The staff here at A Kids Book A Day will be camping for a week.  In the A Kids Book A Day family, “camping” means sleeping in tents, and does not–some would say, unfortunately–involve any sort of generation of electricity.  So blog postings will be suspended for the duration.  We will return to our regularly scheduled programming next Monday.

A little personal history:  a few weeks after starting this blog in 2015, I separated with my husband and moved out of my house with my two daughters.  We’ve lived in an apartment for a little over a year.  Six months later, I started a new job 60 miles away in western Massachusetts.  I stayed in the apartment to let my younger daughter finish high school.  In April, I closed on a house, and today is moving day.  It’s been an eventful year to say the least.  I’m not sure what my Internet status will be for the next few days, so I’m taking a bit of a vacation, and hope to be back later this week.

A year ago today, I started A Kids Book a Day with a review of the aptly titled A Wonderful Year by Nick Bruel. This morning I published post #365, making it truly a kids’ book a day for a full year!  So what do you think?  Have the reviews been helpful to you?  Anything you’d like to see different for year 2?  Leave me a birthday comment!

You may think it’s the end of January, but here in Kid’s Book a Day land, it’s New Year’s Eve.  Some of you keen-eyed blog readers might have noticed that last night I changed the year in the subtitle from 2015 to 2016.  Starting tomorrow, all books reviewed will be published in 2016.  Here’s hoping for as many wonderful books as we saw in 2015!

Here’s the link to this year’s winners.  The Newbery winner was a total surprise to me!  What do you think of the selections?

http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/american-library-association-announces-2016-youth-media-award-winners-300202055.html

I’ve recently finished adding categories to all the book review posts.  You can see the categories on the right-hand side of the screen (you may need to scroll down).  If you click on a category, you will get all the books I’ve reviewed from that genre.  This suggestion came from a reader.  Please let me know if there are other ways I can make this blog more helpful or easier to use!

I’m very excited to be starting this blog!  I’m a school librarian at two elementary schools, and for the last year or so, I’ve been writing a weekly book review for teachers there.  Every week I find there are more books to review than can fit in a weekly email, so I’ve decided to start this blog with the goal of posting a new book review every day!  All the books I review will be brand new, published in 2015.

I’d like to review books in all different genres and for different grade levels.  In case you’re looking for something specific, and you don’t want to have to check every day, I’ll have a few days of the week when I always do the same genre.  They will be:

• Middle Grade Monday – Chapter books recommended for grades 4-6
• Third Grade Thursday – Early chapter books, good for grades 2 and 3 (nothing against second grade, it’s just that Third Grade Thursday is a little more alliterative!)
• Factual Friday – Nonfiction!
• Story time Sunday – Read-aloud picture books, mostly for the primary grades

The other days of the week will be a mix of all of the above.

I usually write reviews with teachers in mind, but I’d love to spread the word to parents and anyone else who enjoys children’s books.  Please feel free to pass on a link to this blog to anyone you know that may be interested!