I attended What’s New in Children’s Books in St. Cloud, MN, sponsored by the Bureau of Education and Research. Deborah Ford was our presenter and she also works for Junior Library Guild. We received a large manual of all the best books for 2016 that she has reviewed. She discussed how to find the best in children’s literature and how important it is to weed our collections. She pointed out many sources for book selection. The journal, Horn Book, only reviews books they love. The manual is divided by genre – fantasy, realistic fiction, picture books, graphic novels, nonfiction, etc. She showed us many of the books in the manual and told us why she liked them and also read many of the picture books to us.
I was excited about the graphic novel section as we received a grant from SAMMIE for graphic novels. Now I have a good source of reviews for new graphic novels. Another item I was excited about is Adobe Spark. It creates infopics with your own photos or with any of their free photos. You can add comments to pictures with this tool. This will be great for facebook posts.
I really enjoyed this workshop and will make good use of the resource manual. I am anxious to send in my next book order for children’s books!