Middle Grade

Looking for short middle-grade novels?

Allison Tait
·
May 16, 2024
Looking for short middle-grade novels?

“Uplifting middle-grade reads” “Middle-grade novels featuring netball” “Middle-grade romance” “Stellar non-fiction middle-grade reads” These are just some of the posts about middle-grade reads from the Your Kid’s Next Read Facebook community. In fact, requests for and recommendations of middle-grade novels make up a good proportion of chat in the group, which is no surprise when you consider that around 40 per cent of respondents in our last* community survey have young readers aged 10-13.

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Diversity in book collections

Allison Tait
·
March 4, 2024
Diversity in book collections

Diversity in children’s literature has been a hot topic in recent months and, with Harmony Week taking place this month (18-24 March, 2024), it’s a good time to think about the range of stories on offer in our home and school libraries. A good starting point might be

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Our favourite reads of 2023

Allison Tait
·
December 19, 2023
Our favourite reads of 2023

TeamYKNR would like to wish all of our subscribers a very happy (and very peaceful) festive break! 2023 has been a (long and) productive year for us – between us we’ve: •published nine books, •spoken at countless events, •participated in key industry research,

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Bonus Bookmark Reviews

Allison Tait
·
December 13, 2023
Bonus Bookmark Reviews

If you’ve listened to this week’s episode of Your Kid’s Next Read podcast, you will have heard TeamYKNR discussing our favourite reads of 2023. We were supposed to narrow it down to ten each – but that proved an impossible task for our resident Celebrity Teacher Librarian Megan Daley.

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Your Kid's Favourite Read 2023

Allison Tait
·
December 4, 2023
Your Kid's Favourite Read 2023

Every year we gather the Your Kid’s Next Read community together and ask them a question – what was your kid’s favourite read this year? And then we make lists. Lots and lots of lists. The kind of lists that make festive season gift-buying much, much easier, no matter which young reader you might be buying for.

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How do readers grow into writers?

Allison Tait
·
November 15, 2023
How do readers grow into writers?

Have you ever wondered what it is that turns a reader into a writer? How do authors go from consuming stories (at frantic pace, in many cases) to creating our own for others to read? It’s a question I often think about, so I decided to find out by asking a range of Australia’s best children’s authors to think about the building blocks of their journey into writing.

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The best kid's book series you've never read

Allison Tait
·
November 5, 2023
The best kid's book series you've never read

Is there a children’s book series that you love – but which no-one else ever seems to have heard of? Something that you think should get way MORE attention than it does? For Megan Daley and Allison Tait, it’s the Miss Penny Dreadful series by the third member of #TeamYKNR, Allison Rushby.

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The best book I've read lately

Allison Tait
·
October 11, 2023
The best book I've read lately

Over nearly 125 episodes, the ‘10 minutes with’ segment on the Your Kid’s Next Read podcast has feature an incredible range of authors, from international bestsellers to international award-winners, from first timers to the well established. In each interview, Allison cuts to the heart of an author’s new book, bringing the time-poor YKNR audience right to the essence of what makes that author special.

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