Two must-read blogs are doing great things to celebrate April as National Poetry Month. 

GottaBook will be posting a previously unpublished poem each day of the month of April.  The poets participating are a who’s who list of children’s poets.  Amazing!  You can also follow the action on Twitter.

The Miss Rumphius Effect will be interviewing poets each day in April.  Her list too is amazing! 

What a lovely way to spend the month of April, basking in new poems and great poets every day.

I am loving Glogster!  A poster-building website where you can use video, images, fonts and more to express yourself.  Create your own poster for a band, library event, or for a new book coming out.  Twilight would be awesome!  I can see using these for displays too.

Another option is to do a teen program and offer them the ability to print their posters for free. 

The Cooperative Children’s Book Center has an incredible bibliography of books on earth and the environment for children and teens.  The books are broken into three categories:

In My World: Loving the Earth

What Happened Here? Environmental Challenges and Change

Taking Action: Planet Pioneers

The categories have items for many different ages with each book given a handy age range to eliminate guess work.  Nicely, each category is broken into fiction and nonfiction.  Even better, the books are from the CCBC Choices lists which means that they are all worth looking at. 

Driving to work this morning, I was lucky enough to catch this piece on NPR about holiday reading.  While the holiday theme is great, I particularly loved the part about how important reading aloud is for children of all ages.  Here is the quote that had me cheering aloud:

But some parents feel self-conscious when they read aloud, says Judy Freeman, the author of a guide to read-aloud books called Books Kids Will Sit Still For. Freeman says they should get over their inhibitions.

"Your kids don’t know the difference. They just want to be warm, and they want to hear your voice, and they associate the words with you," she says. "It turns them into readers. If you want your kids to read, you have to read to them."

Yes! In fact at the end of the piece the father in the family reads aloud a bit from Twas the Night Before Christmas and in that moment evokes the warmth and holiday magic of families reading together. 

The NPR website also has a list of great holiday books to share aloud with your children. 

The Wall Street Journal has a front page story today about getting boys to read by using the grossest subjects possible, including putrefying wounds, farting, rats, toilets, and lots of blood. 

I am glad to see Captain Underpants still on the list of popular books for boys.  But I think the WSJ story misses one key element: humor.  Boys want humor in their books and the lower and sillier the humor, the better.  Even the gross books have to have a sense of humor about the subject to work best. 

Captain Underpants works because of the silliness, not the gross-out factor.  Jeff Kinney’s very successful Diary of a Wimpy Kid works because of the humor.  And even older funny books like Judy Blume’s Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing will be adored by modern kids.  It’s the giggles that keep them reading, especially in the summer.

The New York Times has a fabulous article by Margo Rabb, author of Cures for Heartbreak, that talks about what makes a book YA.  Answer:  the marketing department.

One of the most fascinating parts of the article is her list of other authors who thought they were writing for adults and had their books marketed for teens. 

I soon learned that I wasn’t the only writer who’d written a book with adults in mind only to have an agent or a publisher decide to market it as Y.A. Peter Cameron, A. M. Homes, Francesca Lia Block, Meg Rosoff, Stephenie Meyer, Linda Sue Park and many others have found themselves in the same situation.

Rabb goes on to write about the stigma of being published as a YA author, especially in the U.S.  Fascinating stuff.

The fabulous Wisconsin Public Radio program Here on Earth is doing a program with the equally fabulous Megan Schliesman from the Cooperative Children’s Book Center and Jean Westmoore, NeXt Editor and children’s book reviewer for The Buffalo News.  Sweet!  If you miss the live show this afternoon, you can find past programs in their archive.

The focus is on using children’s literature to create an understanding of world citizenship in children.  Both guests have provided lists of books and they also have links to other great online resources.  As always, the CCBC does a wonderful job of focusing on books that are multicultural.

Great news on the age labeling of British children’s books!  Philip Pullman is leading the protest against the labels.  According to the latest news, over 80 authors, illustrators, librarians, teachers and booksellers have joined together in protest.  Good golly, one would think there would be hundreds of British librarians joining in!

You can support the cause by heading to No to Age Branding and signing the petition.  Their list of reasons to oppose the branding alone is worth the click to visit the site.  The petition has grown incredibly since the new article was published with over 200 signatures waiting to the posted!