Links I Loved Last Week: A Round-up of Online Reading 2/14/16

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I always love Jillian Lauren’s thoughtful writing about motherhood. Here, she tackles a Massive Mom Fail.

Emerging Mama has a terrific piece on 4 Reasons Parenting Trauma Is Incredibly Difficult. Yes, yes, yes.

7 Tools for Calming Angry Kids is written for parents but has plenty of applications in the classroom as well. (Note: there is a bit of religious content here.)

The scientific name is “experience-dependent neuroplasticity.” What it means is pretty simple: What You Focus On Is What Becomes Powerful in your brain.

Eleven-year-old Marley Dias decided to collect and donate 1,000 books about black girl protagonists. School Library Journal chronicles this awesome story.

Ricki Ginsberg explains what’s wrong with Lexiles and reading levels in a powerfully persuasive post (comments are interesting too!).

The Hub’s YA Reading Challenge has begun! I never complete it, but this is still one of my favorite reading challenges every year.

I loved this piece from Book Riot called My Kid Reads Only Comics and I’m Okay With That. Less pressure, less worry about reading=good! It will all come in its own time. Really!

Carrie Gelson’s celebrations of the challenges of her classroom are so powerful and so wise. Her slice of life about a student’s home environment is an absolute must-read this week.

I related to every word in Confessions of a Part-time Facebook Junkie. SIGH.

I loved Sarah Andersen’s post about why we MUST have classroom libraries and time in class for kids to read so much that I threw out this week’s lesson in Adolescent Literature to assign her post instead!

I’ll be book talking all of the transitional chapter book series included in this great Nerdy Book Club post on the Top 10 Chapter Books for Transitioning Readers.

I’ve had several students in Children’s Lit ask me for mystery recommendations–a big book gap for me. This recommendations post for Middle-Grade mysteries came at just the right time.