May - My Webinar Month

I know it makes no sense to people who aren't yet retired, but it really does seem that I have had hardly a free moment since I retired last June and became a "teacher librarian in wild" (aka retired, consultant, volunteer, advocate, lifelong learner). This month, a good chunk of my time went to working on two webinars I co-presented. In case you missed them, I am sharing them here.

CSLA's Committee on Curriculum Standards Integration hosted three "Better Together!" webinars this spring. I was one of the co-presenters, along with friends Katie Williams, Sue Heraper, and Lisa Bishop, for "ESSA and School Libraries" on May 18. We talked about the impact of ESSA nationally, in California, and locally. For my part of the presentation, I spoke about ways to advocate locally, both in relation to ESSA and for any other forms of funding. Here is the archived recording.

I was also delighted and honored to join my friend Michelle Luhtala (@mluhtala) for her May 24 Edweb Webinar on ideas for motivating students to read over the summer and planning for ways to inspired them in the fall. The webinar was part of Michelle's monthly "Emerging Tech: Using Technology to Advance Your School Library Program" webinar series hosted by Edweb and sponsored by Mackin. This was Michelle's 77th webinar!

We shared a combination of our own experiences and a number of great ideas shared by other librarians we interviewed. You can watch the webinar recording at this link, the slides at this link, and all the resources we shared at bit.ly/edwebet77.

Nurturing a Love of Reading

Yeah .. that's me1

I've been playing catchup today on reading the latest postings from my blog subscriptions and discovered a new discussion thread. Several days ago, Jennifer LaGarde, "Library Girl," wrote a compelling post which eloquently shares how she became a book lover and how that wasn't based on any reading instruction or incentive programs, but on librarians and teachers who nurtured her reading and gave her choice. She urged all of us to be those champions for students. (I know I'm way oversimplifying her moving story. Please, please read the original for yourself.) Gwyneth Jones, The Daring Librarian, and others commented on the post. Gwyneth wrote her own amazing post about her history as a passionate reader and challenged us all to do the same. If you haven't read that, please, please go do that now. Gwyneth's posts are always not only insightful and entertaining, but the graphics she creates to tell her stories are a second-to-none experience all on their own. Next, Tamara Cox, the Eliterate Librarian, shared her story, and urged us to read Donalyn Miller's The Book Whisperer, a book I also found truly transformative in its suggestions for how to build a culture of reading for students.

So, taking up Gwyneth's challenge, here's my story, with three important memories of what made me love reading:

I was blessed as a child because both of my parents read aloud to me from a very early age. I wish I could remember all those books. Several, though, are clearly cemented in my head: A.A. Milne's Now We Are Six, Robert Louis Stevenson's A Child's Garden of Verse,  Bemelmans' Madeline books, and Barrie's Peter Pan. To this day, I can still recite parts of each of these - not because I ever tried to memorize them, but because I heard them so often that I couldn't help but remember them. I always loved books and wanted to be a reader myself because my parents brought books alive for me and made me want to read before I could myself.

I was also blessed from early elementary school through my young preteen years to have a children's librarian (I wish I could remember her name) at my local public library - just one block from our house, so I was able to go all by myself from a pretty early age - who was willing to spend endless time walking around with me during every visit suggesting books. Each time I went, I left with a huge stack of books. I usually discarded one or two of them, but read all the rest, and she made it clear that it was okay not to continue with books that didn't speak to me. One of my favorite discoveries during those visits was the Dr. Doolittle series. While, other than the Landmark biography series, I have always been much more of a fiction person than nonfiction reader, she also shared a book with me that lead to a lifelong hobby - Dolls to Make for Fun and Profit by Edith Flack Ackley. I was so taken with the book that my mother agreed to buy me my own copy, which I still own. After I made a number of dolls from the patterns in the book, the librarian even talked me into to lending them to the library to display in the entry hall exhibit case for a few weeks. I was so proud to have my creations on exhibit in the library! While I didn't think about becoming a librarian until years later, those days at my local public library definitely made me a lover of not just books but of libraries.

And, finally, I was blessed with a third grade teacher, Mrs. Schwartzman, who made a ritual of reading aloud to us. I couldn't wait each day to hear Mr. Popper's Penguins and several of the Mary Poppins books read with incredible expression. To this day, I love being read to. I guess that's why I'm an audiobook fan. I think we stop reading aloud to children way too early. Sadly, I don't get to read aloud to high school students, but I know when I was a middle school librarian that the students really enjoyed lunchtime read alouds.

As Jennifer, Gwyneth, and Tamara all shared, my love of reading never had anything to do with reading instruction or incentives. It did have a lot to do with being read aloud to, never ever being told that there was any book I shouldn't/couldn't read, and a lot of indulgence by my parents and librarians in helping me find the right books for me.

As I write, a lot more memories are coming back, and I could probably go on forever with one after another, but I'll share just one more: I was a true goody-two-shoes in school and almost never got in trouble. One day, though, I remember my teacher getting surprisingly angry with me that I had not heard or responded to some direction she gave me. I really hadn't heard her, because I was completely absorbed in the book I was reading. I was living in the world of the book, not the classroom. I also recall, over and over again, "surfacing" from a book and grieving for losing that world I had just inhabited. I even grieved at having to "give up" some really depressing or scary experiences of characters in those book worlds to return to my much more comfortable and safe real world. All those worlds I lived in while I was reading played a huge role enabling me to understand the world outside my own and develop empathy for people different from me.

My wish for all the other teachers, librarians, and parents out there is that you to do everything you can to help your students lose themselves in books. It can happen if you guide them to find books that speak to them. It was one of the greatest gifts of my youth and one every child deserves. Let's all do all we can to give our students that gift.

So ... what's your story?

Reading and Blogging

I had a great resolution to use this blog as a regular journal on how my classroom teaching is going. So far, I have been doing a terrible job keeping up and contributing regularly. I am finding that doing my prep for each day and trying to keep on top of all the grading is all-consuming. And, my time outside of school is also filled to the brim with planning for CSLA’s Annual Conference November 19-22 and year-round planning for CSLA’s Southern Section. Please don’t miss the CSLA Conference! We have a wonderful line-up of presentations and special events. It’s not too late to register. Visit the CSLA site for registration information and our wiki for all the latest information. CSLA Southern Section also is making some terrific plans this year, including a Webinar with Joyce Valenza on January 23.

While I have been overwhelmed with prepping and grading for my classes, my students and I have been involved in a number of engaging activities. I am heartened to see how much they enjoy the reading that we do in class together, both the stories we have been studying and analyzing and those I have read aloud to them purely for pleasure.

Here’s a quick summary of some of what we’ve been up to. I started off the year with plans to read a story or book outside of our curriculum studies for a few minutes at the end of each period. It seems that I never have enough time for all the things we need to do, and I let that quickly drop off the list unintentionally. This week, I was determined to build that back in. My students were really excited when I got out Richard Peck’s Present Tense, Past Perfect to start another story. I’m really impressed about how good their attention is when I do read aloud to them; I’m going to do all I can to restore these read alouds as a regular activity.

As part of my technology-integration planning for the year, I started students off doing some assignments in our Moodle course. There clearly has been a learning curve for a number of them logging in and uploading files. Some of them have also experienced challenges using their flash drives and converting file formats from their home computers to .doc files that can be read on our school computers. I think that almost everyone is now up to speed on all these skills. A lesson in this for me, though, was that I couldn’t expect everyone to master all the procedures through just one assignment; a good percentage of the students needed several walk throughs to get it down.

The second technology tool I introduced the students to was blogging. My intention was to have a blog for each class period as well as an individual blog for each student. The period blogs are a place where students take turns being the guest blogger/reporter of the day, giving an account of what we do and learn. The students will use the individual blogs to respond to writing prompts, reflect on their reading, and add optional additional journal entries. I thought that starting with the period blogs would give them the experience of creating postings before we embarked on the individual blogs. I have, frankly, been disappointed in the period blogs so far. Some of the students have written lively, well-constructed postings, but a number have failed to check their work for good grammar, spelling, etc. Some have simply failed to post on the day they signed up for. I did keep getting questions from students about when we would start the promised individual blogs. I realized that I couldn’t wait until everyone did a good posting on the period blogs before starting the individual blogs. It took me a good chunk of time to get everyone’s screen name/blog name requests and generate all the blogs, but I did get that done last week. I used edublogs.org to create all the blogs, and set myself as a second administrator on each blog. I spent two class periods helping the students access their blogs, customize them, discuss what makes a good posting, and create a first posting about creativity. I am in the process of reading these postings. So far I am very pleased with their work and the variety of their responses to the questions about creativity. My next task is to link each of the individual blogs to the period blogs so the students can visit each others’ blogs and comment on them. I plan to do a lesson next week on what constitutes a good, constructive comment. Perhaps next I will backtrack and re-teach what constitutes a good “reporter” posting for the period blogs.