Okay for Now by Gary D. Schmidt is the kind of book you can’t put down until it’s over. It’s the kind of book that you want all your friends to read so  you can talk about it. It’s the kind of book that reminds you why you always have a book on your bed side table. It’s the kind of book that deserves a long and detailed post.

Somehow though, this little ball of fluff

has sapped a lot of my time and energy this week (Note: This is not an admission that my husband was right when he said that a puppy would be way more work than I thought it would be.) so my best recommendation is to go quickly to your local library or independent book store and check out, Okay for Now.

And then come back here and tell me what you thought of it…

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Daisy wants to learn to read. Perhaps if she lies atop my book bag long enough she’ll do it.

Or maybe she wants to be a runner?

Or for now, maybe just a snuggler!

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You know how when you meet someone for the first time and then you keep seeing them everywhere you go? So, you’ve seen them before but you haven’t noticed them because you didn’t know them? I have been thinking a lot about book choice lately both as it relates to my girls and the role it plays in the reading workshop. As a result, I am now seeing many things through the lens of children’s book choice.

Last week, I volunteered in our elementary school library. Katherine’s kindergarten class was there and my job was to check in and reshelve books while also helping the children to choose their next selection. Some kids chose within a minute while others really seemed to be struggling. With only moments to go before the class had to leave, one little girl was still trying to find just the right book. She kept going up to the librarian saying, “I want a book on cats.” Despite the librarian valiant attempt, none of the cat books presented seemed right.  

As I watched this unfold, I suddenly realized what was going on. I knew this little girl has two black and white cats. I flipped through the books that had been presented to her and couldn’t find a single black and white cat on the many pages. When I asked her if she was in fact, looking for a cat that looked like her own, she said, “Yes!” as if I had stated the most obvious of all things.

Here was yet another reminder of how important it is to find literature that is personally meaningful to children. This little girl looked on the surface like an uninvested and unimpressed reader. Instead, she was incredibly motivated to read but not about any cat, about her cat.

In Lucy Calkins, A Guide to the Reading Workshop, she references a study conducted by Guthrie and Humenick in 2004. She writes,

If we hope to bring up a nation of readers, it is crucial to allow them to choose among high-interest books that they can read. In fact, Guthrie and Humenick did a meta-anaylysis of twenty two experimental or quasi-experimental studies of reading motivation and achievement and found four factors that were strongly related to student success. Ensuring students had easy access to interesting texts was the single most influential factor, and providing children choice over what they read and who they read with was the second most influential factor.

I love it when research is staggeringly clear. We must let the children choose and with this choice, will come success.

 

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our new dog, Daisy!

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As Katherine ate her after-school snack  yesterday, she started to cry. I could barely make the words out through the sobs but I could tell that she was the last one in her class to finish a test and that she felt really badly about it.

I do believe in an academic kindergarten but… I don’t really believe in ‘testing’ in kindergarten and I certainly don’t believe in test anxitey in kindergarten. So after I calmed her down, I immediately sent an e-mail to her teacher.

Because we have hit the teacher jackpot  this year, Katherine’s teacher called me within the hour. And that’s when I was reminded of the little Seabiscuit among us.

For years, Rob and I have called Katherine “Seabiscuit” in reference to the great come back from behind, underdog racing horse. According to Wikipedia, Seabiscuit was “a champion Thoroughbred racehorse in the United States. From an inauspicious start, Seabiscuit became an unlikely champion and a symbol of hope to many Americans during the Great Depression”

As a second child, we often are reminded of Katherine’s strengths in unexpected ways, having given so much attendtion and credit to Caroline. Yesterday was one of those days.

It turns out that Katherine was the last one to finish because she was the only one that worked through to the end of the test, a handwriting assemement to measure growth over the year. As her teacher continued to talk, she and I came to realize that Katherine would need a little more support to understand what a great student she is. Turns out earlier in the week, for example, Katherine placed at the top of her class on her spelling assessment. In places where many students in her class only scribbled or left spaces blank, Katherine spelled entire words.

Her teacher also told me that she is one of the hardest workers in her class. She perseveres through hard tasks with amazing focus. Looks like the personality trait that led Katherine to play until she (and Rob!) had won all the prizes in the picture above is going to work to her favor in school.

Go Seabiscuit!!

 

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I’m thrilled to announce that it’s time for the  Cybils  (Children’s and Young Adult Bloggers’ Literacy Awards) to begin!

And I’m even more thrilled to announce that I was chosen to serve as a second round judge for the Easy Reader/Early Chapter Book category!

Much more to come but for now please head over to Easy Reader/Early Chapter Book  post on the Cybils website to learn more about my category and my fabulous team members…

 

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As often happens these days, my personal and professional lives are focused on the same topic. At the moment, that topic is the reader’s right to choose their own books.

When I began working with a new group of teacher’s last week, they were overwhelmed by the thought that their students would be choosing their own books. Overwhelmed both with confusion and with excitement. As teachers they understood instictively that this was the right way to encourage a love of reading in their students. But as teachers they also struggled to understand how to guide each of the many, many children in their class to the right choices.

The next time I see this group of teachers, I will have my own version of their story to share. Caroline has the most amazing teacher this year. She is a woman who is clearly a gifted teacher, able to meet each of her students where they are academically and encourage them to grow. She also places an immense value on learning who her students are as people and understanding how their social and emotional lives impact their time in the classroom. We really couldn’t feel luckier to have this woman in our lives.

She is challenging Caroline in new ways, causing me also to think about and tackle new things. Caroline has always, always judged a book by it’s cover. She will only read books that look ‘cool’ and are about children, usually girls, living in the present time. No animal books, no fantasy, no historical fiction. And no ugly covers. Of course, I have tried my hardest to work around this but to no avail. And honestly, without a Ms. K. to push me, I have choosen the easy road and let Caroline read only what she has choosen.

Currently, Ms. K. is tackling Caroline’s incredibly fast reading rate. While on the surface, reading fast may seem like a gift, I knew that Caroline was missing parts of what she was reading and sensed it was why she was tying herself to one kind of pretty simple book. During assessment, Ms. K. bumped back Caroline’s reading level to focus on her comprehension skills. A change in third grade is that Caroline is encouraged to read books at her level at home. Because Ms. K. is the greatest, she did say that if kids choose, they can read other books as well but she would like some of their reading time to focus on books at their independent reading level and not above.

This change encouraged me to go out and find some new titles at Caroline’s level. Seeing as she’d read at this level before, I really had to stretch myself and find books outside of Caroline’s comfort zone. I knew what would happen when I got home and I was right. She quickly made piles of acceptable and unacceptable books.

But then, thanks to Ms. K., I sat down with her and explored the books a bit more. As simple as it sounds, sititing with Caroline and reading the  back covers of the books worked. Her piles changed and she added a few new types of books to her acceptable pile.  As always, I was amazed at how just a smidgen of time could be, in a sense, a mini lesson. This one about book choice and at least choosing a book by it’s back cover.

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Against the advice of many wise people, we are getting a new puppy on Thursday. Jenny died less than two months ago and to many, this sounds too soon. Many others though, have told us that we’ll know when the time is right to bring a dog back in to our lives. Our house has been so quiet, we have taken such few walks and we have missed having a canine friend among us.

Caroline has probably had the hardest time with the loss of Jenny. Not openly though. She can not and will not talk about it. I was so sad when Jenny died that I think my sadness scared Caroline more than the loss of the dog that welcomed her home from the hospital. Until just a few days ago, she wasn’t able to talk about Jenny at all.

Now though, as we talk about welcoming a new dog into our family, we are all talking about Jenny again. We are telling stories about how we found her and what her first days with us were like. We are thinking back to all the annoying things she did and promising we will not let the new puppy develop those habits. We are talking about her and loving her all over again.

And we are missing her. Katherine is not outwardly saying much about missing Jenny but as often happens, her questions are letting us know what she’s thinking.

She woke up early this morning, walking into our room, still rubbing the sleep from her eyes.

“Mommy,” she said, “I have a question about dogs. Who’s the longest living dog in the world?”

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I have read the work put out by the Reading and Writing Project at Columbia Teacher’s College for years. I have quoted Lucy Calkins to parents and teachers. I have watched the workshop method of teaching as both a professional and as a mom. But for some reason, I have never attended a session presented by the Reading and Writing Project.

Yesterday, I woke up early and drove in to the city. Because of the crazy traffic patterns here, I left my house before the sun had risen, made it into the city, traffic free, and was there two hours before my workshop began. I sat on a bench and watched city kids scooter to school. I sipped coffee at Starbucks as college kids prepared for their day.

And finally it was time for me to attend my first Reading and Writing Project workshop.

I was not disappointed. I learned and learned and learned. I collected book titles, quotes and ideas to share both with teachers and parents. I learned things that I will bring into my work as a consultant and my work as a mom.

There is so, so much I could share but what struck me the most was the concept of reading volume. That how much children read, matters. That reading is what teaches kids to read and to love reading.

Shana Frazin, our presenter said,

“Read a lot! What ever you think is a lot, it’s not enough. It’s reading volume. Nothing matters more that time spent reading.”

So there you have it. Go read!

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Yesterday was like my first day of school.

I presented the first in a series of eight professional development days for a local school district on the topic of reading workshop.

I was reminded of both the joy and the frustration of being with a group of teachers. I loved hearing their questions and their thoughts on instruction. I hated hearing how they don’t have a favorite author because they haven’t had personal time to read for pleasure in years. I loved how they clamored to know about my current favorite read alouds and how best to fit them into their curriculum. I hated how they told me that most of the kids in their classes were never read to at home. I loved hearing the laughter of colleagues learning new things about the women they had taught with for years, finally having a chance to sit together and chat informally getting to know each other better as I got to know them. I hated that they talked about classrooms filled to the brim with 27 and 28 elementary aged children.

Here’s to a new job full of more loves than hates…

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