A thousand thoughts lying within…

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I was attracted to the book because of its title: Creative Power: The Nurture of Children’s Writing, by Ronald L. Cramer. That title makes me wish I had written that book!  I bought it and read it, and I keep going back to it… to renew my courage for making bold statements such as…

Thinking is part of writing, and writing is thinking.

Children come wired for writing.

Our job is not so much teaching writing as it is discovering children’s writing ability.

Cramer isn’t afraid to say it, and does so right up front, in the beginning of his first chapter:

            “Writing emerges from the crib with the first thought, the first sound uttered, the first mark scribbled.”

             Cramer goes on to make a wonderful case about the fact that “writing facilitates thinking,” and as such, it is “the supreme intellectual achievement of humankind” (p. 2). And then he presents five characteristics of writing that influence thinking:

1.    Writing is visible.  This means it can be manipulated to help us discover relationships among ideas we might have missed if thought depended only on verbal expression.

2.    Writing is permanent. While oral language un-captured is soon forgotten, writing “leaps the bonds of time and space.”  Cramer says writing gives “eternal life” to our words and ideas.  He says “Writing is the repository of humanity’s accumulated knowledge.”

3.    Writing is active. Cramer says it is a “search for meaning” requiring the fullest possible use of mental capacity.  It requires physical action, including “handwriting, spelling, punctuation, depressing keys on a typewriter or computer, erasing, crossing out, rereading, rewriting.”

4.    Writing is precise. While it is not inherently precise because of how it is subject to the actions and understandings of the sender and the receiver, it does “discipline the mind into precise formulation of its thoughts.”

5.    Writing focuses thinking.  Cramer says that the writing process “enables us to summon thoughts out of darkness and into light.”

“Language is a miracle…” says Cramer (p. 5) and as a pivotal event in a child’s life, the acquisition of it cannot help but make us want to know how it happens. And, he spends the rest of his first chapter briefly reviewing how the major theorists of child development and learning back this up.

I was so enamored by these lofty ideas that I had to find out more about this author, Ronald L. Cramer.  I googled him.  (Yes, really! And I found a photo, plus a long and distinguished list of his credits).  He is impressive, as the documentation of his career shows, but I found the best indication of his “teacher-heartedness” and proof that we are kindred spirits when I went back to the preface of the book I have discussed in this blog.  I may be in trouble for quoting so much of his preface, but I’m telling you, my heart just sings when I read his words:

I believe children are creative; I believe that creativity is as natural to children as breathing. I also believe that its manifestations are often kept under lock and key, that children are reluctant to exhibit their creative instincts if they suspect their gifts will not be well received, it they sense hostility, if they sense indifference.  Good teachers strive to unlock children’s creative potential; they understand that the mind and spirit of a child is as fragile as it is malleable. Children are artists of language, not language scholars. They use language not to impress but to express. Given a little fall of rain from a fine teacher, children can make the flowers grow (p. xiv).

Doesn’t that just make you want to be a “fine teacher”… one that can offer a “little fall of rain”?  Here’s more:

All children possess creative potential; it is resident in them from the beginning, but too often it is creative power unrealized. Someone has to tell them; someone has to apprise them of their ‘wonderful ideas.’ Someone has to entice talent out of the closets of children’s minds (p. xiii). 

 Well, he had me back at “the mind and spirit of a child is as fragile as it is malleable.” But here’s where I leave him with you:

And who might that someone be? Teachers, parents, peers, but especially teachers. It is our mission; it is our sacred duty (p. xiii).

 Amen!

This is the classroom I’m dreaming of…

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Imagine writing at the heart of classroom life… teacher and students valuing themselves and each other on paper… Can you imagine it!  Imagine how books and reading are second nature to these children, instead of a “subject” that has to be scheduled, grouped and graded. Authors in this classroom are friends and mentors, and in this place, children seek them out, write letters to them, get to know them and emulate them. This is the classroom I dream of. This is the classroom I would give up my office, my Ph.D. diploma, and my rank and tenured position for. If I thought I could find it, create it, observe it, support it, and help it thrive… I’d be there.  I mean it! Why is this so hard to find? Does anyone out there know a classroom like the one I have described?

 Oh, I know that by the time kids roll into high school, writing has become, for some of them, a measure of prowess. Not for all of them, though, because I still read more than a fair share of college papers that wouldn’t pass 9th grade English comp. The fact is, many intelligent, articulate people (including adults!) seem to enjoy preserving much of themselves on paper. Some types of writing may have increased because of texting, blogging, and every other technological form of literacy we have witnessed over the past 20 years, but since most classrooms around here still rely heavily on papers and pencils, I still lament this sad state of writelessness.  

I’m going to go out on a limb here.  I’m going to be bold.  I’m going to stick my neck out on this issue.  Here goes: elementary teachers (even kindergarten teachers) who neglect or underestimate what kind of writing and how much writing children are capable of and, elementary teachers who are quietly or secretly holding out for when technology takes over and makes writing instruction an extinct practice and a non-issue for them, really ought to get out of the classroom.  Really, I wish they would! Get with it or get out of it.

Here’s the saddest truth, and the biggest waste of classroom time I know: children can think. What they think, they can say. What they can say, they can draw, and what they can draw, they can write. When they do a lot of this thinking, talking, drawing, writing and sharing in an environment where they consistently feel inspired, validated and empowered, they quickly become good at thinking and writing, or thinking and drawing and writing. I am not talking about children sitting in a classroom and being coerced, pushed, drilled or required to fill in the blanks or to copy mundane gibberish that is composed and produced by grown ups. I am talking about watching and listening as their teachers and their friends, who are their own size (or slightly taller in the classrooms down the hall), talk and draw and write, and share what they’ve written. I’m talking about where books are read and celebrated, and where book authors become as real to the children as their own friends and neighbors are, and where the books discussed and analyzed copied in ways that would very much flatter the authors, were they there to witness the work. I’m talking about classrooms where children are, as I said before, validated, inspired, and empowered as writers, and then very clearly celebrated as such. Yes!  Imagine writing at the heart of the classroom.

Posted by Nancy Peterson, Professor of Teacher Education, Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah & Co-Chair of UVU’s Forum on Engaged Reading

Librarians Work Magic!

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Libraries are magical places. I have childhood memories of losing track of time while reading through several books and magazines, sitting in a corner of a library.  I also have more recent memories of that… days when my husband took the kids and I took the keys, and drove to the library.  Sometimes I was in search of a skill, sometimes an escape, sometimes a recipe, and sometimes… I didn’t know what I needed.  I always found it, though.  Because libraries are magical places.

Jan Pinborough’s book celebrates the magic of librarians in history… and one children’s librarian in particular, in her wonderful new picture book, Miss Moore Thought Otherwise: How Anne Carroll Moore Created Libraries for Children, published this month by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Because of Anne Carroll Moore, and other forward-thinking women in her day and through the years, children and teenagers have a place to come where there are resources they can use and borrow, for free, as well as someone to show them how to use them, and give them ideas about where to look for more information, or what to read next.

Librarians work magic! Some that I have seen certainly do, anyway! I discovered magic in the Ann Arbor, Michigan Public Library in 1985 on Thursday afternoons at 2:00, during “Mommy and Me” story time.  I sat cross-legged on the floor behind my two-year-old daughter, who could hardly contain herself sitting on my lap to watch Miss Susan, that magical librarian lead us in puppet shows, sing-alongs, finger-plays as she read aloud wonderful picture books week after week.  My two-year-old turned into 5-year-old who insisted on 20 new books every Monday at the San Antonio, Texas public Library, and confidently informed Miss Linda the Librarian that there was no need to go to school because we had the library and her – Miss Linda!

Magic happens every time the Provo Library at Academy Square puts on an event… in fact, a great “disappearing act” occurs every time event tickets become available, thanks to the incredible reputation of their programs and family literacy series events.  Any Fairy Princess who has appeared before H.R.H. the Fairy King (a.k.a. Library Director, Gene Nelson) leaves with much more than fairy dust on her wings and the love of books in her heart.

 

Yes, librarians work magic.  They create and maintain places for children or teenagers, or adults to feed our imaginations, to broaden our understandings of the world, and to create dreams and goals for ourselves that take us beyond the four walls of homes and classrooms and even the libraries in which we find ourselves.  Who is a librarian who has worked magic in your life, or in your child’s life?  Consider nominating that librarian for our Engaged Librarian Award, and return some magic back again!  It’s easy… just follow this link, and let the magic follow its course!

Posted by Nancy Peterson, Ed.D. Professor of Teacher Education at Utah Valley University, Orem, UT

Finding Papa and Mama… (Guest Blogger -Axel Ramirez)

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Ever since I was in elementary school I have had a fascination with the Great Brain series of books by John Dennis Fitzgerald. I think it all started in 5th grade when a friend suggested the books to me.  What would compel young boys in East Los Angeles to read a book about Mormon and Catholic kids in Utah during Utah’s Wild West period? I’m still not sure, perhaps it is the love between Mama and Papa; perhaps it is the hilarious and touching issues of religious diversity; perhaps it is the draw of a family that sticks together no matter what. I don’t know. All I know is that I grew up with the Great Brain and his family. His family became my family. They were my companions as I moved to Utah.  The only part of Utah that felt at all like home for the first few months was the one I imagined existed somewhere in Adenville, Utah, home of the Great Brain. Those characters were my Utah companions until I found real Mormon kid companions of my own.

Around the time I moved to Utah I also found out that there was a trilogy of books featuring the grown up characters in the Great Brain series: Papa Married a Mormon, Mama’s Boarding House and Uncle Will and the Fitzgerald Curse.  I couldn’t wait to read them and have read the latter two dozens of times each but I’ve read Papa Married a Mormon over a hundred times. At times in my youth, Mama and Papa were the best examples of love and stability in parents that I had ever personally witnessed.    As a result, I am trying to start my own tradition similar to the Fitzgeralds in the book, the passing down of a middle name to the males in the family. I gave both my biological sons the same middle name as mine and hope they will do the same with their sons.  And, for some strange reason, all my children have taken to calling me Papa instead of Dad.  

Last year my youngest came home during 5th grade beaming about the Great Brain series that her teacher was reading to her; I knew it was time to revisit my old friends in Adenville, Utah. For those of us who love the series of books there is a mystery that has always been somewhat solved, but not to full satisfaction.

The question remains, just where in Utah did the book really take place, because Adenville, Utah has never existed? In other words, what real town did the author use as the basis for all the hijinks and drama?  In the series and in the adult books Adenville is in southern Utah, next to the fictional mining town of Silverlode. The current city of Leeds, Utah sort of fits because it is in southern Utah, named after an early pioneer, and is directly next to a mining town named Silver Reef, which had a Catholic Church in the late 1800s. However, the author has been reported to have grown up, at least part of the time, in Price, Utah.  After searching for more clues the best theory is that the author, ever so wonderfully, combined the 1800s diversity found in the mining camps of southern Utah with the diversity found in the mining city of Price, Utah to create Adenville.

To make this theory come alive to my daughter, she and I drove to Leeds, Utah and the old mining town of Silver Reef and used our reader’s imagination to discuss possible geographical connections to the books. We strolled through the Catholic and
Protestant cemeteries, the old boardwalks, the Wells Fargo building, the site of the old Catholic church, and just imagined ourselves with the characters.  The next weekend we drove to Price, Utah to put the finishing piece on our quest — finding where the real Mama and Papa are buried.  We strolled through the Price cemetery and discussed the diversity in the tombstones, the Masonic symbols, the miners, and the children. Finally, we found them — Mama and Papa resting in peace, side by side.   More alive than ever.

Axel Donizetti Ramirez is Associate Professor of Teacher Education in the School of Education at Utah Valley University.

Write on… for the love of writing!

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Many children come to us less motivated to write than they are to read. This is probably because they are less likely to have witnessed writing for pleasure or writing for the purpose of accomplishing something important to them, than they are likely to witness reading for those purposes.  Whoa!  That worries me, and it serves a powerful wake up call to those of us who are passionate about a love for reading and for its literacy sister, writing!  So, let me unpack that sentence and some ramifications of it: many children are even less motivated to write than they are to read. We have long known that many reluctant readers are that way because they lack reading models in their lives – important people they care about, who they see also care about reading, and who they have witnessed reading for the pleasure of it. Similarly, many children are reluctant to write, and perhaps hesitant to see themselves as writers, because they haven’t witnessed others writing for the enjoyment of it, or they haven’t seen others writing in order to accomplish something that is important or valuable, or powerful. This is one of the saddest stories I ever have to tell my students (pre-service teachers)! It simply should not be! All children possess creative potential, from the very beginning of their conscious lives. They are naturally curious and innately full of wonderings and imaginings. But far too often their creativity is unrealized power because no one has shown them it is there. No one has asked them what they are thinking. No one has given them the words to use, nor shown them how to put those words down on paper.  Sometimes children are given words, but they are someone else’s words, and they aren’t natural words, or fun words.  Sometimes they are “fit-in-the-box words,” or “fill-in-the-blank words,” or “spell-it-correctly” words, with little thought about what wonderful composing the child might have in mind for his own words.

If there is no one in a child’s life who has invited those unrealized dreams, those amazing ideas and incredible talents out into the open in the form of wonderful words on paper — out into the light, forever — well, a child just might decide that writing is not a pleasant task, not something she gets to do or wants to do, but rather, just another “school” thing that she has to do.  How lucky are the children who have a savvy loved one with a knack for these kinds of things… maybe an innate sense of it being the right thing to do, or who stumbles across the beauty of it by accident.  It should especially be happening, on purpose and by design, in classrooms.  It should be a top priority… a side-by-side mission with learning and loving to read, in every year of school… for the love of reading and for the love of writing.

What can we do about this?  That is, what can we who are in a mentoring, parenting, teaching, or caring capacity with children and want to do something about this, do about this?  I say, let’s write on. Just as reading for the love of it is the best thing we can do to help our children see the value in reading, writing for enjoyment and purpose is the best thing we can do to help them understand the value, the wonder, even the magic of writing. So… write on!

 I’m not really changing the subject now, so stay with me for a moment… I think you’ll get my point. My sister-in-law Karen lives by the philosophy that you can always comfort others… even win them over, with fresh, wholesome and delectably prepared food, and boy oh boy, can she ever cook up the comfort!  I love to spend time with Karen in her kitchen, and I have spent hours there, working side by side with her, learning to create some wonderful, refreshing dishes. This past summer Karen visited me in my kitchen, and left me this sign that says “Love people.  Cook them tasty food.”  So now, every time I look at those words I think of Karen, of comfort and love, and how I want to provide that for those around me.  So, I say, “write on.”  I’m making a bumper sticker…  no, I think I’ll call it a filing cabinet sticker, or a bulleting-board-above-the-desk sticker: Love kids. Teach them wondrous words.  Come on, my friends! Let them see you writing and loving it!  Let them hear the words and feel the magic – for the love of writing!

Every child deserves to find herself beautifully portrayed upon the pages of a book…

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I’m changing subjects just a bit… away from Valentine’s Day, but not so far from love. This is because something else that I love a lot has been on my mind lately… that is, picture books on whose pages Children of Color find themselves portrayed, and see their beauty in realism and truth and self-respect – and where children with less variety of pigment to hair and skin and eyes, see children of color as subjects of the world’s finest art and prose and poetry.  Without time and space to share all of my favorites, I present my most recent discoveries, as well as my most long-held favorites, and only briefly share my journey of discovery of this world of appreciation.  

I had no understanding of this exchange between the 3-year-old little girl and her mother sitting across from me as I held my feverish 10-month-old in the waiting room at the doctor’s office. This was more than twenty years ago, when I could still claim the title of “young mother.”  The little girl brought an open magazine over to her mommy to show her the dolly she would like to have. Mommy ripped that magazine out of the little girl’s hands and threw it onto the pile of magazines on a table a few feet a way, yelling, “Don’t you come bringing no white baby over here! You know you not going to get no white trash baby!” I didn’t have any frame of reference or understanding for that exchange.  I was sad and afraid for the little girl because of the angry yelling, and the look of rage in the mother’s eyes.  But I didn’t know what to think of the “white trash” baby doll, as I held my own little baby.        

Years later I would read Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, and take my first step toward an epiphanal journey in coming to understand just a little bit, the heart and soul of that mother in the doctor’s office, that day.  I would also come to notice so many things that were unfair but unnoticed around me, such as calling that one particular color of nylon stockings “nude,” that one crayon “flesh; or the unfairness of my neighbor in West Virginia having to drive 60 miles to get hair product that would work for her hair.  So in order to surround my students, and my future grandchildren with beauty in realism and self-respect in a variety of color of skin and eyes, and texture of hair, and wonderful prose and poetry and truth, I will keep looking for brilliant authors and illustrators, and I will celebrate their work and their talents, and they way they show me the world. As I looked for just the right book to end this with, I found it…  well, I should say, I found the author.  It was Nikki Grimes.  I’ve been collecting her poetry books, her picture book biographies — pretty-much everything I can get my hands on that she writes. I thought I might try to find just one of her poems, perhaps from Thanks a Million, so I did a search on the internet.  What a found instead was her website, and even better — her blog. So here, at the end of my blog post, I introduce you to hers — Nikki Grimes. Please take the time to go to Nikki’s blog and read what she posted on December 21, 2012. Thanks to Nikki Grimes, I found myself, and the feelings of my heart, beautifully portrayed upon the pages of her blog.  I think you might find something of yourself there, too.  Don’t you just love how books and writers and illustrators can do that for us? Don’t you just want to share that with the young people in your life?

 

One really unique tradition keeps us looking forward to February — Our Valentine’s Book Tradition!

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Valentine’s Day is one of our family’s favorite holidays.  Certainly we all love the obvious perks of the day – candy, love notes, balloons, and of course, chocolate!  But there is also one really unique tradition that keeps us looking forward to this winter holiday throughout the year.  It is our Valentine’s Book Tradition.     

Valentine’s Day actually begins the night before.  At bedtime, everyone finds a breakfast invitation and menu on his/her pillow.  Each order is taken and left on the kitchen counter.  The next morning, the smell of breakfast deliciousness wakes us.  The kitchen is decorated in balloons and streamers, special dishes and place settings are on the table.  But the most anticipated part of the morning is the gift that is sitting on each plate.   On each plate is a gift card to a local bookstore. A gift card, you say?  Why so special?   That evening we all go to Barnes and Noble to peruse the shelves, looking for the perfect Valentine book to take home.  

When we first enter, we tend to stay together, enjoying whatever catches our eye.  After a while though, we seem to all find our own quiet space throughout the store.  I love looking through the magazines, while my daughter loves the children’s section where the latest picture books are brightly displayed.  My son recently got an e-reader for Christmas and is ever looking for a new book to download.  Interestingly, although he wants to read electronically now, he still makes his selections among the colorful covers and crackling pages of the books on the shelves.  There is always something for everyone at the bookstore!  We even indulge at the in-store café having a light snack as we read. 

We love this tradition and look forward to it every year.  I find my kids even in July, planning which book they will get next Valentine’s Day.    

Posted by Lorilynn Brandt

Sending out Valentines of a different kind…

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This year I’m sending Valentines of a different kind…  love letters to a few authors of books for young people that have made me stop and think, “Wow, I love you for saying that!”   I’m sending out what I’m calling “Book-Love” Valentines. My Book-Love Valentine list isn’t nearly as long as my Happy-Holidays card list – which is a good thing because I didn’t even get those cards into their envelopes! But there are a few authors… whose picture books or young adult novels I will forever hold to my heart, for one reason or another (I should say, one child, or one student or another). These authors will be my Book-Love Valentine recipients.

I hope authors hear this kind of thing all of the time, even if it’s not in the form of a Valentine or “love letter.” I do know, in fact, that some of the funniest author talks are when they read letters they’ve received from their adoring fans between the ages of seven and thirteen.   I wonder if I can figure out a way to write a Book-Love Letter in a meaningful way – something that an author would be happy to receive, and not think it was a joke.  (I would just die if I were sitting in an audience and heard my Book-Love Letter read out loud as humorous entertainment!  No, this has to be good! 

Here are a couple of drafts.  What you think?

Dear Sara Pennypacker,
          I wish you lots of love and lovely thoughts this Valentines Day, because you’ve given me (and my students) such wonderful thoughts and discussions as we have gotten acquainted with your darling character, Clementine!  I, with my students, have giggled over her fresh view of her world, and her fearless love of words and ideas, and her ability to always say what she thinks and hopes and worries about.  Every time I read Clementine, I giggle, and I even shed a few tears about her patient and good-natured teachers, and her tender and loving parents.  I just have to tell you that my students and I love you for your writing because through Clementine, we think we are a little better at teaching and parenting than we were before we knew her… and you.

Dear Eileen Spinelli,
I hope your Valentines Day is filled with love and brownies and cards and letters from all the people you love, and even some you don’t know – like me!  I want to tell you about how your book, When You Are Happy has created such a loving bond between me and a grown-up daughter with whom I’ve had some rough road in healing a relationship.  The two of us just seemed to keep “missing” each other, when it came to matters of the heart.  But when we shared your book, and pretended to be younger versions of ourselves for those few moments, we did feel happy! We both knew, again, that there was no one else who knew just the right thing to say, just the way to be, or just the right moment that would heal our hearts… but somehow your book reminded us that we have felt something very much like we this.  We love you for that!

Okay, you get the idea.  I think I need to just get busy and write, now.  It’s kind of personal, this business of writing love letters – even Book-Love letters!  But I will share with you a portion of my list (in no particular order):  Maryann Cusimano Love, Karin Cates, Kadir Nelson, Steve Jensen (Yes, his nonfiction has stirred my soul!), Doreen Rappaport, Jerry Spinelli, Shannon Hale, Carol Lynch Williams…  Oh my goodness!  This could very possibly be as long as my Happy-Holidays card list! 

Posted by Nancy Peterson

Just lucky to get an “I Love You” in edgewise…

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As a co-chair of the 2013 Forum on Engaged Reading, it’s my privilege to blog “For the Love of Reading.” I’ve been soaking up a wonderful book that makes me stop at just about every-other page and say, “I wish I had written this!” In the
introduction to What to Read When (Penguin, 2009), Pam Allyn tugs at my heart strings with these words:

Everyday as you pack a lunch, wave good-bye to a school bus, tie a shoelace, braid a ponytail, the words you want to say to your child hum inside:

I love you, be safe,
I love you, be free.
I love you, I love you, I love you,
let the world treat you kindly, come back to me.
Here are the values of my life, our family, here is what I hope for you,
here is what I dream for you.

And yet, for most of us, too many moments slip by and we’re lucky to get an “I love you” in edgewise.” The good news, wondrously, is that the world is full of literature written by people who know you are longing to make connections and are striving to put a voice to them. (Pam Allyn in What to Read When, p. 6)

My own grown children recently validated my longing to know if I had done enough. Over the years I have felt various waves of regret for perhaps not having done enough, not having told them enough, nor loved them enough.  But, on December 25th they gave my husband and me the most beautiful gift we could ever have imagined – a “Family Treasure Chest,” they called it.  It was a 12 inch by 12 inch, 2 inch thick, cream colored, bound leather volume, tied with a cream colored ribbon.  After the first golden title page (“Peterson Family Treasure Book 2012”), and a page of “credits” stating that “Mom gave us wings to fly… Dad lit the sky to help us find the way…” they filled the book with a page for each of the books we read to them and the songs we sang to them that had mattered to them in their lives.

Our oldest daughter is completing a master’s degree at Georgetown University while working full time in that busy metropolitan area as a single young woman.  She loved all of the books of Anne of Green Gables by L. M. Montgomery, and related how she became Anne and lived by her many philosophical gems, such as,

“Oh, it’s delightful to have ambitions. I’m so glad I have such a lot. And there never seems to be any end to them – that’s the best of it. Just as soon as you attain to one ambition you see another one glittering higher up still. It does make life so interesting.”

My second daughter is one month away from delivering my first grandchild, and the book memory she wrote about was when we all piled on the bed for me to read North to Freedom by Anne Holm (later changed to I Am David). She explained how fascinated she was to listen to a the experience of a 12 year old boy – older than herself – see and smell and taste an orange for the very first time, and how it opened her eyes to discovering beauty in a world that had, for him, been full of suffering.  She has since seen places of suffering first-hand, and been part of healing processes as well. She read North to Freedom to her husband, and they will carry the tradition to their own family.

Ella Enchanted by Gail Carson Levine, Goose Girl by Shannon Hale, and several of the “Alice” books by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor were all fond memories of my 25-year-old daughter.  She felt lucky to be growing up while I was teaching a children’s literature course so that she benefited from my needing to stay on top of some of the new looks being published at the time!  What she didn’t remember until I reminded her was that I got some of my reading list from her, such as Running Out of Time by Margaret Peterson Haddix.  I found her huddled in the corner of her bedroom, having just finished that book, looking up at me and pleading, “Mom, I have to find another book like this one!”  I read it myself that very night.

And the last book page in this treasure chest was from my son, whose read-aloud experience was initiated by him rather than me.  He came to me carrying the Harry Potter books; “Mom, we have to read these.  Every one is, and they are so good.  Can we, please?”  How could I turn that down?  After the first four books, however, he didn’t have the patience to wait for our read-aloud sessions, and forged ahead on his own, and then on into the Eragon books, and the Lightening Thief, and the The Hobbit, and so forth.  He’s writing his own fantasy trilogy now.

So, I’m thinking, it may have been enough after all.  They said I gave them “wings to fly.”  I guess I was one of the lucky ones – to get an “I love you” in edgewise.

Posted by Nancy Peterson

 

Why “For the LOVE of Reading”?

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One of our favorite bloggers, Brian Wilhorn, says that once teachers ensure kids aren’t illiterate, they need to ensure they aren’t alliterate. His goal, and ours as UVU’s Forum on Engaged Reading, is to get the best books into kids’ hands – books they’ll want to read without being told to read.

In his stirring book, Igniting a Passion for Reading: Successful Strategies for Building Lifetime Readers, (Stenhouse, 2009) last year’s Forum speaker, Steve Layne, quotes a reading methods textbook written 100 years ago: “It should be the teacher’s aim to give every child a love of reading, a hunger for it that will stay with him through all the years of his life” (p. 6).

A recently published book looks at what teachers of adolescents can do, and inspires us in ways similar to how Steve Layne’s book has inspired the elementary crowd. In Book Love: Developing Depth, Stamina, and Passion in Adolescent Readers (Stenhouse, 2012), Penny Kittle makes a powerful case for stepping up our efforts to put the right books in the hands of teenagers and help them have “healing” book experiences that show them how books really can change their lives forever.

These ideas are are what the UVU Forum on Engaged Reading is all about – helping us all — parents, librarians, and educators at every level, to instill a life-long love of reading in the lives of the young people we care about.

The Forum Planning Committee members continue to search out the books, the blogs, and the national bylines for the movers and shakers who can inspire us to do this in more ways, in bigger ways, and in better ways than ever before.  We hope you’ll join us for a retreat, a renewal, and a recommitment to this cause at our new location – the Chateaux in Deer Valley, Utah.  And we’re convening at a new time – just as the leaves are turning from green to gold, and just as our children and students are turning from the green fields of summer to the golden pages of autumn.  Join us September 19th & 20th for the best of what’s new in books and their creators, for the best of how to get good books into the hands and hearts of those we love, and especially, just for the love of reading.

Posted by Nancy Peterson