Showing posts with label Nerdy Book Club. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Nerdy Book Club. Show all posts

Friday, December 29, 2017

Poetry Friday -- Nerdy Poetry and Novel in Verse Winners



I wrote the post, but I didn't pick the winners...READERS did! Congratulations to all of the winners, and the rest of you -- hold onto your credit card because you will want every single one of these for your classroom, school, or home library!

Heidi has this week's Poetry Friday roundup at my juicy little universe.

Happy Reading!! Happy Poetry!! Happy Poetry Friday!! Happy New Year!!

Sunday, December 30, 2012

2012 Nerdies: The Poetry Winners


ANNOUNCING THE 2012 POETRY NERDIES

Light Verse,
Incredibly Diverse,

Apologies,
Honey Bees,

Contemplation,
Rumination.

Best six:
Classics


* ~~ * ~~ * ~~ * ~~ * ~~ * ~~ *

Head on over to the Nerdy Book Club blog for the details!








Thursday, December 13, 2012

Nerdy Book Club Post

If you are looking for some great YA books to read over the holidays, Katherine Sokolowski and I have a list up at Nerdy Book Club today called Top Ten YA Books That Are Worth Reading EVEN If You Are Uncomfortable with Kissing in Books. Enjoy!

Saturday, December 01, 2012

Happy Birthday #nerdybookclub !!!

Happy Birthday to the Nerdy Book Club! We can't imagine life without NBC so we wanted to thank the founders by celebrating with a dance. Who knows, maybe someday we'll become Nerdy Dance Club....
Thanks Donalyn, Colby and Cindy!


Saturday, March 24, 2012

Nerdy Book Club Post

I have a new post up at THE NERDY BOOK CLUB about the 10 Classic Professional Books I can't live without.  I am cross posting the piece here:-)

Well-Worn and Well-Loved:  Ten Classic Professional Books I Cannot Live Without


One wall in my “office” is filled with professional books.  From floor to ceiling, the shelves are filled with the books that have helped me learn to teach thoughtfully. I have been reading professional books throughout my career. I have hundreds and hundreds of books that have impacted my thinking. I have been lucky to learn from amazing people over the years and I learn something new every time I revisit an old favorite.

In the last several years, I have noticed I’ve purchased fewer professional books. I am reading more professionally, but much of my professional reading is online. So in a cleaning frenzy a few weeks ago, I decided to weed out some of my oldest professional books.   I have been teaching for twenty-five years so I figured I could weed almost every book published before 2000 to keep my professional library current.  I have so many books and so many that I read years and years ago, I figured that this would be an easy job.

But, the job was not so easy.  While browsing the shelves, certain books triggered a feeling of transformation-books that changed who I was as a teacher   Below are ten classics that I could not part with, even though they were all published prior to the year 2000. Even though I have newer editions of most off the titles, it was the original reading that made a difference for me.  These classics set the stage for what we understand about literacy learning and teaching.  So many of my big understandings come from these foundational books. These are the books that reground me, reenergize me and remind me of all the reasons I became a teacher to begin with.

This is in no way a conclusive list.  But it is an important one to me. Consider this my “oldies” playlist of professional books—the learning that is playing around in my head every time I work with children.

1983

 Writing: Teachers and Children at Work by Donald Graves was one of the first books that took teachers inside classrooms to let us know what was possible. I didn’t read this until I graduated from college but Graves’ work was the work that created huge changes in classroom writing programs.  It was a great time to start teaching and this book laid the groundwork for my thinking about writing process.

1987

I had been teaching 1st grade for three years when I asked to be moved to 4th grade.  I was excited about the change and had heard about the book (first edition) In the Middle by Nancie Atwell and was excited about the whole idea of workshop. The summer before I started teaching 4th grade, I was pregnant with our first daughter. My husband had a summer job delivering pizzas. I remember laying on the couch with a bag of Doritos and reading In the Middle over and over.  That summer, I created a vision of an intermediate workshop classroom all because of this book.

1988

I was able to attend the Teacher’s College Writing Project and learn from Lucy Calkins for ten days in 1991. But I was a total fan by the time I attended, having read everything she wrote cover to cover, over and over again. Lucy’s work helped us listen to children and to be thoughtful about everything we did.  The Art of Teaching Writing by Lucy Calkins was packed with new thinking.

1990

Ralph Peterson was a huge influence for me. His book Grand Conversations was one that helped me see the power of books and student conversations. It was one of the first books that helped me to see what could happen if students were in charge of their own understandings and conversations. It was a short book, but packed with thinking about the importance of talk and ownership.

1992

I learned a great deal from the staff at The Manhattan New School. I learned through visits, workshops and their writing. The schoolwas amazing and the staff was generous in sharing all that they learned.  A book that changed my teaching was Shelley Harwayne’s Lasting Impressions: Weaving Literature Into the Writing Workshop.  I have always been a huge children’s literature person and this book helped me see the power of children’s literature for writers.

1992

 What a Writer Needs by Ralph Fletcher is a book that opened up so many possibilities for me as a teacher of writing. The ways that Fletcher showed us, as readers, how to look at text with a writer’s eye was key to what we do today.  This was the first book that that helped me “read like a writer”.

1993

The work of Howard Gardner and Harvard’s Project Zero has been instrumental in who I am as a teacher today. Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences. As with all of Gardner’s work, this book taught me strategies for getting to know the whole child and to build on each child’s strengths.

1996

A Workshop of the Possible: Nurturing Children’s Creative Development by Ruth Shagoury Hubbard is one of my favorite books ever. It takes a look at the creative process with young children and takes us into a classroom where children’s thinking is the key to the way in which the community works.  I learned how much you could learn and how much better you can teach if you really listen to children and their thinking.

1996
In the Company of Children by Joanne Hindley was another book from the staff at the Manhattan New School that showed us the daily life in a workshop classroom. In this book, Hindley shared the routines and structures that made her reading and writing workshops so successful. This was one of the first books I read that focused solely on those transitional readers in Grades 3 and 4.

1999

 Living the Questions by Brenda Power and Ruth Shagory taught me to teach, as with questions in mind and that the research I did in my classroom mattered. This book help to make clear for me that a research-based stance to teaching was important for me.

So, .  I wasn’t totally successful at weeding my shelves.  But the process was an enlightening one. I could see, on one wall, the influences of my teaching life. I could see the power of professional reading and the power of learning from others.  My professional reading over the last 25 years has definitely impacted my practice.

Wednesday, December 14, 2011

Nerdy Book Club

(This post is cross-posted on the Nerdy Book Club blog, and is part of an ongoing series of confessionals/testimonials/proclamations by members of the NBC -- the Nerdy Book Club.)


My name is Mary Lee Hahn, and I’m a member of the Nerdy Book Club. I could tell you the entire story of my membership, from my bookish childhood to the present, but instead, let’s pretend there’s a bookmark in my story and let’s open to one particular spot. Let’s start with last week.

Last week I finished listening to Monsters of Men in the Chaos Walking series.

If you are a member of the Nerdy Book Club, the above sentence will tell you volumes (pun intended) about me. You can empathize with the emotional rollercoaster Patrick Ness has taken me on over the past few months as I listened to all three books in the Chaos Walking series. You’ll know exactly when I cried, and you’ll know what moral and philosophical issues we could talk about into the night.

Two of the readers I most admire in the world recommended this series to me, and recommendations are one of the hallmarks of the NBC – if it weren’t for the joys of convincing another reader to fall in love with our (new or long-beloved) favorite books, there would be no CLUB in the Nerdy Book Club. Not only do we read, we talk about books, blog about books, and tweet about books. Now that I’ve completed Ness’ series, I’m connected to those two readers (and all the NBC readers who’ve read the series) in deep and complicated ways. We share a reading history.

Books build connections between readers and readers build connections between books. After finishing Monsters of Men, I needed to listen to a book that would heal my soul. On my Audible.com bookshelf was Charlotte’s Web, read by E.B. White – the perfect antidote for a dystopian future on a fictional planet: the cycle of life and friendship, anchored in the concrete details of Zuckerman’s farm. That’s another benefit of membership in the NBC: the knowledge that books can heal us. And did you notice what kind of shelf I went to in order to find my next read? It was my audio shelf. As a card-carrying member of the NBC, I have many shelves for my books: audio, e-book, poetry, cookbooks, adult, professional, and classroom, to name a few.

Not only do I have shelves, I have piles. Most NBC members do. There’s a To-Be-Read pile…and another, and another and another.



Time to stop writing and read. I finished Charlotte’s Web today, and I’ve already downloaded my next listen – Caleb’s Crossing by Geraldine Brooks. Now…which TBR pile should I tackle…


Mary Lee Hahn teaches 4th grade in Dublin, OH. She has belonged to the Nerdy Book Clubs know as the Cybils (she’s a round two poetry judge this year), the NCTE Notables, and the Central Ohio Kidlitosphere Bloggers. Ten years ago she wrote Reconsidering Read-Aloud. These days she blogs with Franki SIbberson at A Year of Reading, and writes occasionally for Choice Literacy.