CCBC-Net Archives

CCBC-Net Schedule

From: Megan Schliesman <Schliesman>
Date: Fri, 01 Jul 2005 08:28:09 -0500

As always, we welcome your announcements at the start of the month. We will have an open announcement period through July 4.

The CCBC-Net schedule of upcoming topics is below. We will beging the Simple Science discussion on Tuesday, July 5.

We thank you for so many thoughtful, thought-provoking posts in June--what a month!

Everyone should have received the ccbc-net monthly help file message this morning. This summarizes the various listserv commands--just a reminder to hang on to this so for future reference.

Upcoming Topics on CCBC-Net

July First Two Weeks: Simple Science. What makes a good science book for young children? How do authors and artists take complex information about the nature of our world and our universe and make it understandable for the preschool and early elementary audience? The first part of July, we'll examine these and other questions related to creating "simple science" trade books. Second Two Weeks: Perspectives on Gender in Books for Children and Teens. Back in the 1970s, there was a growing awareness of the need for books that offered strong, independent female protagonists and that showed both boys and girls engaged in non-traditional roles and behavior. Thirty years later, we'll examine how gender is depicted today in literature for children and young adults. Have our expectations changed? Do gender stereotypes continue to exist? In what ways are books for children and teenagers reflecting or challenging the way we think about gender today? We'll talk about these and other issues the second half of July.

August First Two Weeks: Harry Potter VI. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince is being released in the U.S. on July 16. We'll spend the first part of August talking about the latest volume of Harry Potter, and taking stock of the Harry Potter phenomenon. Are new readers continuing to flock to the series? What about the original youthful readers of HP? They've been aging faster than Harry. Seven years after the first book debuted, have many of them, unlike Harry, left Hogwarts behind? Or does it still hold a place in their imaginations?

Second Two Weeks: Of Orphans, Abandonment and Children and Teens on Their Own. One way or another, many child and teen characters in literature are on their own. It's a phenomenon that's as old as children's fiction itself. Some characters are literal orphans, like Harry Potter, Lemony Snicket's Baudelaire children, or Cynthia Voigt's Tillerman family. Some of them, like Harry, have ended up, for better or for worse, in boarding schools Others, like the Baudelaires, are at the mercy of nefarious adults. Still others, like the Tillermans, struggle to make it on their own until one or more caring adults intervenes. Whether children have been literally orphaned, physically or emotionally abandoned, or temporarily removed from adult supervision, the plot of children on their own is an archetype that crosses all genres of children's fiction. We'll examine that archetype in the first half of August, including how it plays out differently between literature for children and literature for young adults.


Megan

Megan Schliesman, Librarian Cooperative Children's Book Center School of Education, UW-Madison 600 N. Park St., Room 4290 Madison, WI 53706

ph: 608&2?03 fax: 608&2I33 schliesman at education.wisc.edu
Received on Fri 01 Jul 2005 08:28:09 AM CDT