Time for PLA!

PLA is this week! We hope you’ll come and see us at our booth in the exhibit hall. We’re in booth #1611, and we’ll be giving away posters featuring our bestselling Jake Maddox sports books. We’re also part of a giveaway with Capstone Press and Linworth Books. The drawing has a great prize—9 of our Graphic Revolve books, 14 of Capstone Press’s Graphic Science books, and two books by Michele Gorman (Getting Graphic! Comics for Kids and Getting Graphic! Using Graphic Novels to Promote Literacy with Preteens and Teens) will go to one lucky winner. Simply sign up at our booth during exhibit hours. We’ll ship the prize to the lucky winner after the show.

Stone Arch Books staff will be busy manning the booth. You might even run into some of our authors while you’re there. So come and see us—we can’t wait to meet you and tell you all about our awesome books.

Minnesota publishing

Looking forward to traveling to Minneapolis for the PLA conference? We’re looking forward to having you here! If this is your first professional trip to Minnesota, you might not be aware that the area is a hotbed of publishers—we’ve got all kinds of publishing houses here, but the educational publishing in Minnesota is especially outstanding. Check out this article in SLJ for more (including some comments from our president, Joan Berge).

On oral language

Oral language -- language that is similar to the way kids speak and hear it -- is vital in fiction books for struggling readers. According to Kylene Beers’s book When Kids Can’t Read What Teachers Can Do, “fragments, run-ons, short sentences, and slang all help create what readers call ‘real talk’ or ‘slang lang’ in a book.” This is the language kids hear in their heads. When this type of language is used in a book, it becomes easier for them to relate to the text on the written page.

This is something the editors at Stone Arch Books are constantly thinking about. We want our characters to sound real. Characters who speak with words and phrases appropriate to the situation, and are contemporary without being too trendy, help the reluctant reader enjoy the story. No kid wants to read about a hero who sounds like a grammar textbook. Bullies should sound mean, not literate. We take care to make our books sound the way kids talk, paying close attention to things like contractions, limited narrative passages, lots of dialogue, and sentences ending in propositions. They’re not always a part of exceptional literature, but they help students get into reading and eventually transition into more difficult literature.

In short, oral language gets kids reading. Specific elements of oral language, however, need to be kept to a minimum, or sometimes even deleted, to aid the struggling student. These include figurative, or flowery language, unnecessary use of idioms, homophones, and homographs. Whatever is not a part of a kid’s natural speech habits needs to be introduced in small and deliberate doses.

This approach extends a helping hand and gently moves the reader from oral language to the basics of written language, and then upward to more complex and more engaging material. No one will read Hamlet unless they can first get excited about ghosts, graveyards, and swordplay. And no one can get excited about ghosts, graveyards, and swordplay unless they are given the material in words that are familiar. At Stone Arch Books, we want to get kids excited about reading. To do so, we take time to make sure that our books echo kids’ words as well as their world.


--Michael Dahl
Editorial Director, Stone Arch Books

More graphic novel news

We’ve been looking forward to March for a long time—and not just because the temperatures are finally starting to rise. This month is the first time one of our books is a Junior Library Guild pick. Frankenstein, one of the graphic-novel retellings in our Graphic Revolve set, was chosen as one of the March Junior Library Guild selections. It’s just the first of many of our books that the JLG has honored in this way (look for upcoming selections in the next few months), and we’re thrilled! The Junior Library Guild looks through more than 3,000 manuscripts each year before determining its 288 selections, so we feel very honored to have been chosen.

Catch the Reading Bug!

In March in Minnesota, it doesn’t feel anything like summer, between the frigid temperatures and the piles of snow—although with Daylight Savings Time upon us and temperatures above 40 this week, we’re starting to believe summer will come eventually. Of course, once summer comes, we won’t be excited about the bugs. But right now, bugs sound pretty great.

We’re getting excited for summer with our new summer reading collection, the Bug Collection. Moths, beetles, mosquitoes, and more are the focus of these fun novels and graphic novels, all part of the summer reading program at public libraries this year.

For more information on the books, check out our website, and for more information on the summer reading program, head to http://www.cslpreads.org/ .