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Welcome Back to a New Year of Teaching and Learning with Children's Literature and CLA

8/28/2023

 

By Lauren Liang & Xenia Hadjioannou

Welcome back to the start of school and the fall semester! Whether it is your first year of teaching or your 30th, the first day of school is always an exciting event. We hope that you were able to celebrate with your new learners and mark the day with hope and joy as you look forward to adventuring together into new inquiries and understandings.

As you take these first steps on the 2023-24 school year journey, we want to remind you of the CLA resources here for your support and growth. Below we list some of the many CLA offerings that we hope you will utilize this year for your classrooms.

The CLA Blog

CLA Blog posts, published on Tuesdays every other week from September through May, are designed for educators and librarians who read with children and bring books to them to support their learning, feed their curiosity, give flight to their imagination, and kindle in them a love for literature and reading. Within our blog you will find posts written by CLA members, offering ideas, tips, and recommendations for sharing books with young people in pursuit of diverse goals and objectives. You will also find posts foregrounding upcoming CLA events, announcing award application opportunities, and celebrating the work of our CLA committees.

CLA Notables Award Lists

The CLA Notables are announced annually in March. Throughout the year, members of the CLA Notables Committee read, review, discuss, and debate the merits of over 400 books written for children (K-8th grade) published in the previous year. They then create a final list of 30 books they mark as being the best of the best for use in English Language Arts classrooms and school libraries. 

Note: If you attend the annual NCTE Convention, you will not want to miss the Notables session, during which you will hear all about the books that made the Notables list that year. And, if you win our raffle at the CLA Breakfast, you may find yourself leaving the session with a full set of the books on that list. 
From the CLA Blog
  • March, 20, 2023 The World Keeps Turning (2023 Notables) 
  • March, 29, 2022: Books to Help you Spring into Nature (2022 Notables) 
  • March 30, 2021: 2021 Notable Children's Books in the Language Arts Award Books (2021 Notables)    
  • October 27, 2020: From the 2020 Notable Children’s Books in the Language Arts Using Poetic Picturebooks as Mentor Texts (2020 Notables)
  • December 8, 2020: From the 2020 Notable Children’s Books in the Language Arts: Moving From Small to Large Through Play and Imagination (2020 Notables)
From CLA’s Video Library
(member exclusive)

Book Creator Spotlight: 2020 Notable Children’s Books in the Language Arts Award Books

Journal of Children’s Literature

Member Exclusive, Journal of Children's Literature Spring 2023 Issue

CLA’s semi-annual academic journal, The Journal of Children’s Literature, highlights scholarship in the field and contributes to vital conversations about children’s books and literacy education. The journal offers scholarly, peer reviewed feature articles and columns related to children’s literature. It also offers articles contributed by CLA’s committees, including an exploration of the years Notables books, an interview with the keynote speaker of the CLA Breakfast, a comprehensive report of our annual Expent Class, and contributions from the recipients of CLA awards.



CLA Breakfast at NCTE

2023 CLA Breakfast, feturing Traci Sorell
Every year, on Sunday morning of the NCTE annual convention, CLA hosts one of our most beloved events: the CLA Breakfast. Beyond celebrating the recipients of CLA’s Grants and Awards and featuring our popular Art Auction, the CLA Breakfast features renowned authors and illustrators as keynote speakers. Over the past few years, breakfast attendees were fortunate to hear Jerry Craft (2022); Cynthia Leitich-Smith , Traci Sorell, Michaela Goade, Carole Lindstrom, and Kevin Maillard (2021), Jason Reynolds (2020), Yuyi Morales (2019), and Candace Fleming and Erik Rohmann (2018). 

In 2023, we are delighted to feature Traci Sorell as our keynote Breakfast speaker. When registering for the NCTE Conference, purchase your breakfast ticket and join us on Sunday, November 19th at 7:00 am!


From the CLA Blog
  • May 23, 2023: Introducing Children's Author Traci Sorell: Discover Her Work and Knowledge             
  • May 24, 2022: And the Children’s Literature Assembly Breakfast Speaker is…         
  • September 28, 2021: Listening to Voices from the Four Directions:  Indigenous Storytellers for Your Classrooms 
From CLA’s Video Library
(member exclusive)

Annual CLA Breakfast at the 2020 NCTE Convention, Featuring Jason Reynolds

CLA Expert Class at NCTE

Another annual event CLA sponsors at the NCTE Convention is the CLA Expert Class, which was formerly known as the CLA Master Class. The session is structured as a professional development opportunity for teachers of children’s literature, and typically involves book creators and children’s literature scholars in conversations about vital and timely issues in the field.
From the CLA Blog
  • November 15, 2022: "Books as Lighthouses: Using Children’s Literature to Illuminate and Provide Hope in the Darkness of Sexual Abuse" 
  • October 12, 2021: “Reading Queerness at the Intersections: Using LGBTQ-Inclusive Literature to Move toward Equity, Justice, and Antiracist Teaching”       
From CLA’s Video Library
(member exclusive. Open access for September 2023)

  • 2020: Difficult Conversations in the Classroom: Supporting Students through Children’s Literature
  • 2021: Reading Queerness at the Intersections: Using LGBTQ-Inclusive Literature to Move toward Equity, Justice, and Antiracist Teaching

Student Special Events

CLA’s student members are actively involved in the work of the Assembly. The CLA Student Committee organizes several events throughout the year, including the Annual Student Committee Webinar, and a CLA Student Social at the NCTE conference. In addition, student members have opportunities to serve on other CLA committees and apply for the Vivian Yenika Agbaw Student Conference Grant, which helps defray costs for the NCTE Conference.  
From the CLA Blog
  • November 29, 2022: Concerned about Book Bans? CLA-SC Webinar Panelists Inform and Empower Attendees 
  • September 14, 2021: The CLA Student Committee: Fostering an Inclusive Community
From CLA’s Video Library
(member exclusive)

  • 2023 Student Webinar: Disrupting Monolingually Oriented Praxis: Children's Literature as a Nexus for Translanguaging and Social Justice Pedagogies
  • 2022 Student Webinar: Book Bans: Who, How and Why?
  • 2021 Student Webinar: Inclusivity in Curriculum & Pedagogy
  • 2020 Student Webinar: 50 and Fabulous: The Coretta Scott King Book Award
Lauren Aimonette Liang is Associate Professor at the Deparment of Educational Psychology of the University of Utah. She is a past president of CLA and co-editor of the CLA Blog.

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

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    Authors:
    CLA Members

    Supporting PreK-12 and university teachers as they share children’s literature with their students in all classroom contexts.

    Disclaimer
    The opinions and ideas posted in the individual entries are those of the individual authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions or views of CLA or the Blog Editors.

    Blog Editors

    Liz Thackeray Nelson
    Emmaline Ellis
    Jennifer Slagus
    Sara K. Sterner
    Megan Van Deventer

    contribute to the blog

    Instructions to Authors

    If you are a current CLA member and you would like to contribute a post to the CLA Blog, please read the Instructions to Authors and email co-editor Liz Thackeray Nelson with your idea.


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