Reading in public

For every profession there are clichés. Librarians are no exception. What annoys librarians? Buns and shushing noises are laughable. What really gets under our skin is when people say “It must be nice to be able to read all day.” They usually say it in a tone of voice that lets us know that they are at once envious and looking down on our profession.

We laugh sardonically about how nice it would be to be able to get some of our required reading done during our working hours. (As a school librarian I have to wonder what working hours really means, but that is another story. One that my teacher friends can write as well as I can.) When do we get our reading done? At home, in the evening, on the weekend, during those summer “vacations”, waiting for the doctor, dentist, child’s soccer/baseball/football/dance/swim/etc. practice. On the bus/train/plane/etc. Listening to some of them via books on tape during our commutes. Waiting for the laundry. I’ve even been known to sneak a few pages in during a wait at the grocery story or department store. Especially during the long Christmas lines.

We do our reading by stealth, trying to impose on no one. Cramming as much work in while on location and then indulging our guilty pleasure in the dark recesses of privacy. Reading is our lurid secret.

And, did I mention that since I became a school librarian I’ve read only a handful of novels aimed at adults? I’m mostly in the middle grade trenches. I read these, even the types I dislike, so that I can find the perfect match for my students. Sometimes it is hard to plow through them.

And this was my pattern until a few weeks ago when I saw an article by Stephen Krashen. (see below if you would like more information.) I admire his work. In fact, I began using Sustained Silent Reading as a foundation for my classes after reading a number of his posts some years ago. This article jogged me. The one thing I wasn’t doing was reading during SSR. I was using SSR as the opportunity to take care of book check out. So I started sitting in the midst of my students, cheek-and-jowl and reading. It was refreshing. But to be honest, I felt like I was going to get in trouble for not doing my work. I felt like I was goofing off. Regardless, I do find that much more reading goes on when I am in the middle of the class.

The absolute kicker happened on Friday. It was my lunchtime. I don’t often eat lunch during this time, I use it to change gears and ready myself for the afternoon. Friday, however, I was dying to know how the chapter I had been reading ended. I thought I’d give myself a few minutes to find out. A student walked into the library, one of our youngest, an said in sheer innocence

“Oh, Ms. Shoup! You read too?”

I was shocked. I read books to this student all the time. I thought it was obvious.

She knew the difference. Adults read to children, but that doesn’t mean they read themselves.

Librarians need to come out of the dark places where we read and be caught in the act.  I need to stop worrying about whether someone thinks I’m taking it easy and start acting on the knowledge that being a visible reader is the most effective advertisement for reading.

Von Sprecken, D. and Krashen, S. 1998. Do students read during sustained silent reading? California Read 32(1): 11-13. http://www.sdkrashen.com/articles.php?cat=2

Making Book Trailers

This summer I am taking a course through Simmons in creating book trailers. I am learning about tools that are new to me, considering what to include and what to leave out and am newly impressed with how music changes the tone of a video. 

Here is a first try. I am hoping to join with students to make book trailers for the 2014 - 2015 nominees for the Massachusetts Children's Book Awards. 
Making book trailers is fun and rewarding. It's also time consuming. While I hope to create plenty of my own, enlisting students to make them seems like a good idea. 

 

I finally decided to sign up for the Good Reads Reading Challenge. I generally like a challenge. I love reading. So it seems like it would be a natural step to join. I found myself, however, worrying about whether I could read as many books as I set out to. I worried about whether it would be embarrassing to fail. This morning as I saw that button on my Good Reads account, I thought of my students. How they feel about reading challenges. Some of them may love them. Some of them may dread them. While I can't change their feelings about this summer's challenge, I could at least take the plunge. So here I go, in the middle of July setting an arbitrary goal of 200 books for 2012. 


I realized that the additional benefit of declaring my goal is the incentive to remember to log in books that I have read. When I remember to log in books I don't usually take the time to review them. My reviews are more like notes to help me remember how I want to use the book. Occasionally a book will inspire me to write a review, but the lack of a review does not mean that I did not like it or that I was unenthusiastic about the book. I know that I spend time on social networking sites and I've learned to put limitations. I use Good Reads as a way to track my reading. It suffices at the moment. 


Want to see my progress? The widget on my sidebar is my goalkeeper. 

Participate in Picture Book Month

This last six weeks have been all about picture books for me. Learning about them, reading them, evaluating them and trying my hand at writing them. So when I learned about Picture Book Month I wondered if I really had time to check this out as well. I thought I'd wait until December 1st, but my curiosity got the better of me. So glad it did. If you love picture books you'll want to take a visit to read all the great things these giants of the industry have to say about them. If you don't love picture books already, get over there and see what you are missing!

Guess I'll have to wait until January before I dig into those novels I've had my eye on.

Classical Children’s Lit Malady

I have always loved the classic children’s works written by the likes of Louisa May Alcott, Frances Hodgson Burnett, L. M. Montgomery and their contemporaries. I love the films bringing them to life, especially if they have Shirley Temple in them.

So I have never found it easy to hear someone talk about Scarlet Fever as a treatable, curable malady. The very words bring about visions of sick rooms, drawn bed clothes, the solemn ticking of a grandfather clock and shadows.

A few weeks ago I was exposed to Scarlet Fever. Last week I battled a serious bout of strep throat. This morning I awoke covered in red dots.

After a trip to the doctor, I have been given flight clearance to mingle as much as I want. The course of antibiotics make me safe to be around whether I have a case of Scarlet Fever or an allergy to the medication.

Still, I find the scenes from children’s literature, the classic and its poorer cousin, dance wildly in my head. The drawings of Edward Gorey taunt me and make me want to have that chocolate bar instead of resisting. Life is short and all that.

Children’s literature can uplift, inspire and inform. These old images, however, are not helping me put this into perspective. On the other hand, seen in a providential light, the images so skillfully wrought by our writing predecessors serve not only to make me wary, but also to incite gratitude. Looking back on the works of the foremothers of children’s literature, I can feel inspired by the deftly written story. At the same time, I am grateful yet again that I live in this time. Grateful for the present of a world in which scarlet fever need not be written in capital letters or dealt with in fear. Grateful for a world in which there is the medication to treat the malady.  Very importantly, I am grateful for the fact that I have health insurance.

The Youth Media Awards

It’s been a week since the award winners were announced and I’m way behind in reporting. So many things have happened this week.

The night before the Youth Media Awards were announced I wasn’t able to sleep. I got up and high tailed it into work. I know the ceremony was t start at 7:45 AM, so I got into work a little earlier to ensure enough time to log on and connect to the live stream. I tried and tried, but the computer indicated that the item could not be found. After playing with it for about 30 minutes it dawned on me that the ceremony was being held in San Diego and wouldn’t be held until mid-day East Coast time!

All day long people were slipping by the library to see if I knew yet. One of my colleagues was completely unable to imagine that I would be able to keep quiet once I knew the results of the awards. She tried to wear down my resolve, but I could not be worn down or tricked. It seemed like the suspence building would enhance the experience of the group.

People started gathering before three and immediately wanted information. The suspense was so strong you could have cut it with a knife. When they arrived I gave them each a string of gold beads (Mardi Gras beads, but they were gold, round and resembled medals), pointed them to the direction of our round, gold confetti and offered refreshments. Round and gold things ruled the day.

When we were all accounted for, at 3:15, I made the announcements. We started with books we had read which won other awards, moved on to the honors and culminated with the Caldecott Medal winner. You can easily see that our list does not correspond, even marginally, with the winners. Some of us had seen two out of the three books. We are all anxious to get ahold of copies of the award winning books to peruse and evaluate.

It will be very interesting to look at them and try to guess which elements in these books made the committee choose them. Reading as many books as we did and not having access to them all simultaneously, it is very interesting to go back and revisit. We did do this with some, but not all of the books. The books we read at the beginning sometimes looked less appealing when revisited and sometimes we appreciated them more. It is a task we are anxious to undertake to further our own skill and perception.

The work of our meeting followed. We had to evaluate our journey:

How had we changed?

What had we learned?

What do we take away with us?

How will this experience change us as educators?

When we were through talking and filling out evaluation forms, I gave out prizes. I had enough prizes for everyone. Most of the prizes I collected at Midwinter in boston last. I threw in a couple of small gift cards to bookstores. Participants were delight to “win” something and it build fun feeling.

Now what is left for me to do is paperwork to fill out and my own self-reflection. The focus group took an enormous amount of time, but yielded correspondingly enormous benefits. Would I do it again? Yes, but there are many things I would tweak so that it would go smoother. That’s another post.  

The One

After the teacher voting on December 20 I went to the library and picked up a book I had seen a great deal of discussion about. I had not gotten my hands on it and it finally came in. The book I’m talking about, CHALK, was certainly one I wish I had ordered sooner and had had the opportunity to include in the discussions.

When I showed it to my colleagues over the next couple of days I heard them agree – this was a book that might have made them change their decisions.

Throughout the process of evaluating books I kept hearing people say that they were waiting for “the one” and some felt that this could have been it.

So I feel a bit like a fisherman. The one that got away. Not sure it would have made the difference, but I wish it had been on the table. 

The Kids Vote

Thursday, December 23rd, the last of our kids cast their ballots in the Mock Caldecott Election. The last couple of weeks before our vacation were a whirlwind of activity. Trying to make sure every class had read all the books was challenging enough, but student absences made getting full participation tricky. Every morning I ran around before school with a list of students who had been absent the day their class voted. I was able to round up more than half of the missing students this way.

Well, the voting is in and here are the results:

We had 395 students from grades PreK-1 cast their ballots.

Our selections were:

	Title	Illustrator	author	Number of votes
Medal Winner	Art and Max	David Wiesner	David Wiesner	90
Honors	City Dog, Country Frog	Jon Muth	Mo Willems	49
	Push Putton	Aliki	Aliki	41
	Children Make Terrible Pets	Peter Brown	Peter Brown	35
	Bear in the Air	Amy Bates	Susan Meyers	32

At the end of the day, I asked to have the results be announced along with the Caught Being Good announcement. I can’t tell you  what the reaction was elsewhere in the building, but the class that was in the library let out a cheer.

It was a great feeling to come to the end, but it was also sad. I can only imagine how members of the Caldecott Committee feel once the decision has been made and the phone calls made to inform the winners.

What is left for us is awaiting the announcements on January 10^th and discussing our thoughts about the process. 

Mock Caldecott Focus Group Voting

On Monday, December 20^th the Mock Caldecott Focus Group met to cast their votes. This is the one for adults. There was a bit of nervousness on my part. I had some ideas of how we would start this process, but the rest would have to emerge somewhat organically. People were popping in throughout the day to check books they had not seen or re-familiarize themselves with titles they hadn’t seen in a while.

As soon as my last class had finished I put the books out on display so that they would be easy for everyone to see. The meeting was scheduled for half an hour later, but people started coming, reviewing and discussing almost immediately.

I decided that voting using the method I developed for the student elections would work out well for our adults as well.  Using the Mock Caldecott Medals we made as ballots for the students to vote with we could get a quick assessment of the level of agreement of our members. Originally, I had intended to open it up to discussion and debate before casting the first votes. However, the demands of the holiday, as well as flu, season had people an edge. They came early and discussed generally. When we were all assembled there was an eagerness to get down to business and vote.

I decided to give each member 2 medals. This way we could gather general opinion and equalize some of the quirks each of us harbors. We then removed any book that had received only one vote. This left us with five books to narrow down. Happily, this was the maximum number we could have. All we had to do was vote again to decide which would be the Medal winner and which would remain to be classified as Honor books. Once again each member received 2 medals and were cautioned that they needed to use them for different books. The clear winner was City Dog, Country Frog. This had been a favorite from the beginning. It didn’t loose its charm. In fact, it was one chosen to be in the selection for our student Mock Caldecott. Even reading it 20 times in a week and a half couldn’t sour it. That is the mark of a book that holds together.

Our selections were:

	Title	Illustrator	author
Medal Winner	City Dog, Country Frog	Jon Muth	Mo Willems
Honors	In the Wild	Holly Meade	David Elliot
	The Boy in the Garden	Allen Say	Allen Say
	Henry Aaron’s Dream	Matt Tavares	Matt Tavares
	Art and Max	David Wiesner	David Wiesner

Upon reflection, I realized that we had engaged in the discussion before we voted. It’s just that we had been discussing these books all week. Unlike the real Caldecott Committee members, we work together every day. Our thoughts about books are shared pretty much immediately. I hear comments about a book I have just reviewed as I walk down the hall on the way to bus duty. I share a thumbs up with a teacher who drops their class off for library. Students tell me that their teacher has read one of those books to them and that they all love it. I shoot back with my own thoughts and watch as they are absorbed, debated and shot back to remind me about the criteria. It’s kind of like the twitter version of the committee. 

Mock Caldecott Voting

Last week, when the first class cast their ballots for the book they thought should win the Caldecott Medal I discovered a few things.

It was interesting to watch. Several boys had discussed their choice before class and spent the time trying to convince everyone to join them in voting for their favorite book. Meanwhile, one boy who came to a decision through much consideration and weighing of qualities convinced a group of girls to vote with him. Listening to these two groups debate the virtues of their choice left me speechless. These kids are 6 years old!

Now I do believe that the power of debate is a great thing, however, we wanted students to feel free to vote for the book they really thought was best. Need I explain peer pressure? Or the desire to be like others? So after the first go round I changed the rules a bit.

The contest we held earlier to create the most faithful representation of the Caldecott Medal yielded a good number of excellent entries. Frankly, it was harder to choose the winner than it was for me to choose the book I wanted to vote for. Finally, however, I applied criteria and found that one stuck out clearly to me.

Before the vote we took a book parade. Students were asked to walk in a path by the books so that they had a chance to look at them and start to think which one they wanted to vote for. Before I did this it took a long time to make decisions. This little parade gave them a chance to

1.    move their bodies before sitting and waiting for everyone to have their turn.

2.    View all the covers again

3.    Start thinking about which one they might like to vote for.

To vote, I called each student and checked their name off my list. They took a medal and had to put it in the plastic cup in front of the book they wished to select. The class faced away from the display of books to give them a modicum of privacy. After every student had voted we tallied the votes. I have been chasing down students who missed class using this list.

Students seemed to enjoy using the medals and it made voting clear and easy to do.

Some students got confused, however, and thought that they couldn’t put their medal in a cup if it already had one in it. It seems so easy to explain a task like this, but for young children who don’t really understand the concept of voting it is very important to explain the process in great detail.

Things I would explain:

1.    We don’t need to touch the books.

2.    You don’t have to put your hand in the cup

3.    Just drop the medal in the cup.

4.    You drop the medal in the cup which is in front of the book you want to vote for.

5.    It is ok if there is already a medal in that cup. You can put yours in there too.

6.    We are voting for the book with the finest illustrations

7.    Illustrations are pictures. (Just in case they have forgotten.)

8.    We are looking toward the front of the room, not at the person voting.

9.    When we give the person privacy to vote, they feel comfortable to choose the one they like. Not the one something they like likes.

This is exciting.

Voting will continue to the end of the week. I can’t wait to see what they choose.

Reading the Nominations

Reading for the Mock Caldecott this week has been harder than the weeks up until now because we are forced to read all the titles suggested and try to see what the nominator saw in the book. That means revisiting some books we didn’t care much for at first glance. It means occasionally changing our minds.

I’m starting to see that one of the beauties of looking at books in this way is this process. Some books I eliminated from my top choices early on. While I liked them, they did not seem to be as strong as others. Bringing these books back again I am looking at them all over again. In doing so I am really trying to open my eyes and step away from myself, my preferences and my short sightedness. I am seeing new things and getting confused. I am also seeing new things and finding that it is clearer than I had thought it would be. Well, it is clearer to me. I am finding it easier and easier to step away from personal preferences and story lines that speak to me and really look at whether the illustrations are successful. Separating the books I love, the stories with messages I can relate to, books which have strong curricular applications and those which show a strong visual showing is becoming second nature to me. This is something many of my colleagues not only find difficult, but express a lack of comfort with.

I wonder how it will be when we meet next Monday with the twenty-one titles that were nominated. Will we have eliminated several books unanimously or will someone still be hanging onto each of those favorites?

Picture This!

I missed the boat when it came to responding to THE article published by the New York Times which pointed to the demise of the picture book. The article, Picture Books No Longer a Staple,  created outrage in circle I run in – librarians, writers and children were flummoxed by the assertions. Bloggers wrote rebuttals, listservs buzzed, the first thing said when I met other librarians was “Did you see the article?”

Frankly, I had trouble keeping up with the pace of the responses. I sometimes have the tendency to wait until I’m up to date reading the comments of others before making my own response. I don’t want to say what someone has already said, usually with more panache than I would. This has been a recurring theme for me this year. One I hope to correct in 2011.

Not only that, I’m still trying to process what I heard and learned at the MSLA annual conference in October. There I heard the visionary Stephen Abrams speak about how technology is speeding up and how changing format will drive how our libraries look in the near future. I found myself wandering around in fog over the next few days trying to make sense of what I had heard and how I felt it might all play out in children’s services. Specifically, if the change in format means a real shift from book as a physical artifact to a digital resource, what will that mean for picture books? What about the future of the Caldecott Medal in a digital world? I had not resolved these questions in my mind when the New York Times article appeared. Stephen Abrams had warned us that the changes facing us will be many and of rapid succession. The luxury of understanding one thing before facing the next will be just that, luxury. Those who can quickly respond in clear, concise language their thoughts will certainly be ahead of the rest of us who are left standing in shock trying to catch up. It occurs to me that the skill of responding quickly to new information might be a very important skill to instill in our students.  I need to practice the skill so that I can model it.

This morning I came across the CBS article Expert: Picture Books Do Still Work for Kids. 

While I could have wished for a title with more positive spin, the article is quite solid in outlining how children benefit from picture books. It also encourages parents to add books to the holiday bounty. More than anything, the tone of the article is a calming force. Rather than voicing outrage, the article is reassuring and soothing like a story before bed. Make mine a picture book.

Nominations – Mock Caldecott

Last Monday we had the meeting at which we were to offer up three titles for nomination. Just three. Did I mention that we were only allowed to nominate three? Who came up with this idea? Me?

In the morning people came into the library grumpy. As far as I could tell there were three reasons for this:

1.     Getting back from break is never a good time to have a deadline.

2.     People were behind in reading and felt that they had to catch up by the meeting.

3.     Choosing was too hard.

When people told me they couldn’t choose, I admitted that I hadn’t chosen either. I had narrowed it down to my top fifteen! I found it difficult to narrow it down to six by the end of the day.

Once people gathered at the end of the day, however, the tension seemed to melt a bit. I think finding out that other people also had difficulty in choosing their nominations made it much easier. I think for those of us doing this for a first time, it seems like everyone else is having an easier time/is more competent/is better able to make the critical judgment.

People showed up for the meeting half an hour early. Some of them tried to fit in a book or two, but others were happy to start talking about the books.

While no one really wanted to be the first, they all joined very calmly. It’s funny how people who had admitted they didn’t know which they would pick in the morning did not hesitate to make nominations. Everyone had well thought out explanations of why they chose the titles they did.

Of fifteen people, eleven were present. After all the nominations were sorted for duplicates it turns out we have a solid twenty-two titles to look at. These will be the ones we review over the next few weeks. 

Using YouTube to Enhance Appreciation of Picture Books

When I started this blog as a project associated with the 23 Things course, I set up a YouTube account, played with it and dropped it. From time to time I thought about the account and how convenient it would be to get it back up and running. It would be a lot easier to tag the videos I enjoy and have them all in one spot. So this evening I logged back in and worked on my channel. While it is really in the infancy stage, I hope that I can use this channel as a resource that people can go to to find videos connected with children's literature.

The main thought I had this evening was to collect trailers for book which we have looked at for the Mock Caldecott. These trailers sometimes give insight into methods used for creating the illustrations, the inspiration for the story or other interesting details. I think that our Mock Caldecott participants will enjoy using this. While I was at it I thought of several other applications such as author/illustrator interviews, and trailers for movies made from books. I will be adding to this resource. If you are interested in looking at my channel, you can find it at:

http://www.youtube.com/user/purpleglassesclub

Mock Caldecott, ambiguity and making decisions

On Monday, the participants in the adult version of the Mock Caldecott will meet to nominate their top three books. A list of these books will be compiled and we will all read these titles. I expect chaos to ensue. In fact, I’m looking forward to it.

Last week people kept saying to me “I’m still looking for THE ONE.” I can sympathize. They want one that blows them over, knocks them over the head and has a label that says “This is the one.” No one wants to be wrong.

This is part of a trend I’ve been seeing for a while. People want to know the right answer. They are afraid of getting it wrong. Standardized testing doesn’t do much to alleviate our fears. We are trained to pick “the right answer” from a group of four possibilities. Frankly, life isn’t much like that. There’s so much more ambiguity.

Just think about it. Making choices in health care is seldom a clear-cut experience. You have to weigh the pros and the cons and make your best guess. Even gathering reams of information won’t help you make a decision that is definitely the correct one. There is room for error. You have to make your best guess based on what you know. It’s a leap of faith.

Our current political and economic environment doesn’t help. There’s plenty of ambiguity facing people in personally significant ways. People who have lost jobs, homes, cars and hard cold cash in the economic downturn must feel the need for answers. There are certainly many, many questions. Finding a silver bullet remains elusive.

Choosing a career, a spouse, a home, even a vacation are all matters of weighing the pros and cons. The career may be the wrong one if a field dries up. Think about people who continued making buggy whips after the motorcar was invented. A spouse can have a mid-life crisis. A hurricane can whip through your vacation paradise. No one can be sure that the decision they are making is the only “right” choice. But we want to feel that there is, out there somewhere, a correct choice to choose.

Life just isn’t that certain.

So participating in an activity that is fraught with ambiguity is at times uncomfortable. Fear of inadequacy, incompetence and failure haunts us.  Sometimes we hope that the right answer is there, that we will somehow miraculously choose it. Then that feeling of discomfort will pass away.

To enjoy the process of the Mock Caldecott you have to let it go. It is much more enjoyable to me to listen to others and learn from them than to think I know the answer. Though it’s not something I’m proud of, I must admit it has taken some effort for me to get to that point. It hasn’t come naturally.

Naturally, I would like to pick the winner. I still remember what it felt like to tell students that I had chosen Jerry Pinkney’s The Lion and the Mouse as my pick for the medal. How glorious it felt to be right. My dear students applauded when they heard the news. They were so proud of me. Will I choose it again this year? Maybe, but maybe not. That’s not the point. This year, I’ve moved beyond that. It is not whether I am “right” or not. It’s really more about the process and who I become through the process. I’ll choose a contender – a really fine book.

I anticipate that there will be participants who come to the meeting on Monday who have not yet made their decisions as well as some who feel confident. No doubt about it, I’m anxious to experience this part of the process.

Am I going to tell you which books I choose? No way. I might be wrong.