The CLA Blog is back as a weekly blog!

By Xenia Hadjioannou, Lauren Aimonette Liang, and Liz Thackeray Nelson

Classrooms are stocked and decorated, final touches are put on semester plans and syllabi, and lesson plans are feverishly developed. All the while, health plans, implementation guidance, and teaching modalities are constantly shifting, as aspirations for full, pre-COVID-19 re-openings are confronted by the realities of a still raging pandemic. As we navigate yet another challenging and unpredictable school year, the CLA Blog remains committed to offering educators valuable resources for bringing children's literature to classrooms and into the hands of young readers, in whatever classroom context they may be working.

Since the beginning of the blog in March 2020, and thanks to the innovative spirit and the generosity of groups and individual CLA members who contributed entries, we have published 65 posts. This 66th post marks the blog's recommencement of operations as a weekly blog, which will feature a new post every Tuesday. With it, we also welcome our new co-editor, Liz Thackeray Nelson.

This fall, the blog will feature posts from:

• Individual CLA members on a variety of topics. 
  • If you are interested in contributing a post, please read our Instructions to Authors document and email co-editor Liz Thackeray Nelson with your idea to sign up for an available date. 
    
• CLA committees: A series of posts by the various CLA committees, highlighting recent work and initiatives .
  
• The Biography Clearinghouse: A series of posts from the Biography Clearinghouse team on incorporating biography into the curriculum.

An invitation to our readers

Many teachers we know (including ourselves!) have one or more books or text excerpts they share with their classes during the first week of school. Such texts are typically chosen for their capacity to set the tone of a new, emerging community of readers and writers and can become an indelible part of the community's history. 

We would love to hear from you about the texts YOU bring to your class(es) on the first week of school! We invite you to respond to the BRIEF survey below by Friday, August 27, 2021. The survey should take no more than 3 minutes to complete. We will share the responses we accumulate in a post we will run next week.

You can also access the survey through the button below

Survey

Xenia Hadjioannou is Associate Professor of Language and Literacy Education at the Harrisburg Campus of Penn State. She is Vice President of CLA and co-editor of the CLA Blog.

Lauren Aimonette Liang is Associate Professor at the Deparment of Educational Psychology of the University of Utah. She is Past President of CLA and co-editor of the CLA Blog.

Liz Thackeray Nelson is a doctoral candidate at the University of Utah. She is co-chair of CLA's membership committee and co-editor of the CLA Blog.