B: Best kid-lit Blogs

First off, for a ton of great blogs about kids' books,  check out the Kid Lit Blog Hop on the first and third Wednesdays of each month.

 That's where I've found many of the great kid-lit blogs I check into regularly.

Start with the founder: Mother-Daughter Book Reviews
The Geo Librarian is an elementary-school librarian with lots of great books to share.
Julie Grasso writes When I Grow Up I Wanna Write a Kid's Book
Kid Lit Reviews
Jemima Pett, who writes lovely middle grade fiction about a pair of hamsters. . .
Katie at Youth Lit Reviews has a really fun feature called "Friday Five" and is currently taking us on a walk through favorite books from decades past.

Those are the main kid-lit blogs I track.  But every time we do the kid lit hop, I find another blog or two, so do check it out and see what gems you can find.

Finally, if you haven't already, join the discussion at the "Great Middle Grades Reads" group at Goodreads.com, and ask a whole lot of parents and writers (most of whom are also parents) what might work to get your kid reading!

Announcing the A to Z challenge

Okay,  I've done it.  Signed up for the A to Z challenge, along with a couple thousand other bloggers.  Six days a week for four weeks, more or less.  Why?  To see if I can, mostly.

What is the Challenge?  A kind of cool idea thought up by Arlee Bird--and a big thank-you to our Challenge founder!  Basically, the Challenge is a public commitment to blog every day but Sunday in April, which gives you 26 days--one for each letter of the alphabet (click here to learn more).  To make it more fun, and maybe even a little easier in some ways, you make each post somehow relate to the letter assigned that day.  Today being the First, the letter is A, thus the Annunciation.

Many bloggers choose a theme, and I wanted to do that, but still keep it to something that matches what I usually do here.  So my theme is "reading and writing."  Pretty much the theme all the time.  I'll still have the Kid Lit Blog Hop on the 1st and 3rd Wednesdays, and I'll get the Progressive Book Club out within a day or so of the target, on "P".

And at the end of the month,  I hope that I will have proven to myself that I can write a little more every day (I'm not letting myself off the hook for the 300 words new text and 5 pages of editing that I set as my minimum) and still get the meals cooked and laundry done.  And maybe I'll scare up (as opposed to scaring off) a few more followers.

I've laid out a plan, with a few things you can expect:
--Kidlit reviews on Wednesdays
--Favorite mystery authors on Mondays
--Flash Fiction Fridays (or Saturdays, depending on a few things like what posts fit what letters best).
--Progressive Book Club will be a day late again, so it lands on "P"
--utter chaos by the end of the month

And a special bonus note that Jemima Pett is doing a big give-away of children's books, including an e-copy of The Ninja Librarian (with a review to come on the 13th, L for Librarian).  Check it all out with her adorable guinea pigs, Fred and George, from her Princelings of the East series!