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Congratulations to Stephanie Taylor, who is the winner of our 1,000th Post Draw. Stephanie wins a 2010 Spirit of PaperTigers book set. Thank you to everyone who entered – I wish we had book sets for you all. We so appreciate your support of PaperTigers and were delighted to hear from so many readers. In all, there were 93 entries. We allotted each entry a number and below you can see Aline pulling out the winning number 24.

Don’t forget to take a look at our 1,000th post, with the chance of winning a Spirit of PaperTigers 2010 book set. This fabulous set of seven books contains:

Planting The Trees of Kenya: The Story of Wangari Maathai by Claire A. Nivola Frances (Foster Books, 2008);

First Come the Zebra by Lynne Barash (Lee & Low, 2009);

Little Leap Forward: A Boy in Beijing by Guo Yue and Clare Farrow, illustrated by Helen Cann (Barefoot Books, 2008);

The Storyteller’s Candle/La velita de los cuentos by Lucia Gonzalez, illustrated by Lulu Delacre (Children’s Book Press, 2008);

My Little Round House by Bolormaa Baasansuren, English adaptation by Helen Mixter (Groundwood Books, 2009);

One Hen: How One Small Loan Made a Big Difference by Katie Smith Milway, illustrated by Eugenie Fernandes (Kids Can Press, 2008);

Where The Mountain Meets The Moon by Grace Lin (Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, 2009).

You can enter the draw for yourself – and/or you can nominate a school or library anywhere in the world where you would like the books to go to: just let us know.  But hurry as the deadline for entries is midnight PST, Wednesday 19 January. The draw will take place in San Francisco on Thursday 20 January and shortly after we’ll announce the winner here on the blog! Stay tuned!

Having just finished reading Bamboo People,  I was excited to see this email in my inbox today from Primary Source, a non-profit organization that promotes history and humanities education by connecting educators to people and cultures throughout the world:

Global Read of Bamboo People by Mitali Perkins

You are invited to join us for a discussion of the young adult novel, Bamboo People, by Mitali Perkins — a compelling coming-of-age story about child soldiers in modern Burma. The online discussion forum will begin tomorrow – Wednesday, January 12th. Then join the author for a live chat on January 19th.

Online discussion forum: January 12th-19th, 2011
Live chat session with the author: Wednesday, January 19, 3:00 p.m. – 4:00 p.m. EST

Register online here (registration is free but participants are responsible for obtaining their own copy of the book). All are welcome – teachers, students, parents, and anyone interested in global issues!

I’m off to register now and hope that some of our PaperTigers readers will join me!

P.S. Don’t forget to take a look at our 1,000th post, with the chance of winning a Spirit of PaperTigers 2010 book set. The deadline for entries is midnight Pacific Standard Time, on Wednesday 19 January with the draw taking placing in San Francisco on Thursday 20 January.

1000 posts ago, this blog was created for a conversation between two people. It was about our reading journeys as we attempted to have read the Newbery. We didn't have a blogroll back then because we barely knew how to link.

After about six months, we joined the larger Kidlitosphere conversation and our blogroll started to grow.

When stories about how we use books in our classrooms started to seep into our blogging, we began to read and be read by teacher and librarian blogs. Our blogroll grew and the conversation about books and reading included a wider audience.

We found that we could listen in on lots of Mock Newbery and Caldecott Conversations including those run by past Newbery Committee members.

As we look to the future of our blog and our teaching, we are beginning to explore ways to expand our understanding of literacy. We are thinking about what it means to be literate in the 21st century and how to expand our thinking to include things beyond books in our own and our students' reading lives. We are (kind of) learning to Twitter. Our blogroll will continue to grow and we will do our best to take part in conversations where we sometimes only understand 50% of the words! We love the fact that people come together in ways they couldn't before blogging. We've learned so much from people who we weren't able to learn from before (librarians, authors, journal editors, etc.)

We've made so many new friends over the two years. We have started to get together with old and new blogger friends in Columbus to chat about books and to shop for new books!

We really had no idea what we were doing when we started this blog (Franki, even less than Mary Lee). But after 1000 posts, we are still loving it and can't wait to see what we learn next!