Online Safety and Euphemisms

Sometimes the way we talk to children amuses me. For example, people have no trouble seeing a child in a grocery store/park/church/zoo and asking “How old are you?” will become angry when the child asks the same question. “Children today have no manners!” humph.

It is no laughing matter, however, that children today have many different configurations of living arrangements. As the custodian of a great percentage of a child’s waking hours, those of us who work with them struggle to always find words that will embrace and affirm all of the children in our care. Instead of saying “Have your Mom read this to you” as teachers may have years ago, we now go through all kinds of verbal gymnastics to be inclusive. I, for one, think this is a good thing, even if it can get silly at times.

One of the terms that makes me giggle is “trusted adult.” We say things like “Get your trusted adult’s permission before using the Internet” or “Your trusted adult must sign this permission form.” I can imagine the people children identify as “trusted adult” might shift from day to day depending on who lets them watch TV or stay up late or have cake and ice cream. Still, the phrase is valuable because it describes not only a relationship of power, but also one of trust. You can’t always trust the people in charge of you. This term may empower children to seek out and engage in conversation with those who are trustworthy. Sometimes children understand the issues more than we would imagine.

The term also made me think of all the adults who are posting about children in their online interactions. They may or may not be blood relations. They may or may not be a family. They may be entrusted with the safety and well being of the child for part of the day. What information are the adults divulging that is detrimental to the safety of the children in their care? Many of us think long and hard before doing anything to compromise the identities of the children in our care.

One day I decided that if we are asking children to have trusted adults, we should step up to the plate and trust the children as well. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not advocating letting them cross the street alone or make unguided decisions about meal choices. Yet children are worthy of trust and need to have opportunities to rise to the expectations. That is why you will see me post about my trusted teen (TT), my trusted middle-schooler (TMS), my trusted kindergartener (TK), my trusted preschooler (TPSK) and my trusted toddler (TTOD). I’m thinking about posting about my trusted retiree (TR) as well.

It sounds silly when you put them all together this way, but I feel we should be consistent with the terms we expect children to use and the terms we use to post about them. I want children to hear that they are worthy of trust, to feel empowered and to learn that they are not just helpless, dependent beings. They are also capable of being trusted, being dependable and being active members of their community. I also want them to know that I care about their privacy and safety. The best way I can let them know it is to demonstrate it in the way I share information related to them.

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 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.

Affirmation

Today as she was leaving the library with a book precariously held under her left arm, a spunky kindergarten girl pointed her finger straight at me and proclaimed "You're a good person and a nice librarian, Ms. Shoup." 


That was better than any present she could have wrapped and tied with a bow. 

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.

Kids do Caldecott

Every year around this time I introduce my kindergarten classes to the Caldecott Medal. The introduction includes my drawing a representation on the whiteboard, detailing all the elements on the medal and then quizzing them on each element and how many items of each there are. It's always amazing to see how much they pay attention and retain. Later when they pick out their books they can't control their excitement when they find a book with the medal on the front.

About a week later I do a review in which I ask them to tell me all about the medal using leading questions. This week when I asked the name of the medal, two students gave me answers which made me squeal with delight. One student told me it is called the "Caldegold" Medal. He remembered the beginning and the color of the Medal winner. The other student told me that it was called the "Medalcott" which I found equally entrancing. It is amazing that they can remember the name at all, but hearing how they are connecting this medal to the words they know is inspiring.

Later when I asked who gets the medal one student jumped up yelling "I know. It's the punisher." I had to explain that another Medal, the Batchelder Medal, goes to the publisher, but the Caldecott goes to the illustrator.

Finally, when I tried to trick them by showing a book with a Theodore Seuss Geisel Award on the front one student said "Hey, that's not the Caldecott. There's just an old guy on it."

It took a thunderbolt

Last week we had really terrible thunderstorms in our area. As the thunder and lightning grew closer together the walls shook more violently. Suddenly the two joined the fire alarm and there was nothing for it but to evacuate with purse, family members and a couple of laptops. It was 2:45 a.m. About an hour and a half later, we carried those items back into our home and attempted sleep. Unfortunately, that left me about half an hour before I needed to get up. As I slogged through my commute, I thought about how scared some of my students would be. It seemed that reading some of my favorite storm books would be in order. My two favorite books about lightning are Thundercake by Patricia Polacco and Dragon is Coming by Valeri Gorbachev

I prefaced the lesson by asking students to raise their hands if they had not slept well the night before. Most of them raised their hands. I plowed ahead naively asking what had kept them up. The answers started out with “the t.v. was too loud”. By the time the answers made it to “my sister/brother was snoring” I had caught on. Only one child had mentioned the storm.

I was not brilliant on that day. I did not move fast nor did I always follow what people were saying to me. I would have been happy to have someone tell me to put my head on the table and take a break. Concentration was not easy. Somehow, though, I began to think of what performing in school would be like for a six year old who didn’t get enough sleep. How easy would it be for a child who regularly doesn’t get enough sleep?

I don’t have any answers, but I do think I woke up that day when I made the electric connection.

Reupholstering an old friend

One of my favorite children has a bunny. A soiled and worn bunny. The child is now a teen and the bunny is now a senior citizen. I’m thinking that the rules that apply to dogs’ ages must also apply to stuffed animals. The time had come for that makeover which was long overdue. I knew the job needed doing last year, but I couldn’t find the right fabric for the job. When the bunny was new, her fur was pink and fuzzy. She had developed a coffee colored patina. One day as I slipped my Land’s End angel fur fleece over my head a light bulb went off. The fleece jacket was so soft and just the right kind of pale pink for the job. I promised myself that I could buy a new one someday. The stuffing coming out of pink bunny’s feet meant that she could wait no longer.

So the last two weekends I spent giving Pink Bunny a makeover. Why do this? Pink Bunny is a great comfort to her friend. She is also the object of many stories. Stories which are important to not only my young friend, but also to me. Communal storytelling has its own rules.

So on a Friday night I began dismantling Pink Bunny. Carefully I slipped the pointed blades of my German sewing scissors into a seam that was starting to wiggle free. I freed the beginning of a seam and gently opened it to the end. As each piece was detached, I pinned a label onto it as a reference for later. Each label included all information needed “Right leg, right side”. Each piece was then washed by hand to rid it of grime and germs. Though I had planned to iron the pieces, I found that they felted when I did so. In the end, letting them air dry made more sense.

Meanwhile I cut apart my Land’s End sweater and ironed lightweight interfacing to it. It gave it just enough body to make it more manageable. I made patterns of each and every piece (just in case). Then I basted each piece to the new fabric and cut around the edges. It was VERY important that the old Pink Bunny be encased in the new one. Finally, the pieces were sewn together. Sewing through that many layers of fabric was a daunting task for my old sewing machine. The sewing machine had to be cleaned several times. Between the fuzz that shed into the machine during the process and the shear thickness of the pieces, the machine needed a bit of TLC. It took two weeks, but I was able to finish the project. The eyes were a challenge to remove, but easy to restore.

The restored Pink Bunny is much firmer than before. She is soft, solid and no longer soiled. You hear stories of people doing this sort of operation only to have the child reject the item for its lack of authenticity. So with fear and trembling I passed Pink Bunny back to her owner. I need not have feared the rejection, nor the need for the extra stuffing. Pinky is already considerably flatter than when I handed her over. There was a lot of hugging to catch up on.

Pink Bunny is ready to star in many more adventures to come. The stories, whether they are written down or spoken into the wind, will continue to amuse and delight.