Tag Archives: back to school

10 Books for Back to School

It’s that time of the year again! September is around the corner and the summer season is winding down. Help kick the year off to a great start with our Back-to-School suggestions from Lee & Low Books.

Curated by our in-house literacy specialists, these book lists have something for everyone and will make sure that all students feel at home in their new classrooms. Here are some diverse books to share with students as you get back into the classroom groove!

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NEW RESOURCE: Book of the Month School Year Calendar

Back to school is approaching! Do you have a difficult time deciding which books to highlight every month? We have created a resource to keep students engaged with outstanding diverse literature throughout the year. 

Lee & Low Books is committed to publishing culturally authentic and people-centered stories to be read all year long.

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Back-to-School Book Lists for Grades PreK-8

It’s that time of the year again! September is around the corner and the summer season is winding down. Help kick the year off to a great start with our Back-to-School Reading Lists for Grades PreK-8 and suggestions from Lee & Low Books. Curated by our in-house literacy specialists, these book lists have something for everyone and will make sure that all students feel at home in their new classrooms.

The Back-To-School Reading Lists are available for Grades PreK-2, Grades 3-5, and Grades 6-8, and they are free to download and share!

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Diversifying Your Back-to-School Reading

In this guest post from the Lee & Low archives, professor Katie Cunningham discusses ways to diversify Common Core recommended texts. As we gather resources to begin the new school year, Katie’s post is a good reminder that each year offers a fresh opportunity to look at the books we use with new eyes to see if they are serving us, and serving our students.

We live in an increasingly diverse society. Nowhere is this more evident than in classrooms, in both urban and suburban schools.  Nationally, our classrooms are almost 45% non-White and the trend toward greater diversity is expected to continue. Our classrooms reflect this trend, but our classroom libraries do not. The New York Times found that despite making up about nearly a quarter of the nation’s public school enrollment, young Latino readers seldom see themselves in books. Those of us in schools working with children from minority backgrounds know this to be true as we scan our bookshelves and find protagonists that are overwhelmingly white and living in suburban, privileged settings. The Cooperative Children’s Book Center found that in 2011, only 6% of children’s books featured characters from African American, American Indian, Asian Pacific/ Asian Pacific American, or Latino backgrounds. Continue reading

The Right Read Aloud for the Classroom Community You Want This Year

Whether students have a year or more under their belts or are starting school for the first time, a new school year can invoke everything from laughter to tears to giggles and cheers. Teachers face the full spectrum of student feelings about the first day of a new school year: excitement, shyness, doubt, fear, anxiety.

How can we help our students face their feelings and the start of the new school year?

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Lexile: A Bookseller’s Best Friend or Worst Enemy?

Guest bloggerThe following post by bookseller Melissa was cross-posted with permission from her blog, Scuffed Slippers and Wormy Books. Thanks to Melissa for allowing us to share her perspective!

Fall has (almost) arrived.  Cool weather, pretty fall color, yummy drinks composed of apple cider or hot cocoa, and I get to wear scarves (I like scarves as an accessory).

And standardized testing, if you are or have a school-age child.

In my area of the country, it seems school districts have chosen testing that calculates a Lexile score for a child’s reading level with an associated score range.  Lexile is a company that uses a software program to analyze books for word usage, sentence length, etc. and produce a Lexile Text Measure for each book (I copied the description from the Lexile Analyzer site):

The Lexile ® measure of text is determined using the Lexile Analyzer ®, a software program that evaluates the reading demand—or readability—of books, articles and other materials. The Lexile Analyzer ® measures the complexity of the text by breaking down the entire piece and studying its characteristics, such as sentence length and word frequency, which represent the syntactic and semantic challenges that the text presents to a reader. The outcome is the text complexity, expressed as a Lexile ® measure, along with information on the word count, mean sentence length and mean log frequency.
Generally, longer sentences and words of lower frequency lead to higher Lexile ® measures; shorter sentences and words of higher frequency lead to lower Lexile ® measures. Texts such as lists, recipes, poetry and song lyrics are not analyzed because they lack conventional punctuation.

I’m not a huge fan of putting a “score” on a book based simply on a computer generated metric because the software doesn’t take into account context or content of a book.  Or form, cf poetry.  But this seems to be accepted by the educational powers-that-be, so it’s here for the time being. However, I don’t know how well or often the scores are explained to parents, because I wind up in a lot of parent-bookseller conversations like this:

Parent: My child has a Lexile score of XXXX.  She has to read books in the range of XXXX-XXXX.  Will this work?

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Three Books for the First Weeks of School

Jaclyn DeForge, our Resident Literacy Expert, began her career teaching first and second grade in the South Bronx, and went on to become a literacy coach and earn her Masters of Science in Teaching. In her column she offers teaching and literacy tips for educators.

Ready or not, the 2012-2013 school year is upon us!

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwcYbo7pjto]

And while parents are stocking up on pencils and notebooks (and, if the Target Music Teacher is to be trusted, potentially an inordinate amount of denim), teachers are busy planning for the first weeks of school.

Educators, for your planning pleasure, here are three titles to get students back in the right mindset for those first days back in the classroom:

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