Children's Literature (Reading Level Appropriate)
Children's literature is written for children, to be read by children. Most school media centers maintain a collection. BSCTC maintains a library guide of recent purchases that may be taken to local schools. Both the school and BSCTC often purchase according to guidelines:
Teachers now face troubling challenges to their decisions to purchase for the collection.
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Literature and the New Culture Wars
by
ISBN: 9781324019183Our current "culture wars" have reshaped the politics of secondary literature instruction. Due to a variety of challenges from both the left and the right--to language or subject matter, to potentially triggering content, or to authors who have been canceled--school reading lists are rapidly shrinking. For many teachers, choosing which books to include in their curriculum has become an agonizing task with political, professional, and ethical dimensions. In Literature and the New Culture Wars, Deborah Appleman calls for a reacknowledgment of the intellectual and affective work that literature can do, and offers ways to continue to teach troubling texts without doing harm. Rather than banishing challenged texts from our classrooms, she writes, we should be confronting and teaching the controversies they invoke. Her book is a timely and eloquent argument for a reasoned approach to determining what literature still deserves to be read and taught and discussed.
Leveled Reading
Big Sandy's local collection is one large unit. In most schools, media centers are divided by age group. For example, you may not find a first-grader's picture book in a high school collection, or a 300-page chapter book in a section of picture books. Due to space concerns, Big Sandy's collection is one large section, generally alphabetized by author's name.
Reading level designations match the child's reading level with the vocabulary and writing in the book.
For more information about leveled reading, see Fountas and Pinell's system of identifying level gradients.
