Julia suggested someone create a dictionary to define words such as marauder and comeuppance. Two years later, that someone was her dad. Read more about the man who wrote the book, The Pottersaurus: 1,500 Words that Harry Potter Readers Need to Know, in this article from The Beaumont Enterprise of Texas.

Whenever 41-year-old Liana Crowe struggled with her English homework in pursuit of her high school diploma, she could count on a convenient tutor—her 17-year-old daughter. "English is my favourite subject," beamed Megan Crowe, who along with sisters Natalie, 16, and Sarah, 14, proudly attended the graduation ceremony Wednesday, June 6, for their mom and 124 other adult students of St. Michael's Catholic high school at the Fogolar Furlan Club. For Liana, her graduation was sweetened with the knowledge that two of her three daughters will be joining her as graduates later this month—Megan finishing Grade 12 at Cardinal Carter and Sarah finishing Grade 8 at Ecole Ste. Ursule. Read their inspirational story.

A New York City writer on her way to an international literary festival gets a ride from a cab driver from Bangladesh. And in the time it takes to drive downtown, they define “literature,” discuss Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Edward Albee, and learn just a little bit more about world literature. Read this article from The New York Times.

Rumors of a diamond discovery sent hundreds of people scurrying to Chinamano Primary School in Epworth, Zimbabwe, tearing up the grounds with picks and shovels. But all they found were quartz pebbles, which mining experts said were definitely not diamonds. School authorities woke up to see hordes of men and women with picks and shovels combing the schoolyard to dig for the "diamonds." Police and other security agents had to be called in to disperse the "diamond" hunters who had invaded the school in the Overspill area. Read about the diamond rush at allAfrica.com.

In a recent New York Times essay, writer Joe Queenan looks at the summer reading lists assigned to teenagers and remembers his own battle, 40 years ago, with Hardy’s The Return of the Native. He discovers that while many teenagers realize summer reading can be a valuable experience, he can’t get past page six of the book that tormented him so many years ago.

J.K. Rowling, who became the world’s first billion-dollar author on the back of Harry Potter’s success, has given the go-ahead for the creation of a Florida theme park dedicated to the schoolboy wizard. The park’s opening could help to quell the withdrawal symptoms of Potter fans around the globe who have bought 320 million copies of her wizard tales and turned every one of the films into a box office hit. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the final installment in her hugely successful series, is being released on July 21. Read more of this article from CNN.com.

The 80th Annual Scripps National Spelling Bee takes place today and tomorrow, with the finals televised on ABC. USA Today looks at all of the attention the competitors receive in this article, and features one speller, who is trying to avoid becoming the Dan Marino of spelling, in this article. Learn more about the bee at the Scripps National Spelling Bee website.

As Americans indulge their seasonal search for good beach books, they might profit from some advice on the subject from Theodore Roosevelt. Hard-charging, hard-playing, always on the move, President Roosevelt might seem an unlikely source of wisdom on what to read while serenely sunning near the surf. But “T.R.” was a lively geyser of opinions on issues large and small, and the modest matter of vacation reading proved to be no exception. The former president weighed in on the matter in the April 1915 issue of Ladies’ Home Journal. The Christian Science Monitor reviews Roosevelt’s recommendations in this article.

J.K. Rowling has a request for those with inside dirt on her seventh and final Harry Potter book: Please keep it to yourself. Read more about Rowling’s efforts to keep the book’s contents under wraps in this Associated Press article, posted on the CNN website.

As you may have heard, Yann Martel, author of the mega-bestselling Life of Pi, and winner of the Man Booker Prize, is sending Canada's Prime Minister Stephen Harper a book every two weeks as part of Martel's one-man campaign to educate Harper about the importance of literature and the arts, and draw attention to the need for stable funding for the Canada Council for the Arts. Martel, in making his case for sending books to Harper, says one of the pleasures of reading is the "stillness" it provides. He's absolutely right. But reading also provides "escape," and there's nothing shameful in reading something that provides nothing more than that. Read Linwood Barclay's light-hearted opinion piece at The Toronto Star website.

Atop a hill, inside the walls of an old Toronto church, is a nursery school where children are playing and learning—alongside their parents—just as they have for the past 70 years in the same rooms children did when Manor Road Co-operative Nursery School opened in 1937. Co-operative nursery schools, dubbed by some as child care's "best-kept secret," began in 1916 in Chicago, when a group of professors' wives sought a program that would combine education for their children, parenting help and social networking as well as some free time for themselves. The schools are nonprofit and less expensive than other pre-school programs. Read more about the concept at TheStar.com.

Enough is enuf. The Simplified Spelling Society (SSS) is celebrating its 99th birthday by launching a new campaign to make it easier to read and write English. With texts and e-mails revolutionizing the way we communicate, SSS secretary John Gledhill says the time is ripe for phonetic reform and spelling simplification. Read more of this article, from the Reuters news agency, on the Scotsman website.

Ex-Spice Girl Geri Halliwell is writing a series of children’s books for release next year. The former Ginger Spice has landed a six-book publishing deal with Macmillan to chronicle the animated adventures of Ugenia Lavender, a bold and assertive 9-year-old girl who balances everyday school life with solving mysteries and working her way out of fantastic situations. Read more about Halliwell’s new pursuit in this article from USA Today.

United Through Reading, a free program available to all U.S. service members in Al Asad, Iraq, is designed to help keep them connected with their children and other family members at home. Through the program, the service members are filmed reading a book out loud. They then receive a DVD of the read-aloud, along with a free package to mail it home. Read more about this program in this article from the Marine Corps News website.

What would you do to motivate kids to read? Kiss a pig? Be made into a human ice cream sundae? Spend the night on the roof of a school? Read about these and other crazy things principals do to encourage reading in this article from Education World.

Two education students and two professors from the University of Texas at Brownsville and Texas Southmost College are trying to make it into the Guinness World Records book. The four plan to read for 200 hours nonstop as they participate in the “Longest Reading Aloud Marathon by a Team” category in the Guinness World Records. Read more about their attempt to break the record in this article from The Brownsville Herald.

Rose “Mama G”Gilbert dons a red plastic fire helmet and excitedly begins lecturing on George Orwell’s novel “1984.” Her Advanced Placement English literature students soon feel the heat as Gilbert connects current events to themes in the book—government surveillance, conformity and sexuality. With her energy, it’s easy to forget that she’s old enough to be the great–great–grandmother of her Palisades Charter High School students. Gilbert is 88 and the oldest teacher in the Los Angeles Unified School District. Read about the feisty, opinionated but passionate teacher at CNN.com

The Mountain Man’s Field Guide to Grammar, which was released last year, is probably the only grammar book to include “grifter” and “pemmican” in its glossary and to teach the simple sentence with examples such as “Dirty Doris spit tobacco juice.” Read about the book’s author, Gary Spina, in this article from The New York Times.

See Kayla sit. Sit, Kayla, sit.
Tom Pawlisch, a third–grade teacher at Fall River School, Fall River, Wisconsin, is trying to encourage reading by having his students read to his pet Kayla, the school’s official literacy dog. The Chesapeake Bay retriever listens to the students, which encourages them to read expressively, said Irene Pawlisch, Kayla’s co-owner. “The dog doesn’t judge if the kids make a mistake, so the kids relax,” Irene said. Read about the dogged pursuit of literacy in the classroom at The Washington Post website.

Words, words, words. They were flying inside the main New York Public Library recently, where 50 finalists were competing in the National Vocabulary Championship, which promised to reward high school students whose strength is verbal acuity with money for college tuition. Read more about the kids in this contest, who know what is pulchritudinous and what is pulverulent, in this article from The New York Times.

With more than 12 million books sold last year alone, author James Patterson doesn’t need to worry about getting the public to read him. But he does worry that people aren’t reading enough. Patterson’s PageTurner Awards, given to organizations and individuals that help encourage literacy, will be announced March 2. Winners range from Pam Shelton, a librarian from Vermont who moved to Africa and founded the Botswana Book Project, to First Book, which has distributed thousands of books to low–income families in the United States. Patterson is the author (and co-author) of such best sellers as “Honeymoon” and “Step on a Crack.” The awards coincide with the National Endowment for the Arts’ “Read Across America” day. Continue reading at The New York Times website.

Along with the accolades and attention that came with being named National Teacher of the Year in a White House ceremony, Jason Kamras received something else when he was named to his post in 2005: business cards. Business cards may be a staple of the business world, but in education, with its strict, top–down pecking order, often only high–level administrators and central-office types receive them. Now some teachers are taking matters into their own hands by making cards. Others are receiving them from a new brand of school leader seeking to bring a touch of the business world into education. Read about the trend at washingtonpost.com.

Fifteen years ago, teachers Andy Anderson and her husband, Frank, devised a project that would bring their students—separated in age by 13 years—together. Books have been the tie that binds Frank’s high school seniors, teenagers nearing graduation and adulthood, to Andy’s kindergartners, children completing their first year of school. It starts with the seniors writing papers on the importance of reading early and often in life. After writing the papers, the seniors pair up to write original children’s stories. They also illustrate and bind them, and develop a lesson or activity to go along with the books. The culmination comes in mid-April, when the seniors take a field trip to the elementary schools. Once there, they read their books to the kindergartners and participate in the activity with them. Read more of this article from the Bradenton Herald of Florida.

It’s a rare honor to be tutored by a person once referred to as the most powerful woman in America. But that was the case last month when retired U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor acted as reading coach at Navajo Elementary School in Scottsdale, Arizona. Read more about O’Connor’s coaching experience in this article from the Arizona Business Gazette.

Parents want a famed Tanzanian ghost buster to cleanse a school in Kenya that has been closed because of “witchcraft.” Students at Tala High School in the Kangundo District were sent home January 30 after they claimed ghosts were molesting them. On January 29, assorted witchcraft paraphernalia was recovered from students. Parents said they want the exorcist, Maji Marefu, who has in the past three years exorcised ghosts in schools and homes in Ukambanito, to cleanse the school. Marefu said he was willing to do the work, but the demand by parents is likely to put them on a collision course with the Catholic Church, the official sponsor of the school. Read more of the article at allafrica.com.

After more than 20 years as executive producer and host of Reading Rainbow, actor Levar Burton is leaving the popular children’s television series. Read more about Burton’s career in this article from Florida’s Bradenton Herald.

Grammar lessons often are associated with high school drudgery — diagramming sentences and memorizing obscure rules in between passing notes in English class — but an Arizona technical writer has turned the seemingly dry subject into a popular podcast. Mignon Fogarty, the woman behind Grammar Girl’s Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing, has been explaining the finer points of commas, colons and split infinitives since July. The show is currently the 47th most popular podcast on Apple’s iTunes service, right behind Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Day. The shows have been downloaded more than 1.3 million times. Read more about the podcast in this article from CNN.

The buses that carry students at B.C. Haynie Elementary School in Morrow are unlike any other in Clayton County, Georgia. The students are eager to sit still and not talk to each other. They are too busy to bother anyone. That’s because they are reading books. Lots of them on every ride. Read more of this article from the Clayton News Daily (Jonesboro, Georgia).

An English school founded by a social worker six year ago is now offering education to poor and deprived children in Saidpur upazila town in Bangladesh. Founder principal of the school Rukhsana Zaman Shanu believes that education can change the attitude of children of poor people towards life. Located in old Babu Para in Saidpur town, the school follows the curriculum of Cambridge University. There are 107 students. Of them, 67 are either orphans or came from impoverished families. Rukhsana Zaman said poor students are provided with uniform, shoes, pens, books and school bags and free tuition. Read the article at The Daily Star website.

Victoria Echeverria wants to become a U.S. citizen. The Mexican immigrant and Oceano resident will take the citizenship test this month. To help prepare, she turned to the Literacy Council of San Luis Obispo County in California. More than 600 students are taking part in English instruction through the council, according to the group. Students include immigrants from around the world, inmates at the California Men’s Colony and local workers, said Bernadette Bernardi, the council’s executive director. Native English speakers learning to read also enroll. Read Echeverria’s story at the San Luis Obispo Tribune website.

Jack Prelutsky was recently named the first ever “Children’s Poet Laureate,” by the Chicago-based Poetry Foundation. It’s a title, complete with $25,000 cash prize and an inscribed medallion, he will hold for two years, a sort of blessed community service that compels him to give two major public readings and act as adviser, ambassador and pollinator of his art. Read more about Prelutsky in this story from CNN.

TV host Oprah Winfrey has opened a new school in South Africa to give an education to girls from poor families. The school, on a 50–acre campus in the small town of Henley–on–Klip, south of Johannesburg, cost US$40 million to build. Winfrey interviewed many of the 3,500 South African girls from low–income families who applied for an initial 150 places at the school. The Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy will eventually cater to 450 girls who show outstanding promise but whose families cannot support their education. Read more at the BBC News website.

It was a read-aloud to beat them all Wednesday, December 13, as 140 elementary pupils at Wilmington Christian School in Hockessin, Delaware, mouthed words from E.B. White's classic children's book Charlotte’s Web.They were part of a chorus of several hundred thousand children —including more than 2,200 in Delaware — who joined forces to help shatter the world record for the most people reading aloud simultaneously. The second– through fifth–graders at Wilmington Christian joined more than half a million people at 2,451 locations in 27 countries in an attempt to break the Guinness world record for the feat. Read more at The News Journal’s website

Football players from the Warren Central Warriors high school football team in Warren Township, Indiana, have been making weekly visits to a local elementary school to read to students. Through the Leadership Through Literacy program, the football players choose and read a book to students that they feel emphasizes good character, according to an article by Dale Rosebrock appearing on IndyStar.com. For further information, read the full article.

Julie Andrews Edwards and her daughter Emma Walton Hamilton, who salute Broadway in their best-selling children's book The Great American Mousical, are serving as this year's ambassadors for Kids' Night on Broadway. The event, which takes place on January 30 and 31 in New York City, allows young people ages 6-18 to see a Broadway show for free when accompanied by a full-paying adult. The event will also spotlight the work of Autism Speaks, a nonprofit organization dedicated to increasing awareness of this disorder and raising money to fund autism research. For further information, visit the Kids' Night on Broadway webpage.

Guapo and Dolley Madison, 2-year-old pugs, are all ears for first- through third-graders during twice weekly, 75-minute reading sessions at Reche Canyon Elementary School in Colton, California. The two dogs are part of Pug Tails, a volunteer educational therapy program started by Bonnie Strom, Dolley’s owner and handler. The children are in the program because their reading levels are two to three grade levels behind, said Principal Diane Mumper. The program has helped improve the children’s reading scores, and the close contact with the canines has boosted the students’ self-esteem. Read the article from the The Press-Enterprise (Riverside, California) website.

Reading teacher Kathy Eppley’s little brainstorm was to ask all students and adults at Hernando Middle School in Spring Hill, Florida, to wear cards around their necks with the titles of the books they're reading. The idea turned out to be so elegant, and apparently so original, that national reading experts are vowing to steal it. Linda Gambrell, president-elect of the International Reading Association, said she loved the idea. She said many incentive programs discourage less fluent readers or encourage students to read below their ability in order to rack up points. But Eppley’s idea, she said, promotes the opposite: genuine discussions and excitement about reading. “What that idea does is it simply shouts, ‘I am a reader, I enjoy books,’” Gambrell said. “It’s not a competition.” Read the article from the St. Petersburg Times website.

Three guitars autographed by Latino celebrities are being auctioned on eBay to raise money for a national Hispanic literacy initiative. John Leguizamo, Johnny Pacheco, Mana and others autographed the guitars at the 7th Annual Latin GRAMMY Awards at Madison Square Garden earlier this month. The guitars will be listed on eBay through Saturday, December 2. The proceeds from the sale will support Lee y Seras (Read and You Will Be), a national, research based initiative that helps parents and communities build early literacy skills among Latino children. More information about the initiative is available at Lee y Seras.

A one-woman show titled "No Child" is captivating teachers with its realistic portrayal of the teaching life, according to an article by Samuel G. Freedman in the November 8 issue of The New York Times. To learn more, read the full article.

The word treeware entered the Oxford English Dictionary in September as “computing slang, freq. humorous”. Blog was recognized in 2003, dot-commer in 2004, metrosexual in 2005, and the verb Google last June. The O.E.D. has met the Internet, and chief editor John Simpson is leading a revolution — in what it is, what it knows, what it sees. The English language, spoken by as many as two billion people in every country on earth, has entered a period of ferment, and the editorial offices of the O.E.D. may be the best observation platform available. Find this article in The New York Times Magazine.

The book is far from dead, but it is changing. An article by consultant Paula Berinstein appearing on the Information Today website talks about the "networked book"--a book that is searchable, linkable, comment-able, and more. Berinstein includes some interesting insights on how the ability to comment on Web-based, networked books changes the relationship between author and reader. For further information, read the full article.

Even as Lebanon’s internal refugees return to their homes, a return to normalcy remains in the distant future. The reconstruction process has turned otherwise mundane events like a first day at school into notable milestones. An article in The Christian Science Monitor provides details.

An estimated 15,000 people turned out on a brisk October morning for the third annual Reading Rocks! Walk-A-Thon in Fayetteville, North Carolina. The event raised more than $119,000 for literacy initiatives, according to an article by staff writer Michael Futch appearing in the Fayetteville Observer. For further information, read the full article.

Today, thousands of people across Britain are recording a diary of their day in order to create an online archive of a day in the life of a country, according to a report from BBC News. Today was picked as an "ordinary day much like any other of no particular national significance." The blogs will be stored by the British Library and at other locations. For further information, read the full article.

It's a balmy Thursday at Munn Park in Lakeland, Florida, and a number of families, as well as students from a nearby elementary school, have gathered to enjoy the new outdoor reading room. A collaboration between Lakeland Vision, the Junior League of Greater Lakeland, Verizon, and Citrus and Chemical Bank, the effort is designed to provide the community with a place to read and relax while promoting general literacy in a park atmosphere, according to an article by Aurora Rodriguez appearing in the Lakeland Ledger.

The reading room, which is open 11:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. Thursday through Saturday, weather permitting, is stocked with magazines and a selection of books for people of all ages. For further information, read the full article.

Eight years ago, an Australian teacher came up with the idea of getting her class to send a teddy bear to a matched class overseas, whose members would then post a teddy to her class. Each child took turns to take the teddy home and wrote a diary about the bear’s experiences. At the end of the week, the class collated the individual handwritten diary entries and e-mailed the transcript to their partnered class overseas.

Since then, more than 5000 classes in primary and secondary schools worldwide have taken part in the online activity, known as the Teddy Bear Project. The process gives children an opportunity to practice reading and writing in an authentic context and also to learn about their counterparts in other cultures. Learn more about it in The Age (Australia).

Two ancient languages are sparking an unexpected revival in the increasingly lost arts of punctuation and grammar in Australia’s schools. Newly popular courses in classical Greek, Latin, and ancient history are also teaching high school students skills in analysis, logic, and persuasive argument — skills employers value highly but that many students are failing to grasp in modern day classrooms. Find more information in The Australian.

Nearly 100,000 people gathered on the National Mall in Washington, DC, last Saturday for the 6th annual National Book Festival. The annual celebration of books and reading was sponsored by the Library of Congress and hosted by First Lady Laura Bush. Many well-known authors of both adult and children's books talked about their work and signed books. For further information, read an article by Shannon Maughan and see photos posted on the Publishers Weekly website.

The best way to appreciate teachers’ professionalism, dedication, and sacrifice is to work among them in a displacement camp in the Sudan, writes British educator Jane Davies. Find her article in The Guardian (UK).

A photo essay in honor of UNESCO's World Teachers' Day just appeared on Slate.

When it comes to selecting the right school for their children, international families in Bulgaria can choose from a variety of options. So-called “international schools” or home schooling offer instruction in familiar languages and cultural milieu. But some parents opt to send their children to Bulgarian schools, which offer some surprising advantages. Find this article in The Sofia Echo.

Jack Prelutsky has been named as the inaugural winner of the Children's Poetry Laureate award from the Poetry Foundation. Prelutsky, 66, will serve as the first Children's Poet Laureate: Consultant in Children's Poetry to the Poetry Foundation for a two-year tenure. He received a $25,000 cash prize and the Children's Poet Laureate Medallion. The new award aims to raise awareness that children have a natural receptivity to poetry and are its most appreciative audience. For further information, visit the Poetry Foundation's website.

It seems that the list of famous achievers who had reading problems should include Tony Bennett, the beloved singer and accomplished painter.

Once upon a time, country superstar Dolly Parton and Tennessee Governor Phil Bredesen imagined a Tennessee full of happy endings. They formed a partnership that is now making available Parton's Imagination Library project, which provides a free book a month to children from birth to age 5, to any child in Tennessee whose parents register for the program. Last month alone, more than 134,000 books were delivered to Tennessee children, writes Leon Alligood, a staff writer for The Tennessean in Nashville. To learn more, read the full article.

Jumpstart, an organization that pairs children with adults to prepare them for school, says it set a record for group reading in its August 24 event in which adults and children read The Little Engine That Could together. Some 104,000 children took part, according to the organization.

A North Carolina gym teacher finds that basketball and poetry can have an unexpected synergy.

According to a survey for England's Department for Education and Skills, 77% of women said they would prefer a love letter to a romantic text or e-mail, with one in five saying they'd never gotten one and half saying it had been years. The Department for Education and Skills said its Get On Campaign could help the men in question brush up on their billet doux-related skills.

Books open up a world of imagination for children on reserves and can lift them from a life of poverty and despair. Even the death of a young woman couldn’t keep youngsters from their summer literacy program. Find details in the Toronto Star.

In 1971, the famous photographer André Kertész published a book titled On Reading, and an expanded version of this long out-of-print collection of world-class photographs of people interacting with books may soon be available.

A new study of text messaging by Toronto teens shows that despite the much-discussed use of abbreviated forms in such messages, almost all the communication employs standard English, suggesting that the practice is not necessarily harmful to grammar knowledge and may actually demonstrate flexibility and creativity in language use.

Halfway-house residents, returning to a life of freedom after years in a penitentiary, explore a bookstore in what for many of them is a new and revelatory experience.

John Irving and Stephen King asked that Harry be spared during a reading they did with J. K. Rowling, who has warned readers that more major characters' lives are in jeopardy as she finishes the final book in the Harry Potter series.

A summer program in Michigan helps K–6 kids maintain or improve literacy skills that can slide in the out-of-school months.

A rose by any other name might smell as sweet, but it probably wouldn't fetch the 2.8 million pound bid that a near-perfect copy of Shakespeare's First Folio brought at auction at Sotheby's in London in mid-July. Widely regarded as one of the most important books in English literature, the First Folio contains 36 plays. More than 200 copies of the First Folio still survive, but few in this fine condition.

For further information, read the article by Amy Iggulden on the website of the Daily Telegraph in London.

Just a few years ago, people looked down their noses at authors who self-published their own books. Self-publishing was seen as a mark of books that weren't good enough to be published by a commercial publisher or books that were of interest only to the author and his or her immediate family.

New technology for designing books, however, coupled with new print-on-demand options that make producing very limited press runs more economical than ever before, is now allowing more and more people to produce professional-looking books. For further information about this growing trend, see the article by Peter Wayner of The New York Times, found online on the website of the International Herald Tribune.

These kids' parents enrolled them in a week-long summer program called a Literacy Boot Camp designed to prepare them for high school's literacy challenges. So they didn't really want to be there—but after they did it, they found they had improved their literacy skills and enjoyed themselves in the process.

Enterprising principals in Japan’s Osaka prefectural high schools will soon be able to act like baseball managers preparing for a pennant race — trading for teachers to fill weak spots in their lineups. Beginning with the 2007 school year, administrators will be able to use a database to “scout” for teachers with the skills needed at their schools, and arrange trades with other principals. Learn more at the Asahi.com website.

The new terms in the language that are judged likely to last can be found in the latest edition of Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary

Libraries on the Gulf Coast that were damaged by last year's hurricanes will receive $18 million in aid from various sources.

Primary school pupils at around 250 schools in South Africa are reading hot-off-the-press world news in their own newspaper sent to them via e-mail. The Times I Am Living In publishes wire-service stories side-by-side with rewritten versions that children can more easily understand. A glossary and quiz questions keep them engaged with both versions of the text. Learn more at the Mail & Guardian Online website (South Africa).

You'll never guess who's writing a children's book. (Check the third paragraph from the end.)

Poet Donald Hall, who has received many awards in his career, including the 1980 Caldecott Medal for his children's book Ox-Cart Man, has recently been named the next poet laureate for the United States.

Unhappy with the “disorganized” curriculum in her son’s school in Massachusetts, charter school founder Julia Sigalovsky was determined to provide the kind of education she’d received in Moscow: a highly structured curriculum of integrated, multi-year courses, with an emphasis on discipline and focus, rather than personal choice. Find her story in The Christian Science Monitor.

Famous people are memorialized in many ways, writes Garrison Keillor in the June 4 edition of The Salt Lake Tribune--by having airports and freeways named after them, by having huge stone monuments built in their honor. But the best way to remember someone is through words, according to Keillor, who says that Abraham Lincoln is perhaps best illuminated through the Library of America edition of his writings.

"No writer needs a memorial," Keillor adds. If you want to know