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Literary Activities for African American History Month

By on January 25, 2019   /   Articles, For Librarians, For Parents, For Teachers  

African American History Month starts next week, and schools across the country have a variety of activities planned to celebrate. In addition to being a middle grade writer and blogger, I am the PTA President at my kids’ elementary school, and so I’ve had the good fortune to be involved in our school’s planning for this special time. Of course, reading had to be a big part of it!

We decided to welcome parents into the classroom to read works by and about African Americans. First, we met with principal, and discussed our mutual goal of enhancing kids’ understanding of the breadth of the contribution of African Americans to American history. Often, kids point to the same five or seven famous African Americans, without a sense of how many more people have shaped our society in a broad range of ways. We then put together a list of books that included biography, fiction, poetry, and more, all by or about African Americans. We worked with the librarian to find out which of those titles our library already contains, and created an Amazon wishlist of the remaining. We will send that out to parents, to see if anyone would like to contribute. The librarian will collect the selected books onto a few shelves of the library for parents to choose from when they come in to do their reading at the appointed time.

As we planned, we came across a number of other ideas and resources for those putting together literary activities for African American History Month. Here are a few:

I hope this African American History Month is filled with fun, discovery, and plenty of great books!

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Cover Reveal for Jennifer Swanson’s, Spies, Lies, and Disguise: The Daring Tricks and Deeds That Won World War II

By on January 23, 2019   /   Articles  

Hello Mixed-Up Filers!

Wow, do we have exciting news for you! Mixed-Up Files will start doing cover reveals, and we can’t think of a better way to start than with our own Jennifer Swanson!

Illustrated by the fantastic, Kevin O’Malley, the book, Spies, Lies, and Disguise: The Daring Tricks and Deeds That Won World War II is due out November 26th from Bloomsbury.

About the Book:

In the late 1930s, times were desperate. The world found itself at war again, less than twenty years after the first World War had ended. No one could quite believe it. And no one wanted it. The leaders of every country involved were left with no choice. They had to try to end the war as fast as possible, using whatever means they could. That meant coming up with secret operations meant to deceive, deflect, and confuse the enemy.

 

In the 25,000-word off-center look at history for middle graders, SPIES, LIES, and DISGUISE: THE DARING TRICKS AND DEEDS THAT WON WORLD WAR II, readers will be captivated by the classified and covert efforts made by each side as they tried to gain the upper hand and win the war. Restricted access is lifted to give the reader a peek into the top-secret operations of the daring men and women who fought the war under a cloak of secrecy.

 

Now, for the moment you’ve all been waiting for, the cover reveal!

 

Love it!

 

To purchase SPIES, LIES, and DISGUISE: THE DARING TRICKS AND DEEDS THAT WON WORLD WAR II, visit:

 

IndieBound

 

You can visit Jennifer Swanson’s website at:

http://www.Jenniferswansonbooks.com

 

 

We’re thrilled that we could host Jennifer’s cover reveal and wish the best of luck with SPIES, LIES, and DISGUISE: THE DARING TRICKS AND DEEDS THAT WON WORLD WAR II!

 

If any traditionally-published authors wish to host cover reveals at Mixed-Up Files, please feel free to reach out to us. We’d love to have you!

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Finding Needles in the Haystack

By on January 18, 2019   /   Articles, For Librarians, For Parents, For Teachers, For Writers, STEM Tuesday  
STEM Tuesday blog page

Information.

It’s everywhere.

It’s all-encompassing.

We are knee deep and rising in the Information Age.

We are surrounded by it every minute of every day of our modern life.

We are writers and readers and teachers and librarians and we are all well aware of this information wave. I can’t count on all my fingers and all my toes the numbers of times just in the past month I’ve fallen down the rabbit hole of information while doing book research. You know what I mean, right?

Case in point. A certain, not-to-be-named kidlit author researches the Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library website looking for a reaction quote from Ike in response to the Soviet launch of Sputnik and several hours later, discovers he’s “accidentally” read through the entire Eisenhower archived collection on Sputnik I.

As important as the information is, though, it’s as critical we are able to store and access that information. The difference between success and failure of an assignment or a project often lies in the ability to find the exact clear and concise data we are searching for without losing time chasing interesting, yet irrelevant information.

The library of humanity grows exponentially each passing day. We are swamped with data and overwhelmed by information. How each of us learns to store and retrieve information has become an important part of daily life. Digital data storage, for example, has evolved as fast and as far as anything else in the technology sector.

From the punch cards of mid-20th-century computers to today’s cutting-edge cloud storage options available to practically everyone, we have seen massive improvements in the past 50-years. We rely on thumb drives and smartphones as much or more than we mature folks used to rely on our 5-1/4” floppy disks.

Hannes Grobe/AWI [CC BY 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)]

The future of data storage looks incredible. There was a paper published in 2012 about using DNA to store digital information. Digital information which can be coded, carried, copied, and preserved in the genome of a microbe. We could possibly one day stream 2001: A Space Oddessey for the family get-together after retrieving the stored digital copy from the bread mold strain we keep in our pantry. An entire encyclopedia of knowledge stored in the philodendron on the window sill of your office? Maybe, just maybe.

Storing information is one thing. Retrieving it is another vital piece of the information pie. We need to be able to find the data we are looking for fast and accurately. Google, the Queen Mother of Internet Search Engines, uses crawling and indexing to find information—even those funny cat videos. And to make myself sound completely ludicrous, how about the magic of Boolean Search? 

Personally, I still have a soft spot in my digital heart for the old school search engine found in a library card catalog. There’s still something magical about sliding out the wood drawer of the cabinet, finding the book or topic you want, and scribbling the call number with a stubby pencil onto a piece of lime green recycled scrap paper. Then the moments of investigative anticipation while walking the stacks until you find the physical book on the shelf right where it belonged.

Information nerd heaven.

Enokson from Alberta, Canada [CC BY 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)]

Okay, folks. In case you were beginning to wonder why I’m rambling on about information storage and retrieval, here’s the meat and potatoes of this post. Today, I have the honor of introducing a new feature for the From the Mixed-Up Files STEM Tuesday posts. When the other STEM Tuesday members said, “Hey, wouldn’t it be so helpful to teachers, librarians, readers, etc. if they could quickly search a topic for past STEM Tuesday posts?”, I said, “NO! It’s more fun to make everyone search blindly and wander around the entire blog archive for days and days! (Insert evil laugh)”

Needless to say, the STEM Tuesday team told me to shut up and go write an introductory post for the new feature. Ladies and gentlemen, here is the new feature:

A searchable database of STEM Tuesday content!

Thanks to programming and webmaster brilliance, we now have our own portal to assist teachers, readers, writers, and librarians sort through the STEM Tuesday library of past book lists, classroom activities, writing craft & resources, and author interviews. We hope this search tool makes it quicker and easier to find that one helpful piece of information.

So, without further delay, the STEM Tuesday Search Tool is live! Visit the STEMtuesday.com page and select a topic from the drop-down screen. Searching for MG STEM book info has never been easier.

(BREAKING NEWS! Next month, we’ll announce a contest to celebrate the STEM Tuesday Search Tool. We’re calling it The STEM Tuesday Search Party contest. Details are being finalized for the contest so I can’t tell you any specifics yet, except we already have a fabulous cache of prizes to offer. Stay tuned for the STEM Tuesday Search Party announcement on February 21, 2019!)

And remember, back up those files! Information is the currency of the digital age. Take care of your data!

No data storage system is perfect; even if it’s Tom Brady’s DNA we’re talking about.

 

 

 

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