ALA has announced that the Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA) will be offering four online courses in February and March of 2007. They are:
Making the Match: Finding the Right Book for the Right Teen at the Right Time
New Technologies & New Literacies for Teens
Reaching Teens Virtually
YALSA Competencies Live
What a great way to provide top-notch programming nationwide. You can get more information on each session on the site as well as finding out how much participating will cost you.

The Richmond Times-Dispatch has a nice article about cookbooks for kids: Cookbooks feature kid-friendly recipes. They look at the new Williams-Sonoma series for children, as well as the Dr. Seuss cookbook, Green Eggs and Ham Cookbook. My favorite is the final book on the list: Mom’s Big Book of Cookies, because what kids doesn’t love cookies and doesn’t love to help make them. Even better, the author Lauren Chattman has some very clever tricks up her sleeve like using melted butter rather than softened butter in her recipes. I love this! I don’t know how many times I have tried to soften butter in the microwave to use in baking and end up with a golden puddle of melted butter anyway. Chattman’s recipes will at least save me the angst in between.

pixie stix kids pix is a great blog from Kristen McLean, author of children’s books and Executive Director of The Association of Booksellers for Children. Her site is filled with book reviews that are rated on a 10 point scale. It is great to get the perspective from the bookselling industry.

Sara’s Holds Shelf is a fairly new children’s lit blog that deserves some attention. She writes reviews of the books she reads. Recently she has been reading mostly teen novels, probably because she is serving on the YA nominating committee for the Cybils. I am on the judging committee and hope that they pick a bunch of fab titles for us to select from. I must admit that I have some on my list that I am having trouble getting through and I hope hope hope that those do not make the final group for us to judge because then I will have to force myself to read them. 🙂

Publisher’s Weekly has an interesting piece The Run-up to Christmas: A Bookseller Survey, which interviews independent booksellers across the country about their picks for what is going to be popular this holiday season. I always like looking at bookseller lists vs best of the year lists because they are often so different. It is rather like collection development in general as we struggle to have both the popular and the high quality titles. This is one easy way to take a look at popularity in places other than Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

The Christian Science Monitor Books Section has several articles on children’s books. They feature some great new additions to popular series, a review of One Potato, Two Potato, a small list of noteworthy titles from 2006, and features on other books.

ScienceDaily has an article on a study that concluded that children can distinguish between reality and fantasy using contextual cues.
“In three studies, about 400 children ages 3 to 6 heard about something new and had to say whether they thought it was real or not. Some children heard the information defined in scientific terms (“Doctors use surnits to make medicine”), while others heard it defined in fantastical terms (“Fairies use hercs to make fairy dust”). The researchers found that children’s ability to use contextual cues to determine whether the information is true develops significantly between the ages of 3 and 5.”
And what does this have to do with children’s literature? Plenty!
My question is what is wrong with a child between the ages of 3 and 5 or even much older believing in fairies or other amazing creatures like elves, witches, dragons, etc. Why does this demonstrate their ability to distinguish reality from fantasy? Seems to me that there is a lot larger issue that if something is seen as scientific it is real and if it is creative it must be untrue.
Or perhaps I am just a trippy type of person who wants children to read books, internalize them and dream their big dreams. I want children to be children a lot longer than they are in our society. Let’s give them their years to believe in fairies and the fantastical. Let’s allow them to be real for children.

CBS News has some study results that will not surprise any of us: Picture Books Really Do Teach Toddlers. I know that this is one of those, well duh! moments, but I do think that it is wonderful when studies support what we all intuitively know.
So, keep on reading to those kids! Whether they are 18-30 months old or not!

Random Shapes Blog Network features blogs written by teens, focusing on the best writing and posts. This is a great way to see what teens are writing about online.