Teachers@Random

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• Learn more about authors, book talks, books, illustrators, information skills, language arts, librarians, literature, poetry, reader's advisory, reading, and writing.

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Teachers @ Random provides a variety of resources and information to help both classroom teachers and school librarians to encourage student reading and utilize children’s and young adult literature in the curriculum. This site is a great place to find information on author tours, interviews with authors, and biographies of authors and illustrators. Under the author/illustrator tab, the site provides an appearance kit to help you set up an author visit at your school.

By clicking on the Teachers Guides tab at the top of the page, you can find all the site’s teacher guides for books, sorted by title, grade, theme, discipline, and time period. These guides explain a variety of ideas for classroom activities and discussion, which cross curriculum areas. They also sometimes recommend other titles like the book, as well as list additional resources from the web.

To do a more general search for books, which may not include guides, you have a variety of options at your disposal. One of the nicest search features is the Search by Theme link, which allows you to specify a grade range and then choose from a list of themes and holidays to find titles. There is also a Planning Calendar section, where you can view lists of potential books to use during each month, which match some sort of theme for that month.

For librarians, the site provides a Librarians @ Random section, which contains book talks, booklists, and details of author tours. You can browse their wide range of booktalks by title and author.