Lewis Carroll Scrapbook
The Library of Congress offers access to a scrapbook kept by Lewis Carroll. It includes newspaper clippings, photographs and some manuscript materials. I have always thought that digitized rare books is one of the magical qualities of the Internet. Being able to page through Lewis Carroll’s personal scrapbook is amazing.

The Spectator.co.uk
A cynical look at the dark trend in YA literature. The piece blurs the line between YA and children’s lit, comparing Doing It to Peter Pan and Charlotte’s Web. Here is a good quote from an expert cited in the article:
“But according to Professor Nicholas Tucker, author of the Rough Guide to Children’s Literature, books have to be grim to explain difficult issues to children that parents shirk from discussing, especially with their pre-teens or tweenagers, and to compete with the grabby, pixillated storylines and images available onscreen.
“Look at adoption,” he says. “It’s better to have two books about it in the house than having a chat about it once a year at Christmas. Books provide some of this function and they probably do a lot of good. The only time to get scared is when fiction exists only as a way to teach social messages, but at the moment there are masses and masses of books that don’t deal with social issues at all. And with TV it’s too late to put the genie back into the bottle now. Books have got to be in some ways ahead of TV in terms of sophistication as a way of surviving.””

PrimaryGames.com – The Fun Place to Learn!
A collection of online games appropriate for young children. Formats include Java, Flash and Shockwave.

Picturing A Canadian Life: L.M. Montgomery’s Personal Scrapbooks and Book Covers
A remarkable collection of book covers and scrapbooks with a nice digital interface that allows for zooming in and viewing the interiors of the scrapbooks.

Princesses get plenty of support
A look at the newly popular role of princess in books and movies for young girls. While these princesses are not as passive as in the past, I stick by a statement I made as a little girl, “Who’d want to be a princess when you could be a queen, they have a lot more power.”
“Yasue Kuwahara, a professor of communications and the director of popular culture studies at Northern Kentucky University, says the image of the pretty princess is over-emphasized in the Disney movies and the Princess Barbie dolls.
“In that sense, I think it’s problematic,” she says. “The focus is on the looks.”
Kathy Burklow, a clinical child psychologist at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, says it’s typical for girls to try out different roles – princesses, brides, housewives – that are consistent with their gender.
That kind of play can provide parents an opportunity to teach their daughters that they’re capable of doing anything they want and don’t need to be rescued, Burklow says.
“You can be on the softball team and still wear a crown,” she says.”

The end of books?
A depressing take on children’s book reading where the ages 5-35 are basically discounted as reading ages. Hmm. One would think he had never heard of Harry Potter, but then he mentions it himself.
“”The primary target customer for books is folks over 35, 40 years old. Children are exposed to books for the first few years of life, when they’re read to, and then for the next 30 years or so, they’re mainly exposed to music and movies and all that other stuff. The hope is that they’ll come home to books when they’re in their 40s, but can publishers really afford to wait that long? That’s probably not the best game plan.”
But with the Harry Potter craze still in full swing, aren’t more children reading, and isn’t it reasonable to expect they’ll continue the habit as adults? According to Ipsos, children’s books had a fairly good year in 2003, with early lackluster sales jolted by the June release of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. But despite the Potter phenomenon, Rappaport said, the consumer base for children’s books is actually shrinking, with 33 percent of American households buying at least one book for someone under the age of 14 in 2003, compared with 35 percent in 2002.
“Even with exciting, new and value-added books on the market,” Rappaport reported recently on the Ipsos Web site, “the children’s book industry has not managed to substantially increase the volume of children’s book purchases or share-of-wallet.””

National Geographic Education Guide
Lesson plans, maps, online adventures, and a collection of favorite sites.

London Free Press: Today Section – Corus lists new fall programs
Very cool! Starting this fall, Canadians will have a new preschool claymation program based on the Dragon books by Dav Pilkey.

The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Contributor: Summer Reading List Blues
This Op Ed piece has an interesting take on modern children’s lit. One part really rings true for me and that is that kids are now given mandated summer reading lists that count as part of the following year’s grade. Sad. I always found summer the time that I could just read any books I pleased and many more of them than I would read during the school year.
While I don’t agree with her take on modern realistic novels for children being too heavy for kids. I do agree that there is a power to fantasy novels that is freeing and perfect for summer reading. I do see it as problematic that summer reading lists depend on Newbery winners to make up their lists. I would hope that teachers begin to point kids to some of the wonderful books out there that will never win awards like that.
Tha article concludes with:
“We seem to have lost sight of what children can actually process, and more important, of their own innate capacities. Instead of our children being free to roam and dream and invent on their own timetable, and to read about children doing such things, we increasingly ask our children to be sober and hard-working at every turn, to take detailed notes on their required texts with Talmudic attention, to endure computer-generated tests. And the texts we require them to pore over have become all too often about guarded, world-weary, overburdened children, who are spending their childhoods trying to cope with the mess their parents left them.
Strangely, it seems that in such stories the only people who get to break free are the missing parents: these characters seem to have found their lives too stressful and boxed-in, and have fled — right out of the books.”