It feels wild to think that we only have 7.5 weeks left in the school year. One of my favorite things about the school year is watching my readers and their preferences evolve over the course of our 180 days together. I’d love to know which books the readers you serve are loving these days. […]
Category Archives: Uncategorized
January
01
The 2023 Nerdies: Middle Grade Fiction announced by Colby Sharp
posted by Colby Sharp
One of my favorite Christmas gifts each year is an email from Doanlyn Miller that contains the winners of the Nerdy Book Club’s Middle Grade Fiction winners. She’s sent me the list each year for more than a decade, so that I can put together this post. The first thing I do is count how […]
December
29
The 2023 Nerdies: Early Readers and Chapter Books Announced by Alyson Beecher
posted by donalynm
Have you ever tried to guess what books would make it to the Nerdies in a particular category? It can be hard. For the Early Readers and Chapter Book category, there was a time that would be very easy to guess possible titles. It seemed like the same authors and the same series were being […]
September
12
WRITING INVINCIBLE, FATHERS & MOTHERS OF BLACK AMERICA by Wade Hudson
posted by CBethM
When I was growing up in the Jim Crow South, I knew very little about the history of Black People. There were bits and pieces of information in school, but nothing really substantial. Books about Black history and culture were very scarce in our school library. On the other hand, I heard stories from elders […]
April
19
A Conversation About Community | Ask Nerdy
posted by Colby Sharp
In the latest episode of the Ask Nerdy Podcast, Donalyn Miller and Colby Sharp start a conversation about reading communities. They share their memories from early reading communities that they were a part of before the conversation moves to the importance of reading communities, and their experiences with reading communities in their classrooms. You can […]
April
05
Pepita Meets Bebita: How This Mother/Son Picture Book Came to Be by Ruth Behar and Gabriel Frye-Behar
posted by CBethM
We started writing the first draft of Pepita Meets Bebita just three weeks after Gabriel’s first daughter and Ruth’s first granddaughter, Mila, was born in New York on the last day of Hanukkah in 2020. With our family gathered to celebrate (and help with the new baby!), we noticed how Eloise, who had been the “baby,” or the “bebita,” of […]
March
15
On Visual Learners by Aaron Becker
posted by CBethM
It’s perhaps a testament to just how incredibly disruptive the pandemic has been to our sense of time that when I was told I’d written a post for the Nerdy Book club, I actually had no memory of ever doing so. A quick search pulled it up (August 2016) and what a joy it was […]
March
09
The Books My Fifth Graders are Reading as we Beg for Spring by Colby Sharp
posted by Colby Sharp
Hey, Nerdy friends! It has been a minute since I checked in the on the blog to share the books my fifth graders are reading. We’ve had a bit of an interesting last few weeks here in Michigan. We had a very late arriving winter, and now that it is here, it doesn’t seem to […]
January
30
Congratulations to the ALA Youth Media Awards Winners
posted by Colby Sharp
The American Library Association’s Youth Media Awards just might be the most exciting day in children’s literature. You can find a list of the winners here. We’d love to know in the comments which books you are adding to your to-read list. After the awards were announced Donalyn Miller and Colby Sharp recorded a conversation […]
January
09
What 2023 books are you most excited to read? by Colby Sharp
posted by Colby Sharp
I had a blast adding books to my to-read list from December 26-January 3 during the Nerdy Book Club awards season. If you haven’t checked out the list, be sure to go back and check out those posts here on the Nerdy blog. I still have a stack of 2022 books that I need to […]
Nerdy Book Club 