Education - Children's Literature in the Classroom

Children's Literature in the Classroom

The Children's Literature Comprehensive Database is a fantastic place to search for children's literature by reading level, category, or genre.  UVic Libraries doesn't have every book included in the database, but we do have a lot.  Once you find some books in CLCD, then search by title in the UVic catalogue.

Storybooks Canada is "a free open educational resource that promotes literacy and language learning in homes, schools and communities."  

Indigenous Storybooks is an open educational resource making levelled-texts available in Indigenous languages.

There are many resources available to teachers that provide guidance on how to critically and effectively evaluate children's literature and learning resources generally.  Here are a few to get you started:

• K-12 Evaluated Resource Collection created by Focused Education Resources (formerly ERAC)
• Focused Education Resources Criteria and Guidelines
  • Social considerations rationale document

    • Age; gender roles, identity and sexual orientation; Indigenous peoples; multiculturalism; ability/disability; belief system; socio-economic; violence; ethical and legal; humour; safety; language.

  • Five Best Practices: Consider whether learning resources chosen for use in schools and classrooms:
    1. support the B.C. curriculum
    2. are developmentally and age appropriate
    3. have effective instructional and technical design
    4. meet the requirements set by copyright and privacy legislation
    5. are suitable based on social considerations
  • OpenSchoolBC's Online Course: Selecting Learning Resources for the Classroom:
    1. Module 1 – Discover the Learning Resource Selection Model
    2. Module 2 – Check Reliable Resources
    3. Module 3 – Learning Resource Selection Criteria
    4. Module 4 – Make Your Decision
• Learning First Peoples Classroom Resources by the First Nations Education Steering Committee
• Teacher Resource lists from the Greater Victoria School District (SD61) Indigenous Education Department
• British Columbia Ministry of Education learning resource policy
• Resource Evaluation Criteria Form Langley School District (SD35)
• Learning Resources policy for the Surrey School District (SD36)
• Learning Resource Evaluation Guide by the Saskatchewan Ministry of Education
• The BC Educational Resource Acquisition Consortium's (ERAC) 2008 document Evaluating, Selecting, and Acquiring Learning Resources: A Guide 
• Learning for a Sustainable Future's Resources for Rethinking review tool
• Common Sense Education's Educator pages and Selections for Learning

If you are taking EDCI 330 in the January to April 2022 term, you will learn how to evaluate learning resources within the context of BC's curriculum.  Here is a library tutorial on how to do this and how to find related resources within UVic Libraries' collection.  By the end of this video, you will have been introduced to the following:

1. How to use the Focused Education K-12 resource collection including commonly applied evaluation criteria
2. How some school districts in BC guide their teachers to evaluate resources independently
3. How to find high-quality Indigenous education resources that consider the authors' own voices and lived experiences
4. How to apply advanced search refinements to locate children's fiction and non-fiction resources by using databases such as the Children's Literature Comprehensive Database
5. How to locate specific resources within UVic's holdings by searching by title and author
6. How to seek further help from your subject librarian