To help teachers and comic fans at home, I’m posting outlines and lesson guides for each week’s session. Last time, in Writing Comics Workshop for Kids: Session 1, we covered Brainstorming and creating Story Seeds. Session 2 is all about Creating Characters.

If you’re ready to dive in, then read on  . . .

Getting the Creativity Flowing

To start a writing workshop session, it’s essential to get our brains into creative mode thinking. One of the quickest ways to do this is through the One Sentence Story game. It’s a classic that can work anywhere. Here’s how it goes:

1. Get the kids sitting in a circle.

2. One person is picked to be the Story Starter. He or she, chooses a direction the story will flow – clockwise or counter-clockwise. The Story Starter begins a story with a single opening sentence. Something like “Once upon a time, there was a  . . . .” works well.

3. The person next to the Story Starter continues the story by adding a single sentence.

4. The story goes around the circle with each person adding to it.  Each player can only add one sentence at a time.

5. When the story returns to the Story Starter it’s finished! And probably very silly, which is a good thing.

Play as many rounds of the One Sentence Story game as you have time for. By the end, everyone should be bubbling with ideas and creativity.

Creating Characters, Three Panels at a Time

In session 1, we talked about brainstorming ideas and creating story seeds to grow our story. Now, we’ll talk about creating characters. A fun way to do this is through another classic creation game I call the “Three Panel Character Creator”. I learned this one years ago from the multi-talented writer/comic creator Brian McLachlan. I forget what it’s actually called,  but you know, that doesn’t really matter. It’s easy and fun to do with a group of creative kids (or adults!)

All you need is a piece of paper and a few creative people.  You can also download a Three Panel Character Creator Template right here!  Here’s how it works.

1. Each person puts their name on a piece of paper and folds it into three equal sections.

2. Label the top section: Head, the middle section: Body and the bottom section: Foot

3. Fold the paper so only the “Head” section is showing.

4. Draw a head for your character. The goofier, the better. Give them three eyes, horns or unicorns for hair, anything goes.

5. Fold the paper, so the “Head” section is hidden and only the “Body” part can be seen.

5. Pass the paper to another player.

6. That player draws a body. The weirder, the better, but the player cannot look at the Head section!

7. Fold the paper, so only the “Feet” section is showing and pass it to another person.

8. That person draws wacky feet or tentacles or whatever. Again, the player cannot look at the Head or Body sections.

9. The completed 3 part picture returns to the original person. They unfold it and they have their totally weird and wonderful character!

Armed with their new and very strange characters, the kids are now ready to add some details.

Character Sheet Creation

Every character needs details and using a character sheet inspired by role playing games and collectible card games is a great way to connect these ideas with kids.

Writers can create their own character sheets or you can download the Character Sheet template to get them started.

Challenge your writers to think about the character’s favourite foods, best friends, worst enemies and goals and problems. When these are fleshed out, story ideas usually follow.

Give your students plenty of time to write up their character details.

Wrapping it All Up

With their crazy characters created and character sheets filled out, your students will have plenty to work with next week when we start looking at creating plots and planning out our stories.

Until then, keep writing and creating!

–-

As an award-winning children’s author, gamer-geek and elementary school teacher, I often have teaching ideas and writing news to share with fellow educators. I deliver these resources and ideas to your inbox in my e-newsletter Reading Change.

If this sounds like something you’d like to receive, then subscribe to Reading Change.

You can unsubscribe anytime and I won’t share or sell your data. Honest.

Thanks!

Liam

My YA picks in Best Books for Kids & Teens 2013

A few months ago, I was honoured to be asked to be one of the judges picking the YA Best Books for 2013 on behalf of the Canadian Children’s Book Centre.

I blogged about getting all the books and then making the decision about would make the cut with a team of great librarians and book industry folks.

Back then, I couldn’t reveal any details. But this is the future so anything goes! Almost.

If you want to see the picks and many other amazing books from Canadian creators, you’ll have to pick up a copy of the Spring Edition of the Best Books for Kids and Teens 2013 in your local bookstore or online at BookCentre.ca.

Do this and you’ll be supporting the amazing work of the Canadian Children’s Book Centre who do way too many fantastic things around literacy to mention.

It can be difficult to explain how 40 students, from four inner-city schools, share 1 Minecraft server for learning and fun. It hasn’t really been done before. We have our GamingEdus site packed with resources for teachers and our Minecraft Club Hub wiki for student work. But what we didn’t have is a video tour. That is, until now.

Enjoy this quick video tour of the Multi-School Minecraft server. And if you’re a teacher interested in using Minecraft with your students, visit gamingedus.org and get in touch. We’d love to hear from you.

–-

As an award-winning children’s author, gamer-geek and elementary school teacher, I often have teaching ideas and writing news to share with fellow educators. I deliver these resources and ideas to your inbox in my e-newsletter Reading Change.

If this sounds like something you’d like to receive, then subscribe to Reading Change.

You can unsubscribe anytime and I won’t share or sell your data. Honest.

Thanks!

Liam

That was also when I stumbled upon a newly released book called What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy. It gave me an idea for an article and I was fortunate enough to land an interview with its author, Dr. James Paul Gee.

Here’s the article reprinted in all it’s 2004 glory. I think the content is still relevant today, nearly 10 years later. What do you think?

Screen Doors

For boys who shun books, video games and the Internet provide a way into the world of words

By Liam O’Donnell

“I’d be happy if he read the Sunday comics,” laments Jodi DiGiuseppe, a mother of two from London, Ont. She has tried everything to get her nine-year-old son, Anthony, to read, with little success. “We banned the TV and offered bribes, but that didn’t work for long.” Like many boys his age, Anthony just isn’t interested in books. But get Anthony playing his favourite video game and he turns into a digital demon. “I have to drag him away from the screen.”

Having a button-mashing, book-bashing son is worrying for many parents. For the last six years literacy tests conducted by Council of Ministers of Education show Canadian boys trailing girls in reading and writing skills. In 1998, 13 year old boys scored 15% lower than girls on reading tests. In more recent writing exams, girls continue to score higher than boys. Are video games and other digital distractions to blame? While some parents and teachers are quick to say yes, a growing number of educators are coming to the defence of video games. Boys aren’t becoming illiterate, they say. Boys are redefining literacy, and gaining “digital literacy” skills. And in the workplaces of the future, these skills might give them a head start on their book-reading buddies.

Video Games are Literacy in Action

“Boys are becoming literate in spite of school instruction,” says Heather Blair, an associate professor at the University of Alberta. Blair and her colleague, Kathy Sanford of the University of Victoria, spent two years talking to adolescent boys, delving into their backpacks and desks, hoping to learn more about boys and literacy. “Computer games, Internet searches and online chat rooms have shaped the way boys interact with texts,” says Blair. In chat rooms, boys communicate in a constrained shorthand of shortened words that reads like a rapid-fire barrage of customised licence plates.

On the Internet, they scoured websites, absorbing sports statistics and tracking down secret cheat codes for their favourite video game. Parents are often mystified by skill and confidence boys show as they click their way through new technologies. This, say Blair and Sanford, is literacy in action. Their findings, recently published in the study “Canadian Adolescent Boys and Literacy”, are attracting attention from educators and giving hope to many frustrated parents.

Blair and Sanford believe that we need to expand our definition of literacy to include other sources of reading material like magazines, newspapers and text found on websites and video games. “There is a certain amount of reading in video games,” says Sanford, “And in some games, a high level of reading.” From the novel-length printed manuals to the clue-filled messages on the screen, the amount of reading material in games quickly adds up. In a format that relies so heavily on fast moving graphics, this written material is often overlooked by observers, but not by players. Understanding the game text is essential to a player’s success. “You have to read what the instructions are, and follow them exactly or you fail the level,” says one boy in the study.

Button Mashing Teaching Tools

When educators mention good video games, they are not talking about the ultra-violent, shoot-anything-that-moves variety. Dr. James Paul Gee, a professor at the University of Wisconsin, studied the structure of dozens of video games to reveal their educational potential. In his book, What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy, Gee examines the ways that video games can used as teaching tools. The best video games, he believes, offer challenges that can be solved in alternative ways, encouraging lateral thinking and problem-solving skills. The player’s decisions must affect the outcome of the game, placing importance on their choices and promising consequences to their actions. With the stakes this high, the challenges in the game should be at a level that is difficult but ‘doable.’ According to Gee, popular titles like Age of Mythology, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic and Legend of Zelda: The Wind Walker all have educational potential.

Gee is quick to point out that a good video game can only teach so much. The rest is up to the player. “Video games are only good for a child’s growth when played strategically,” he says. Strategic playing means that boys ask themselves questions as they face in-game challenges. Questions like: what problems do I face here? How can I best tackle this problem? What other approaches would work? Gee believes that the problem-solving skills developed while gaming strategically can help boys succeed in their literacy assignments at school. Blair and Sanford agree.

“Boys transform the assigned literacy work into something more fun, engaging, and personally meaningful for themselves,” says Sanford. Many teachers recognise this. That’s why your son’s grade-six language arts assignment is more likely to be a series of comic strips than a written book report. But even with traditional literacy exercises, boys will draw upon their outside interests to make a connection.

Boys Morphing Language and Learning

Blair and Sanford talk about one grade five student who was asked to write a short story starting from a visual prompt of a man sneaking around a corner. The boy wrote a story about a James Bond character who evades trip wires, climbs along rooftops and uses his high-tech watch to decode a safe’s combination. The language the boy used, like “wire traps” and “decoding”, and the actions of his character were all elements of his favourite “007” video game. By transforming what he had read and learned from playing his video game, the boy created a connection with his literacy assignment. Blair and Sanford call this “morphing” literacy, a term borrowed from the boys themselves. “Morphing is a word used by boys in their play to describe the transformation of one form or character to another.”

As the boys morph their school work to fit their interests, by using the words learned from their game experiences for example, they also expand the definitions of literacy to include language and skills learned from non-traditional sources like video games. These ‘digital literacy’ skills, say Blair and Sanford, will serve boys well in the coming years.

Digital Literacies are the Workplace Skills of Tomorrow

“The abilities to navigate the Internet and read multiple texts simultaneously will be perhaps more useful workplace skills than the ability to analyse a work of fiction or to write a narrative account,” Blair and Sanford predict. Email and the Internet didn’t exist 15 years ago, but today many offices expect new employees to have already mastered these technologies. 15 years from now, when today’s eight year olds are starting their careers, technology will have transformed the workplace even further. The digital literacy skills boys are picking up today, will make them more comfortable in this environment, giving them a distinct advantage.

Until then, how can we encourage boys to cultivate their ‘digital literacy’ skills while they play? Dr. Gee suggests that parents pick up the game controller and join in the fun. By playing video games with your son, parents can ask questions that will help him play strategically, while at the same time gaining insight into what attracts him to these worlds. And that could be the “game cheat” you need to convince your boy to put down the controller and pick up a book.

–-

As an award-winning children’s author, gamer-geek and elementary school teacher, I often have teaching ideas and writing news to share with fellow educators. I deliver these resources and ideas to your inbox in my e-newsletter Reading Change.

If this sounds like something you’d like to receive, then subscribe to Reading Change.

You can unsubscribe anytime and I won’t share or sell your data. Honest.

Thanks!

Liam

As I promised in previous blog posts and to the good people who subscribe to Reading Change, my monthly newsletter, here’s a quick rundown of the activities we did during Session 1.

If you’re a teacher, you could adapt these activities to use in your own classroom.

Here are the activities for Writing Comics for Kids: Session 1. Enjoy!

Introductions: Getting to Know Each Other

The first day of a workshop always feels like the first day of school in a new year. Nobody knows each other. Everyone nervously finds a seat, slaps on a name tag and tries to look inconspicuous. Since we were going to meet weekly, I knew the kids weren’t going to become BFFs or anything, but I wanted to get to know a bit about each of them. That called for the dreaded Icebreaker Activity!

State Your Name & Favourite Comic:  Our tables were in a U shape so that was close enough to a circle for what I wanted to do. After introducing myself, I asked each of the kids to tell us their name and their favourite comic. This is a great way to find connections between strangers because I knew at least 3 kids would list Bone as their favourite – they always do (it is a great comic.)

Behind the Scenes: How Comics are Made

After the ice breaker activity, I took the kids through the stages of how I (with the help of many amazing people) created the Max Finder Mystery comic for Owl Magazine. I showed them my notebook scribblings, rough drafts of scripts and some sketches from Michael Cho, who illustrated the early Max mysteries.

You can do this, too! Examples of Mike’s sketches are in the back of Max Finder Mystery: Collected Casebook Volume 2 and examples of my writer’s notebook and scripts are in the back of Max Finder Mystery: Collected Casebook Volume 3.

Planting Creativity Seeds with Opposites

Now that the kids had seen how comics get made, it was time to get them creating their own. We started by having them plant seed for their story idea. Each story starts out with one idea for a plot or a character and grows from there like a plant. We needed to find that seed and get it growing. To do that, I like to play the “What if . . .” game.

“What If . . .”  This is a great brainstorming activity. The kids wrote the words “What if . . .” at the top of their notebooks and then drew a line down the middle of their page below that. On the left side of the line, they wrote the word “Person/Place/Thing”. On the right side of the line they wrote “Actions”. Here’s a What If Story Starter Template [pdf] for you to download.

I challenged them to think of  a “thing” to put in the left column – a character or animal is a good place to start, like a ninja or a whale.

Then they ask themselves “What if ninjas . . . .” and then write down the wackiest action they can think of in the right column under “Actions”. I encouraged the kids to put together things that don’t normally go together, things that are opposite of each other.  For example, “What if ninjas  . . .  did ballet!” “What if a whale  . . . went ice skating.”

With their heads bursting with ideas, they got to work and wrote a long list of zany “What Ifs  . . .  ” After about 10 minutes, we stopped and they shared their ideas. It was a lot of fun to hear some of their wacky characters and ideas. Our creativity was officially flowing!

Storming the Brain with Webs

Now that everyone was in their creative zone, it was time for the final activity of the session: The Brainstorm!

Now it was time to pick one zany idea they just created in the “What if  . . .” exercise and flesh it out to see if it will make a good story.  I handed out a blank Brainstorm Web template [pdf]. Each of them picked an idea they just created and put it in the middle of the web. Around the centre circle, they put more ideas for this character: problems he/she could face, friends or enemies they could have, anything they could think of.

More fantastic creativity followed. After another 10 minutes, we gathered and shared some of our ideas.

Wrapping It All Up

And suddenly, we were out of time.  The kids went off with the task to complete their Brainstorm Webs and be ready to add to their story idea for next week.

With our creativity seeds planted and our brains sparking up a storm, our session ended with lots of chatter and sharing of ideas. It was great.

Tips for Teachers

Our session lasted 90 minutes with a quick break in the middle. For teachers in a classroom, you could break Session 1 into two parts to give your kids time to really have fun with the “What if . . .” and the Brainstorm Web activities.

I gave each student a two-pocket folder to store all their writing, which I called their Writer’s Portfolio. I also gave them a a very basic lined notebook, that I called their “Writer’s Journal”. This helped them keep their writing in one place and hopefully will inspire them to write more during the week between sessions.  We’ll see!

What’s Your Creative Writing Tips?

Next Week, I plan on having them dig deeper with creating characters and creating plots. I’ll post those activities here too.

What do you think of Session 1? What creative writing activities have you tried that have worked or even failed? Did I miss anything? Let me know in the comments. I’d love to hear from you!

–-

As an award-winning children’s author, gamer-geek and elementary school teacher, I often have teaching ideas and writing news to share with fellow educators. I deliver these resources and ideas to your inbox in my e-newsletter Reading Change.

If this sounds like something you’d like to receive, then subscribe to Reading Change.

You can unsubscribe anytime and I won’t share or sell your data. Honest.

Thanks!

Liam

I’m excited to announce the arrival of Tech Tales, a brand new series of short stories for middle grade readers available exclusively as digital downloads.

Written for Reluctant Readers, Designed for Teachers

Reluctant readers will enjoy the Tech Tales’ short length, brief chapters and high interest topics told with with fast action, spooky mysteries and gadgety weirdness.

Teachers, librarians and home schoolers will love the easy DRM-Free license that comes with each story that allows unlimited:

• sharing of digital files with colleagues or students
• printing for in-class group reading or offline reading
• access to unique Teacher’s Guide with questions and activities individually tailored for each story

Get Unplugged and New Stories Every Month

Unplugged, the first Tech Tale story, is available now and more stories will be arriving monthly.

Learn more about Tech Tales and watch out for a new story each month!

Max and Alison circa 2002

Tomorrow, I’ll be heading downtown and traveling back in time.

I’ll be joining the Owlkids team to talk about the history of the Max Finder Mystery comic I created ten years ago. It’s all part of the Comic Arts for Kids Expo (CAKE) happening at 12:45 on March 23rd, 2013 at the Lillian H. Smith Library (239 College Street, at Spadina.)

I still can’t believe it’s been over ten years since I sat down and ripped off, er, was inspired by Encyclopedia Brown and created Max Finder and Alison Santos and a little town called Whispering Meadows. Every month since around 2002, Max and Alison have stumbled into a fresh mystery and middle grade readers across North America have joined them in cracking the case. Now, Max and Alison have their own European editions and soon they’ll be translated into Spanish and Dutch. More on that later.

In the meantime, if you and your favourite comic fan are looking for some mysterious fun, come on down to CAKE and check out the whole day of activities.

In honour of the time traveling fun, I’ve included a vintage Max Finder Mystery below the jump. It was illustrated by Michael Cho that appeared in Owl Magazine back in 2002, I think.

Enjoy!

Click on the image to make it bigger.

Max Finder Mystery: The Case of the Garden Grind-up Page 1

Max Finder Mystery: The Case of the Garden Grind-up Page 2

Max Finder Mystery: The Case of the Garden Grind-up Page 3

Max Finder Mystery: The Case of the Garden Grind-up Page 4

Solution to the Case of the Garden Grind-up

Dorothy Pafko isn’t a science whiz, she’s a beauty queen and winner of the “Little Miss Cutie Beauty Pageant”.

Mr. P said that his “Dot” was mad at him for being in Marcus’s video. “Dot” is a common short form of Dorothy. Mr. P is short for Mr. Pafko, the same last name as Dorothy. Mr. P is Dorothy’s father. Her pageant winning photo is proudly displayed on the shelf in his office, which can be seen during his video interview.

Dorothy was so scared that she’d lose her science whiz reputation for winning a beauty contest, that she lied to Marcus. She said she travelled to Toronto for a science competition.

She really went there for a beauty pageant. When she heard that her father blabbed about the pageant to Marcus, she decided to steal the tape to keep her secret safe.

Unfortunately for her, Dorothy made a few mistakes when building her alibi.

She claimed to be in Mr. Bailey’s class teaching the budgies how to speak. But Mr. Bailey said that Dorothy was quiet for the whole period. If she was really teaching the birds, they would have been screeching loudly, like in the video footage.

Mr. Bailey is nearsighted, that means he can’t see far away things very well. When he looked up, he said he could see Dorothy’s white lab coat. But Dorothy wasn’t wearing the coat. She wasn’t even in the science lab. She had put her lab coat over the shoulders of “Bones”, the class skeleton, to fool the nearsighted teacher.

When confronted with this evidence, Dorothy broke down and confessed to stealing the camcorder. She retrieved it from her locker and gave it back to Marcus, who vowed to never do anymore secret snooping.

Thanks for helping solve a Max Finder Mystery!

Did you solve it? Yeah, I couldn’t either. Oh, well. Next time, for sure.

–-

As an award-winning children’s author, gamer-geek and elementary school teacher, I often have Tech Teaching ideas and project news to share with fellow educators. I deliver these resources and ideas to your inbox in my e-newsletter Reading Change.

If this sounds like something you’d like to receive, then subscribe to Reading Change.

You can unsubscribe anytime and I won’t share or sell your data. Honest.

Thanks!

Liam

Talking Max Finder Mystery at CAKE

First off, on Saturday March 23rd, there is the Comic Arts for Kids Expo (aka CAKE) at the Lillian H Smith Branch of the Toronto Public Library.  I’ll be part of the “From Idea To Finished Comic” Max Finder Mystery Panel at 12:45pm. Myself, Craig Battle, Ramon Perez and ChickaDEE editor Natalia Diaz will share how we work together to make those mysterious Max Finder comics.

Truth be told, these days Craig and Ramon do all the heavy lifting. Craig’s writing and Ramon’s illustrations have carried on  the sleuthing tradition  in the pages of Owl and for the last four Collected Casebooks.

It’ll be great to meet and share how it all gets done. There’s lots more to do, so make sure you check all the events at CAKE.


Getting Graphic Writing Workshops

If you’re a young comic creator, then you should check out my Get Graphic: Writing Comics (When You Can’t Draw) series of workshops happening Saturday afternoons in April.

It all kicks off Saturday, April 6th at the Woodside Square branch and runs for 90 minutes every Saturday throughout the month. It’s open to comic fans aged 8  – 12 years old, with a maximum of 25 participants, so sign up early. You can register in person or by phone (Woodside Square details here.)

Not in Toronto? Not a Problem!

If you’re not near Toronto, don’t panic! You can participate in the comic writing workshops too. Each week, I’ll post an outline about what we’ll be covering during that session and you can play along from home. If you’re a teacher with a class of comic fans, get in touch and we can cook up something for your students to get involved in the fun. Contact me or leave a comment in the post below and I’ll be in touch.

So that’s where I’ll be this spring! I’m looking forward to meeting some new comic fans and hearing the amazing stories they’ll have to tell.

–

As an award-winning children’s author, gamer-geek and elementary school teacher, I often have Tech Teaching ideas and project news to share with fellow educators. I deliver these resources and ideas to your inbox in my e-newsletter Reading Change.

If this sounds like something you’d like to receive, then subscribe to Reading Change.

You can unsubscribe anytime and I won’t share or sell your data. Honest.

Thanks!

Liam

Plugins can control chaos like these student spawned Blazes. (But chaos is good sometimes!)

Last November, the GamingEdus Minecraft server celebrated its first year anniversary.

In the time, I’ve learned that running a Minecraft server for teachers and students takes 3 Ps: Patience, Persistence and Plugins. I  can’t help you with the first two. But with the third P, Plugins, I got you covered.

Here’s a list of my Five Essential Plugins for educators running a Minecraft server in school.

Caveats and Definitions

These are five plugins I think educators running a server should start off with. This isn’t a list of all the plugins I run on our servers, but it’s the ones I think no teacher or student running a school server should be without. In the future, I’ll post about the other plugins I use, the ones that add a lot of fun and complexity to our game world.

Another caveat: I use Craftbukkit to run my servers, so all these plugins will be the CB versions.

A Definition: Okay, I hear some of you asking: “What the heck is a Minecraft plugin?” A plugin is basically software that you install into your server files, that allow you and your players to do some pretty cool stuff. As you’ll see below.

Instructions on how to install plugins are usually found on the pages of each plugin, which I link to in my descriptions.

Ready? Okay, here we go.

Five Essential Minecraft Plugins for Educators

1. Essentials

This wins the prize for being the most useful plugin and the most aptly named, because it is essential to have if you’re running a server. Essentials is actually a collection of smaller plugins that allow you to set player spawn points. organize players into different groups with varying levels of permissions (Admins, moderators, players, etc) and much, much more. It’s the first plugin I install on every new server I set up.

2. World Guard

This is a protections plugin that can stop griefing in it’s tracks. It allows admins to protect existing builds from being destroyed, it can lock down building in certain areas, stop players from using TNT or lava and a lot more. If you want to have control over what players can and cannot do, then this is a key plugin.

3. Residence

Like World Guard, Residence is a protection plugin. The beauty of this plugin is that it lets players easily set their own protections. They can quickly protect their builds from others without having to ask an admin to do it for them. This works really well in student servers where griefing (even accidental) is a reality.

4. Backup

This plugin can be a life saver and a world saver. It automatically creates a back up zip file of all your world files. Crashes happen and world files can get corrupted. When this happens entire worlds simply won’t load properly again and everything in that world is gone. Forever. I’ve seen it happen. That’s why having a regular, set it and forget backup system is crucial. I’ve had to revert to a saved world file more than once in the year of running GamingEdus.

5. LWC

This is another protection plugin for players to use. With a few simple commands they can lock checks, doors, furnaces and dispensers. They can also password protect blocks to allow access to only approved players. It’s very handy in survival world. This GamingEdus Basics video explains how it works:

Five is Just the Beginning

That’s my five essential plugins for educators. As I said earlier, I run many more plugins on my servers, but these five are the first ones I install on any new server I set up.

What are your Essential Five Plugins for Teachers? Let us know in the comments below.

And if you’re an educator interested in seeing first hand how these plugins work, visit us on the GamingEdus Professional Play server. It’s a multi-age server for Minecraft-curious teachers and their families to play the game, connect with other educators and have fun. We’re very newbie-friendly, generously hosted by the EDGE Lab at Ryerson University and open 24/7.

Fill out a whitelist application to the Gamingedus server if your interested.

–

As an award-winning children’s author, gamer-geek and elementary school teacher, I often have Tech Teaching ideas and project news to share with fellow educators. I deliver these resources and ideas to your inbox in my e-newsletter Reading Change.

If this sounds like something you’d like to receive, then subscribe to Reading Change.

You can unsubscribe anytime and I won’t share or sell your data. Honest.

Thanks!

Liam

2013 Best Books for Teens submissions

After nearly four months of reading, I’ve made my way through all the books submitted for the 2013 Best Books for Teens Awards from the Canadian Children’s Book Centre. There were close to 30 entries and all of them fine young adult novels. Now that the reading is done, the hard part begins.  It’s decision time.

And when you get a group of book lovers, teachers and librarians together to pick a winner, things can get messy.

Many Judges, Many Winners

Okay, maybe not messy, but the discussions can definitely get lively. Last year, I had the honour of choosing the Best Books for Kids, for middle grade novels. It was the same process as this time around.

We were shipped a selection of books submitted to the CCBC by publishers. We had a few months to read the books. Then, we met at the Canadian Children’s Book Centre’s offices to pick a selection of the best, including a few that we thought stood out and were given “Starred Selection” status.  This year, because of schedules, we’re meeting virtually via Google Hangouts.

I’m really excited for this meeting because there are definitely a couple of titles that I am ready to champion to get on the list. While I can’t tell you which ones those are, I can say that it’s a lot of fun to sit down with fellow book fans and talk about the merits of particular titles. I also like that there isn’t a single “winner” for this award. Too often, a single prize contest shines all the light on one book while leaving other, just a worthy titles, languishing in the “Runner Up” category when those books are equally deserving winners themselves.

Better Judges for Best Books?

As a teacher as well as a writer, I’m always wondering how we can include young people into these book awards programs. The CCBC does an amazing job recognizing the achievements of Canadian children’s books through its many generous awards. However, I really like the way the OLA’s Tree Awards puts kids in the centre of the award-giving by making them the judges who pick the winners. For me, this really hits the mark as an inclusive and equitable way to give kids a voice in a medium that is specifically for them. That said, it would be also great to have the kids as part of the selection process to choose the Tree Nominees.

Update: Since posting this, the amazing Rachel Seigel, who organizes the CCBC Best Book judging (and runs Reading Timbits, a great book blog AND is the K-12 buyer at wholesaler S&B Books here in Canada) shared with me a great post she wrote over at Publishing Crawl, about putting kids in charge of choosing the book winners.

This part really jumped out at me:

One of my favourite aspects of awards such as these is that the lists are not specifically created with curriculum in mind, but to represent a variety of cultures, genres and authors, and with kids’ reading interests in mind. The winners reflect not the choices that adults would make, but the books that the kids have chosen, and they’re not necessarily the most popular or commercial books. Whether they realize it or not, kids are learning to think critically about what they are reading, improving their reading skills, and most importantly, enjoying reading- and what could be better than that?

I couldn’t agree more and it’s something that all teachers and teacher-librarians hope their students take away from their time reading books (and other texts) in school.

Since starting to judge the Best Books Awards, I’ve been thinking about ways that a Best Books Award, chosen by kids could be run in my school. Perhaps there already is something like this and I missed something in my exhaustive my 5 minute duckduckgo search on the subject. I guess the “Battle of the Books” competitions is close to what I’m thinking about. However, these tend to focus on picking a single “winner” as opposed to a recommended list of winning titles. Somewhere in there is a happy medium. I think I’ll add that to my list of  “Projects to Try Out in My School Library” in the coming months.

What about you? Have you run a Best Books style program in your class or library? I would love to hear how it worked or other suggestions you have to get kids involved in the book recommendation process.

Leave a comment below and share your wisdom!

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As an award-winning children’s author, gamer-geek and elementary school teacher, I often have Tech Teaching ideas and project news to share with fellow educators. I deliver these resources and ideas to your inbox in my e-newsletter Reading Change.

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Liam