Showing posts with label books. Show all posts
Showing posts with label books. Show all posts

Tuesday, February 19, 2019

The Art of Reading, Lost or Otherwise



AJ recommends lots of books that we both know might wait years before I get a chance to read them. But when he slid this small trim size, 150-page book across the table, I decided to give it a go. I'm glad I did.

It took me about 50 pages to get past his description of a reading life that is nothing like mine, and which made me feel more than a tad inferior. But then he got to some big points.
"We come to books (or at least, I do) to see beneath the cover story, to be challenged and confounded, made to question our assumptions, even as the writers we read are compelled to question their own. 
What does that mean? On the one hand, it's an argument for nuance, for the role of narrative as a mechanism to confront the chaos, to frame a set of possible interpretations while acknowledging that these could shift at any time. Yet even more essential, I would argue, it's a call to engage. Stories, after all--whether aesthetic or political--require sustained concentration..."
Ulin defines reading as an act of creativity that requires sustained concentration, which, in a world of "endless information," has become harder and harder to maintain.

"Technology is rewiring the neurology of our brains," but we shouldn't be too alarmed by this. It's been happening since the first symbols were carved into clay. We need to remember that Gutenberg shifted the world of reading only about 600 years ago. Ulin quotes Jane Smiley, from 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel when he gets to the heart of what should worry us about the loss of book readers,
"When we talk about the death of the novel, what we are really talking about is the possibility that empathy, however minimal, would no longer be attainable by those for whom the novel has died...If the novel dies, or never lives, for children and teenagers who spend their time watching TV or playing video games, then they will always be somewhat mystified by others, and by themselves as well."
Ulin sees reading as "an act of resistance in a landscape of distraction, a matter of engagement in a society that seems to want nothing more than for us to disengage...We regain the world by withdrawing from it just a little...."

Pretty heady stuff, and all of it a hard sell for my fifth graders. I have one foot back in the world of no Internet; they have both feet fully planted in the world of distraction. Luckily, at the same time I started reading The Lost Art of Reading, a book I had on reserve at the library came in.


This gorgeously illustrated book is filled with over 100 letters to young readers describing the joys of books and reading. Perhaps a couple of these read each day to my students will help them to see the breadth and depths of what books and story can mean to a person.

The Universe didn't decide to stop there in making me think hard about the meaning of reading and books in this time of distraction. When I finished Ulin's book, I picked up the January/February Horn Book Magazine and found Uma Krishnaswami's article, "Why Stop at Windows and Mirrors?: Children's Book Prisms."
"A prism can slow and bend the light that passes through it, splitting that light into its component colors. It can refract light in as many directions as the prism’s shape and surface planes allow. Similarly, books can disrupt and challenge ideas about diversity through multifaceted and intersecting identities, settings, cultural contexts, and histories. They can place diverse characters at these crucial intersections and give them the power to reframe their stories. Through the fictional world, they can make us question the assumptions and practices of our own real world."
Then, just a few more pages into the Horn Book issue, I found Grace Lin's article, "Speak with Us, Not for Us."
"What diversity needs is not white authors to write heroes of a minority race, but rather for them to redefine the white hero. We need authors to create white characters who are (or are learning to become) socially aware and who fight alongside people of color, without being saviors, and we need authors who know how to do the same."
Okay, Universe. I hear you loud and clear. It's worth it to keep trying to fall my students in love with books and reading, even though it feels like I am swimming against an impossible tide of technology and distraction. A Velocity of Being will help me with this. It is still worth it to provide books that are windows and mirrors and sliding glass doors, but I will also look for more prisms. And I'll cheer on not just the #ownvoices authors, but also the white authors who are working to redefine the white hero.


Friday, January 19, 2018

Poetry Friday -- Sorrow and Joy



After 25 years of business, our favorite local independent (secondhand and antiquarian) bookstore, Acorn Bookshop, is succumbing to the pressures of bookstore chains and Amazon. To give you a sense of the loss that many in the community are feeling, here's a poem (not by me) that George shared on the Acorn Facebook page:

The following poem was written by one of the Acorn family of friends/customers.

NOT AN ACORN FALLETH

Not an acorn falleth, but our God doth know,
Even when e-commerce lays a bookstore low;
Seeds are scattered ‘round the earth, bookstore-ies are set free.
What once was just a mortal nut is now immortal tree.
Far more precious surely than the books that fly
Off the shelves are people who all came in to buy,
Or chat with George or Christine or other Acorn kind
‘Bout every sort of history or author on their mind.
Then off they’d go to browse around; such treasures to behold.
A myst’ry why there’s any left; so many you have sold!
Remember all your book fans as you turn the page;
for memories grow more precious as they come of age.
Though pages now are numbered; dust each off and see,
How many hearts you’ve gladdened; The acorn’s now a tree.

An Acornista

(with apologies to Louisa May Alcott)


Last summer when I did a fairly massive clean-and-purge, I sold a bunch of books to Acorn and so we had a sizable amount of store credit. I was looking forward to working with George and Jack to build my collection of signed editions by U.S. Poets Laureate. When they announced the closing, they didn't have any such editions on their shelves, but I bought four gems I'll be sharing in the next couple of weeks.



 First up, a 1914 first edition of Joyce Kilmer, containing his (yes, HIS!) most famous poem, "Trees."


There aren't many other poems in the book that I particularly care for, except this one:


Lots of folks in this snow-covered coldcoldcold land are looking forward to spring!

The page after this Easter poem contained the biggest surprise in the book: evidence of the previous reader/owner, who marked up a poem with directions for reading it aloud! AND...tucked in at that spot was a magazine clipping with poems by Aline Kilmer, who, come to find out, was Joyce Kilmer's wife!


As I was poking around learning about the Kilmers, I discovered that the University of Delaware has a collection of 50+ letters that Sara Teasdale wrote to the two of them. Fascinating. I'd love to poke through that collection some day!

My students are astonished by my lack of knowledge about current popular culture -- movies, video games, sports, YouTubers, etc. Who has time for all that when you can get lost in literary rabbit holes?!?

Kay has today's Poetry Friday Roundup at A Journey Through the Pages.

Wednesday, January 17, 2018

Ban This Book



Ban This Book
by Alan Gratz
Starscape, 2017

"...for all the amazing things books can do, they can't make you into a bad person." p.232

Nope. They open our minds, make us think, introduce us to new worlds and different ways of living and being, entertain us, and call us to action. But they don't make us into bad people, or good people, or any kind of people at all. It's up to us to take action and be the person we want to be.

And that's precisely what Amy Anne learns in this book. She has always been the quiet mouse of a reader, chewing on the ends of her braids, having conversations in her head but not standing up for herself out loud...until her favorite book in the world is banned from the school library. The book is not banned through the formal board-approved process of review. Rather, it is banned because one powerful mother goes straight to the board, bypassing all the rules, and gets what she wants.

Not only does Amy Anne learn to say what's on her mind, she also learns the importance of empathy. It's not until she looks at the situation from the point of view of the book-banning mom is she able to provide the school board with the argument that wins her case -- you can't ban books because a single reader finds fault with them. If you did that, you might as well ban all the books in the library.

Hooray for the teachers in this book and their study of the Bill of Rights. Hooray for Amy Anne's friend Rebecca who wants to become a lawyer and who knows all about Robert's Rules of Order (and wears a suit and carries a briefcase to the school board meeting at the end of the book). Hooray for Alan Gratz for giving book-loving kids a book where the reader is the hero, and a story where the misuse of power is defeated by democracy.

I'm going to add Mrs. Jones to our list of 100 Cool Teachers in Children's Literature even though she's a librarian. She gets fired because of Amy Anne's BBLL (Banned Books Locker Library), but she doesn't hold it agains Amy Anne. She tells her, "Well-behaved women seldom make history. Consider this your first taste of behaving badly in the name of what's right." p.223

I'll end with this: "All the book challenges, the real ones, were because one person saw a book in a very different way than somebody else. Which was fine. Everbody had the right to interpret any book any way they wanted to. What they couldn't do then was tell everybody else their interpretation was the only interpretation." p.195.

Amen.





Tuesday, February 07, 2017

Still Learning to Read: Books We Love!


This is one of a series of blog posts that continue the conversation around Still Learning to Read--teaching reading to students in grades 3-6.  This series will run on the blog on Tuesdays starting in August 2016 and continue through the school year.


I love watching the tastes in the classroom change.  I love watching a student read a book and then that student recommends it to another and another and another. I love watching how books are informally passed around the classroom as readers know each other's tastes as readers.

This week, we worked on creating book reviews--we chose books we thought other 3rd graders would love to read. And we collected the book reviews on a Padlet.  So this Padlet is a glimpse into our classroom--the books that are currently popular.  Take some time to visit the Padlet, share it with your students and let us know if you read anything we recommend.  We hope you enjoy some of the books we love!

You can visit our Padlet here.

  

Tuesday, October 18, 2016

Still Learning to Read: Books I've Handed to Kids Recently



This is one of a series of blog posts that continue the conversation around Still Learning to Read--teaching reading to students in grades 3-6.  This series will run on the blog on Tuesdays starting in August 2016 and continue through the school year.


It is always around this time of year when I find that handing a book to a child can make a difference for the rest of the year.  This is the time of year when I know readers well enough to chit chat books on the way to lunch or at recess. This is the time of year when I start leaving a book in a child's book bin that I think they might like.  There is something about a young reader knowing that you thought about him/her specifically when you saw a book.  There is something about handing a child a specific book that strengthens a relationship.  This week, I noticed myself informally handing books to children in informal ways.  This is one of the most important jobs I do--so I have to know lots of books. Always. It seems that every year my kids have different tastes as readers, so I can't just recommend the books I've always recommended.  It is always a personal act--the act of recommending a book.  These are some of the books I've handed to kids (or ordered for kids) this week.


So many of my kids have become Raina fans. Raina's name comes up like she is a student in our class!  A few of us  were chatting informally as they came in the other day about them.  They especially love Smile and Sisters.  This week, I pulled out the Babysitter's Club Graphix. (I seem to only have #!--my other 2 have disappeared since last year so I had to reorder!)   Kids were thrilled to know about more books that Raina illustrated and there is a list of people waiting to dig into this series. (I love this kind of recommendation because it builds on what they love (Raina) but also introduces them to a new author that they might fall in love with (Ann Martin). 


One of my students had fallen in love with the Zita books  (By Ben Hatke) and was more engaged when reading them than I'd seen her all year. I remembered that I had received a review copy of Mighty Jack by the same author, earlier this month and I mentioned it to her and left it at her table the next day. She loved it and passed it on to another reader in the class who she thought would love it.


The Little Shaq books went around my room early in the year but they seem to be making their rounds again. Last week, I had a conversation with a student who was reading the 2nd book. We checked and were THRILLED to find out that the 3rd book in the Little Shaq series (Star of the Week) was due out THIS WEEK!  It should arrive today and was the talk of the room.  Not only did I get to hand a book to a child but this also built some awareness for those "hot off the press" books. 



The Treehouse Books were popular in my room last year and I realized they were published about a year earlier in Australia than they are here.  Lucky for Amazon, I can get copies of the books that are not quite published in the US yet which I think is the case with The 65 Story Treehouse which should arrive this week so one of my readers can read this last book (so far) in the series.


I bought the first two books in the new Super Happy Party Bears series after Ann DiBella recommended them on Facebook. I love having new books, doing a quick share in the morning before we start our day and handing them off to the first readers! Kids always love to be the first readers of new books so this is a fun way to hand books to kids.  I need to read this one as soon as I can get it back as it seems like a fun read for 3rd graders.


We visited the Columbus Zoo on a field trip a few weeks ago. My kids aren't reading much nonfiction yet so I picked up two of Jack Hanna's Wild But True books and gave them to a few of the first kids to walk in the room the next morning. I always love to hand books to kids in the morning as they start a buzz in the classroom with lots of kids curious about the books.

My students know me well enough now to know that they don't have to love any of the books I recommend to them. They know that they own their reading and that when I recommend a book, they are not obligated to read it. But, they also know that I think about them and their individual tastes and needs as readers and that matters. Knowing my kids as readers and combining that with what I know about books is one of my most important roles.  And one of my favorites:-) 




(Our new edition of Still Learning to Read was released in August!  You can order it online at StenhouseYou can follow the conversation using the hashtag #SLTRead or you can join us for a book chat on Facebook that began this week by joining our group here.)

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Saturday, May 30, 2015

All About Them Books




This darling video by a librarian in Worthington says it all!

And may I just add, how am I supposed to get any work done when THIS showed up in yesterday's mail:






Monday, February 03, 2014

New Books in February


February looks to be another great month for books!  Here are some of the books I am looking forward to being released this month!


My kids have become HUGE fans of The Quirks since I brought it into the classroom. And they ask me daily if I have the new one yet!  They are going to be thrilled when The Quirks in Circus Quirkus makes it to the classroom. The Quirks is one of my favorite new series for 3rd graders.  The perfect kind of story for this age.  I am anxiously awaiting lots more!


There is also a new Stink book coming out. My kids will be thrilled to see Stink and the Shark Sleepover (Book #9)


And I am very excited about Lord and Lady Bunny--Almost Royalty!  I so love Polly Horvath and I loved Mr. and Mrs. Bunny-Detectives Extraordinare! It was so quirky and fun.  I'm excited to see a new one!



And who could not be excited about a new version of Goldilocks called Goldi Rocks & the Three Bears?

Another series I'm anxious to take a look at is the upcoming one by Henry Winkler.  This is Hank from Hank Zipzer series but a younger version.  Bookmarks Are People Too! #1 (Here's Hank) looks similar to the text that my 3rd graders enjoy and it looks to be funny which is a huge plus for many of my readers. I'm anxious to check this new series out.



I'm not sure how I heard about Extraordinary Warren: A Super Chicken but it looks like great fun!

I recently read Winger and it was fabulous.  I definitely want to read more by this author. His book Grasshopper Jungle comes out in February. Not sure how fast I'll get to it but it is definitely on my TBR list!


Baseball Is . . . is one I have been waiting for for a long time. Louise Borden is amazing and I love the whole idea behind this book. I can't wait to get a copy (or copies).  It will be great for all ages, I think.


A Snicker of Magic and Half a Chance are two middle grade novels I have been looking forward to for a while. Both sound amazing and I am a huge Cynthia Lord fan!


Feathers: Not Just for Flying is a nonfiction book that looks fabulous.  We have been reading a lot about birds and this book looks like a great addition to our basket of bird nonfiction.


We are huge Arnie the Doughnut fans here so we are all very excited about the newest...Invasion of the Ufonuts (Adventures of Arnie the Doughnut)!