Yoo Kyung Sung, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM, Junko Sakoi, Tucson Unified School District, Tucson, AZ

Today, there is a growing number of quality and newly published children’s and young adult literature available in audiobook and ebook formats through various online educational platforms such as Epic, Storyline Online, and PBS KIDS. Also, many stories are read aloud by educators and book authors and uploaded to YouTube. Jacqueline Woodson reads aloud her book The Day You Begin, Minh Le reads aloud his book Drawn Together, and Kevin Henkes reads aloud Kitten’s First Full Moon.

There are several companies that provide audiobooks and ebooks. Audible is an audiobook and podcast service owned by Amazon.com Inc. Sora and Libby are free apps where we can borrow audiobooks and ebooks from our local public libraries and read and/or listen to stories on smartphones, tablets, and desktops anytime and anywhere. Sora and Libby are available in ten different languages, in addition to English, including simplified Chinese, traditional Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Russian, Spanish, and Swedish. Sora and Libby are great instructional tools. They allow readers to make notes, highlight words, add bookmarks, change text size, turn on dyslexic fonts, and view readers’ own reading progress. Books are downloadable so readers can read them while offline. Teachers can assign books to students to read and monitor their reading progress as well.

During the school closure due to the COVID-19 pandemic, these were critical teaching and learning resources for children, teens, families, and educators at the Tucson Unified School District, Tucson AZ, I (Junko) am working for. Our district used Sora to encourage students and teachers to access audiobooks and ebooks. Sora allowed them to borrow books from the district’s digital collection as well as our local public libraries. Many books are available in different languages in Sora so it was a great help with many of our students from diverse linguistic backgrounds. After all came back to school, audiobooks, ebooks, and read-aloud stories available online are becoming “new normal” resources in the classroom. I have seen the positive impacts of them in and out of the school context. Especially the students who are digital natives are motivated to read. For more information about Sora, please visit the Sora YouTube Channel and OverDrive Resource Center.

This is a list of books that are available both in audio and ebook formats in Sora that our district developed to share with Grades 6-8 teachers and students. Unifying concepts and themes and topics of our district curriculum maps, reading interest and lexile levels, teaching guides for each title, and Arizona State Standards (ELA) are added to the list. This helps teachers with incorporating audiobooks and ebooks into teaching.

• 6.RL.2. Determine a theme or central idea of a text and how it is conveyed through particular details; provide a summary of the text distinct from personal opinions or judgments.
• 7 RL.6. Analyze how an author develops and contrasts the points of view of different characters or narrators in a text.
• 8.RL.6 Analyze how differences in the points of view of the characters and the audience or reader (e.g., created through the use of dramatic irony) create such effects as suspense or humor.

Journey through Worlds of Words during our open reading hours: Monday-Friday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. To view our complete offerings of WOW Currents, please visit its archival stream.

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• Themes: Junko Sakoi, Yoo Kyung Sung
• Descriptors: Books & Resources, WOW Currents