Children’s Lit
The Adventures of Beekle: The Uniminginary Friend is one of my top 10 picture books of 2014. Pen and Oink has a terrific interview with author/illustrator Dan Santat about its creation. Well worth reading!
Looking for more fantastic middle grade to read? From the Mixed-Up Files profiles children’s book awards you may have missed.
Young Adult Lit
Book Riot follows up on a Delaware school board’s censorship of Emily Danforth’s novel, The Miseducation of Cameron Post. An important read about why we must fight for our students’ right to read diverse literature.
Flavorwire collects the 20 Most Beautiful YA Book Covers.
Bookishness
Need to spend more time on Pinterest? Book Riot hooks you up with the 20 Best Pinterest Boards for Bookish Types.
I love street art, and what could be better than street art about books and reading?
Need another reason to share diverse literature with your students? Susie Rodarme explains how reading helped her overcome a racist upbringing.
Teaching
Matt Renwick has a terrific piece about how he would integrate technology into an elementary classroom. So many wonderful ideas for using technology meaningfully for learning.
Katherine Sokolowski shares an important key to her curriculum design and planning: asking the questions, What is the purpose of this? Is this authentic?
Teaching Ferguson
Kris Shaffer has a thought-provoking piece arguing that it’s not enough to teach Ferguson related only to current events: if our ultimate goal is for our students to stand up to racism, oppression, and injustice wherever they see it, to ask important questions about what is happening and why, we need to teach Ferguson much more broadly.
Renee Watson argues that social justice pedagogy is for all students and suggests four activities for teaching students about the historical context to Mike Brown’s murder.
Jesse Hagopian argues that we must educate to empower youth “to solve the problems they face in their communities” and specifically calls out certain vocal ed reformers for their silence on Ferguson.
The New York Times piece on the re-opening of schools in Ferguson is also worth a read.
Productivity
Cognitive psychologist Roland Kellogg examined the schedules and routines of writers to determine how environment shapes productivity. Maria Popova at Brain Pickings shares his key insights.
It turns out that less email leads to better productivity.
Rafranz Davis gleans 10 lessons for creative types from Kanye West. (Funny and motivational!)
the dirigible plum 
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