Magazines for the Library

Greetings!

Do you enjoy reading a good magazine? Most of us do. Even people who don’t read much will often pick up a magazine a browse through. Magazines are full of short items, and not as intimidating as a thick book would be. They are great for kids especially if the magazine is on their reading level and full of interesting information. If you library does not have any magazines, consider subscribing to a few. Now I suppose you are going to ask me which ones to subscribe to! I would be happy to tell you that you need to have these magazines in your library, but that may not actually be true. I think each library is different enough that you may have needs and interests that another school may not have. If I didn’t have any magazines in my library, I would ask the students which magazines they are interested in. Then I would take their interests in mind when choosing magazines for the school. The following is a list of magazines that we get here at Rogers for our student population and interests. I know it looks like a lot, but nearly all of them are read. We process magazines like a book and students check them out like a book.

American Girl
Appleseeds
Ask
Cobblestone *
Consumer Reports
Current Health Teens *
Current Science
Dig
Faces *
Kids Discover *
Kiki
Model Airplane News
Model Railroader
Motocross Action
Mountain Bike Action
National Geographic
National Geographic Kids *
Odyssey
Popular Science
Radio Control Car Action
Ranger Rick *
Choices
Ski
Sports Illustrated for Kids

Since money is tight for us all, think about getting one science magazine, one health magazine, and one nature magazine. The Current Health Teens (grades 5 – 8) and Current Science (grades 5 – 8) are both from Weekly Reader and are quality periodicals. If you have kids who are interested in archaeology, get Dig (grades 5 – 8) from the Cobblestone Group. Cobblestone (grades 4 – 9) is a great option for American History, and Faces (grades 4 – 9; also from Cobblestone Group) is about people and places. We have copies of these from the 1980’s and they are great supplemental materials for the curriculum. The Cobblestone Group also has Ask (primary grades) and Odyssey (upper grades) which are both science magazines for different age levels. The Cobblestone Group generally takes a theme for each issue and is great at sending sample issues for you to look at when you request them. If you get a sample of Cricket, keep in mind that very often the themes are ‘Ghosts, Wizards, magic, Dragons’, trolls orother themes that we might not feel is appropriate for our schools.

There may be families in your school or church congregation who subscribe to National Geographic and would be willing to donate their copy after they are finished reading it. This is how we get it. Our issues arrive late, but we don’t mind. Maybe someone gets Popular Science and would donate it, or a family might pay for a subscription to one of the magazines for you.

You probably noticed the asterisk by several of the magazines. These are ones that I feel are important for the curriculum and would be a good purchase. You may have noticed that I did not include Winner or Listen in this list. Those are obvious choices, so I assumed that you would already know about them and have them. I did include the Current Health Teens, since it includes many of the same points that Listen and Winner do, but not from an Adventist viewpoint. It is like having the public support our health message.

I hope you have some wonderful magazines for your students to read and learn from. Assign a magazine for a ‘book report’ one month and see what happens.
Have a great week,
Audrey