Notes from the Windowsill is a great page dedicated to children’s books, “celebrating children’s books loved by adult readers.” They publish bibliographies as well as a journal about children’s books that is published several times a year. Both the bibliographies and the journals are available at no charge on the website.

The New York Times: Girl Power Fuels Manga Boom in U.S.
For the first time since the 1950s, girls are starting to buy comic books. This time, the comics are manga from Japan. This is an important trend for librarians to be aware of. The article lists some of the top publishers and series.

BBC NEWS: Toys have lasting impact on brain
Tests of baby owls show that things learned in youth transfer to adulthood. The study shows that “learning new skills very early in life prompts neurons in the brain to build new connections that still work into adulthood.”
Goodness, think what reading to kids at an early age is doing! Let’s go out and build more neural connections in the children we work with.

Quidditch.com’s Incomplete Guide to Lemony Snicket Allusions offers an in-depth look at dystopian references within the Series of Unfortunate Events.

News from Reading Today Daily : Gr8 news! Texting “no bar to literacy” The claim that kids using text messaging abbreviations destroys their written literacy skills has been proven unfounded.

Books for Children Portraying Aging and Older Characters in a Positive Light contains books for preschoolers through sixth graders. It is a joint project between the Association for Library Service to Children (ALSC) and Societal Education about Aging for Change (SEA Change).
You will need Adobe Acrobat to read the pdf file.

Ypulse has a posting about the top magazines read by college women. Interestingly, there were some teen titles on the list, including Seventeen, CosmoGirl, YM and Teen People. There is also a list for the top magazines read by college men.

Space Art in Children’s books 1950’s to 1970’s offers some great scans of vintage space travel illustrations from children’s books.
Via Boing Boing.

Lissa Explains it All offers HTML help specifically for kids. The site offers information on CSS, frames, tables, color, and javascript.