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Books BC announces its 2024-25 Books for Schools program and online database for K-12 educators
October 16th, 2024
The Association of Book Publishers of British Columbia (Books BC) is excited to announce the 2024-25 edition of our Books for Schools database. Books for Schools helps BC and Canadian publishers to effectively reach the K-12 market while providing teachers, teacher-librarians, other educators, and booksellers in BC and Canada with a free community resource to find suitable and appropriate books for the K-12 audience.
Our BC Books for Schools and Indigenous Books for Schools collections have been long-standing initiatives of the Association since 2007. BC Books for Schools comprises BC-published titles, and Indigenous Books for Schools includes Canadian-published titles by Indigenous creators. Both collections are now available as a combined database on BooksForSchools.ca supported by enhanced search functionality and accessibility for users. The database is updated annually, with a total of 324 titles in the BC Books for Schools collection and 260 titles in the Indigenous Books for Schools collection so far.
“We are incredibly proud of the evolution of this book program, which began as print catalogues mailed to every school in BC and has now become a free searchable database. It’s the easiest way to find BC books for BC students, as recommended by BC teachers and with links to curriculum,” says Leslie Bootle, Executive Director of Books BC, of the BC Books for Schools program.
The titles are selected and evaluated by qualified K-12 educators from BC, and annotations include a descriptive review, grade level and curriculum matches, and theme mapping. The titles in the Indigenous Books for Schools collection undergo an additional evaluation for authentic Indigenous Voice, an evaluation process developed by the program’s lead education consultant Jackie Lever based on Dr. Greg Younging’s Elements of Indigenous Style.
Books BC would like to thank our funders for their continued support of this program, in particular the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund, the Canada Council for the Arts, Creative BC, and the City of Vancouver.
Learn more about the database and our unique evaluation process and find hundreds of evaluated K-12 books at BooksForSchools.ca.