The General Assembly of the United Nations declared 2008 as an International Year of Sanitation (IYS).
World Water Day will be celebrated on 20 March 2008. In 2008 the day will highlight issues on sanitation and people around the world are encouraged to celebrate the day to draw attention to the world’s sanitation challenges.
Check out the calendar to see if an event is happening near you.
If you are struggling to get your head around the ‘how 2 of web 2′ then take a look at the Californian School Library Association’s blog – School Library Learning 2.0. CSLA is focusing on the 23 things one can learn, so there are 23 activities that you can do to begin to understand RSS feed, blogs, wikis, image and video sharing, digital collection sharing and more.
Very early in 2008, Jon Scieszka, author of The Stinky Cheese Man and numerous other offbeat titles, was named National Ambassador for Children’s Literature in the United States. This week he took the opportunity to explain just what the experience has been like in an open letter on the Children’s Bookshelf section of Publisher’s Weekly. It seems that children across the US are already benefiting from this newly created post – Jon has taken on the mantle very diligently, but is maintaining his trademark wacky approach.
Jon maintains a terrific website, Guys Read, which reflects his passion for getting boys hooked into books.
Children’s Bookshelf has a free weekly email newsletter. Subscribers can join the list here.
It would be great if IASL members could share information about posts similar to Scieszka’s role and the UK’s Children’s Laureate, a post currently held by Michael Rosen.
The IFLA Libraries for Children and Young Adults Section December 2007 newsletter is now available from the IFLA website. A range of articles are included. Also, the sections web page has some useful information, links and documents that would be of interest to school libraries.
A new annual children’s literature award has been announced in the United States. The Horace Mann Upstanders Book Award is sponsored by Antioch University in Los Angeles, and will be awarded to the best fiction book published in North America in 2007/8 for children in years K-6 that ‘best exemplifies the ideals of social action and in turn encourages young readers to become agents of change themselves’. Deadline for submission is 15 March. The award will be presented in June.
