The search for UK and Ireland's BIGGEST Harry Potter fan begins! Fifteen years ago today, on 26th June 1997, Bloomsbury published a book about a boy wizard on Bloomsbury's newly launched Children's list called Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. From an idea born on a train journey, to its creation in a small cafe in ...

A few weeks ago, I read and loved Laurie Halse Anderson’s Chains, so I was in a rush to read the sequel, Forge.  I thought I got so lucky at the airport last week, when I found a copy of the sequel, but unfortunately, I did not love it as much as Chains. In Forge, we follow the plight of Curzon, Isabel’s friend.  The story is told from his ...

I had to read The Higher Power of Lucky a year or so ago for a class in college, and I did not love it when I read it then.  But it did win a Newbery in 2007, so I decided to give it another chance this last weekend. Via Wikipedia Susan Patron’s novel, The Higher Power of Lucky, stars Lucky, a 10-year-old girl living in a dusty small town in ...

I’ve read The Egypt Game by Zilpha Keatley Snyder a few times, and each time I love it a little more.  It’s dark, for sure, but the urban violence is also a sign of the times. In The Egypt Game, April is essentially abandoned by her actress-mother, and is brought to live with her grandmother.  April soon befriends a girl named Melanie, and ...

After I read the Newbery award-winning Good Masters! Sweet Ladies!  Voices from a Medieval Village by Laura Amy Schlitz, I decided I better buy her other books and see if they were as excellent.  I was not let down with A Drowned Maiden’s Hair.  In turns, slightly dark, suspenseful, and heartbreaking, I couldn’t put it down. The protagonist of A ...

The Invention of Hugo Cabret  by Brian Selznick is a book much loved by older struggling readers. It’s a thick book and apparently carries some weight of prestige, though it is basically a Caldecott-award picture book in novel format. My students have been suggesting I read it for months, and when my mom recommended the movie Hugo to me, I knew I ...

I read this interesting article last week in The Economist about a researcher who went into areas of high poverty in Africa and Asia and found that the poorest of the poor were somehow sending their children to private schools. The researcher, James Tooley, published a book called The Beautiful Tree that I was compelled to purchase on my iPad. Via ...

'In the midst of continuing ill-informed media rants and political pontificating about poor quality education, uncommunicative young people and adolescent apathy, it was a delight to find myself in the real world earlier this month, judging the South East England Regional Finals of the Institute of Ideas’ Debating Matters competition. Each having ...

A rigorous national curriculum should include a set number of books that all students should read at each grade level.  The Core Knowledge curriculum recommends students learn about King Arthur and the Round Table in the fourth grade.  I LOVED the King Arthur legends when I was a kid, so I was excited to read the Core Classics book King Arthur ...

Since I subbed all last week in the same classroom, I decided to make use of my “planning period” by reading the teacher’s resource books. The first one I picked up was Weird, but True High-Interest, Age-Appropriate Stories and Activities that Improve Reading Skills by Cindy Barden. The book is essentially a selection of copy-able worksheets to ...