It’s not too late for a few summer literacy ideas

Several times, I’ve pointed out the Reading Rockets site from WETA Public TV as a good place for library folks who work with kids to visit. I wanted to point out a couple of worthwhile articles on Reading Rockets that you might find worth a read.

One is called “Making Reading Relevant: Read, Learn, and Do!” For adults working with K-3 kids, it offers several activities that turn what’s in a book into a real experience. Don’t pass up any chance to let parents and other caregivers know that “making reading relevant,” putting printed words together with large motor skill activities and 3-D objects, is one of the most important things they can do - especially for boys, who are often behind girls in language development skills, and especially for kids whose parents have less education.

Making reading “relevant” makes the difference between a child who gives up on reading by the fourth grade and one who becomes fascinated with learning about new things through print.

Here’s another, called “Use Summer Fun to Build Background Knowledge.” One of the biggest problems children from lower-income families face in school is a lack of “background knowledge” - the basic information about how the world works that many school lessons, and books, assume that children of a particular age already have. But not all - particularly those kids who have gained most of what they know sitting and watching cartoons on video most days - may know things such as that the earth rotates around the sun and the moon around the earth, or how plants grow from seeds.

If you haven’t looked at Reading Rockets yet, pay a visit. It’s a great way to pick up lots of child development and literacy tidbits - the kind you can pick up and then pass along - quickly and pretty painlessly.

 

My third (and last) ALA conference post

I’m back from ALA, and I have to go back to work today. But before I do I wanted to post a few more quotes from the ALA conference. And I also wanted to give a cheer for our book cart drill team - the Austin Public Library Bibliofiles - which won the silver at the Book Cart Drill Team Championships on Sunday. (That’s them on the left.) They won a Demco book cart (yeah, that’s it in the picture) that was painted silver, with a little plaque on one end.

The Championship was MC’d by the comedy duo of John Scieszka and Mo Willems, who hammed it up shamelessly and had us all chanting “DEM-co!” (Demco sponsors the Championship) throughout. It was great to watch our homies place as we cheered them on. (Those book headdresses spin, by the way.)

I saw that Alan Sitomer, Los Angeles media specialist and YA author, was giving a program on encouraging boys to read, so of course I was there. He works in an inner-city high school with kids that are almost entirely Latino and Black, and they’re kids who many adults consider not worth spending much time or effort on. These kids are often mouthy or unmotivated. But Sitomer, who could be one of the dictionary definitions of the word “enthusiastic” (he was named California Teacher of the Year, and you can tell he really enjoys public speaking), told us, “You have to believe that kids are reachable. If you don’t, nothing will reach them.”

He uses computer time, Web resources, and any technology he can to get the young men he works with to read. But he also uses something as simple as handing out jokes, printed on paper. He said that when the more motivated students start laughing, the less motivated will read them, too. (Warning - the following jokes are boy jokes):

Q. Why do gorillas have big nostrils?

A. Because they have big fingers.

Q. What’s the difference between roast beef and pea soup?

A. Anyone can roast beef.

Q. What do you call a hunk of cheddar that doesn’t belong to you?

A. Nacho cheese.

Sitomer says that for this group, many of whom are one bad grade or boring class from dropping out, he doesn’t try to tell them what they must do. “I let them tell me what they like,” he says, “and then I build bridges for them from their outside interests to what’s in the media center.”

I also went to hear T. Berry Brazelton, the Grand Poo-Bah of Pediatricians, who spoke Monday morning. He sat thoughout his talk, and seemed a little hard of hearing - but that wasn’t unexpected after he told us that he had just turned 90. (He said that members of Congress held a celebration for him in Washington, and “they asked me what I wanted for my birthday. I asked for $2 billion for children and their parents.” Ah, we wish.)

Brazelton said that the most important role for the public library should be to help parents understand child development. Anything librarians can supply and market to parents - books, videos, and programs - that will help them comprehend the ages and stages their children are passing through will help them feel more in control of what can be a stressful and confusing process.

He showed us a wonderful film clip of a 12-month-old boy who was passing through a phase Brazelton called “storage.” Brazelton kept handing the boy small toy figures, and after he filled his hands with them, he took them into his mouth, and then looked at his mother as if to say, “Aren’t I so great?” It was a lot of fun.

If you’ve never been to an ALA conference, go when you can. It’s a wonderful way to expand your “box.” (You know, the one they’re always telling you to think out of.)

 

Getting men involved in literacy

We all know that kids often admire the men in their lives - and often it’s because men possess the mystery and charm that comes from keeping a greater distance than the many women in most kids’ day-to-day existences. For boys in particular, it means that whatever these men do, the kids will take seriously.

Because many men aren’t enthusiastic readers, and in particular not readers of books, boys often will quickly get the message that reading isn’t a thing that men do. The Reading Rockets site from WETA Public Television recently posted two pages of tips on ways for men to encourage children’s literacy. Here’s one, and here’s another from the National Literacy Trust in the UK. These pages were created with fathers in mind, but not all kids have fathers who play active roles in their lives. Depending on the family situation, moms’ boyfriends, or children’s uncles, grandfathers, and male family friends can fill this role, too.

The most important part of this message, though, applies to all of us who spend time around kids, and is titled “Walk the walk”:

Your child learns from what you do. Make sure the messages you are sending about reading tell your child that knowledge and literacy are valuable, achievable, and powerful.

All men who interact, even in small ways, with children need to get this message. It’s harder for those of us in public libraries to talk and work directly with the men we need most to reach - the ones who aren’t readers, yet have children at home. Any time we have the opportunity to speak with them, we should make it a priority.

 

An utterly cool and demi-godly T-shirt

If any of you are fans of the Rick Riordan Percy Jackson series, the way I am, you’ll want to visit the Boys Rule Boys Read! blog run by a couple of guys at the Charlotte-Mecklenburg County (NC) Library to read the story of a program they’ve done to celebrate the series. Anyone attending the Percy Jackson Summer Book Club program will get one of these utterly cool T-shirts that say (in case you can’t read it on the photo) “Demigod in Training,” and if you know the Percy Jackson series, you know what that means.

What’s even cooler is that these T-shirts were donated by a Charlotte local who wanted to help out the Charlotte-Mecklenburg County staff. What a great thing, what a great shirt, and what a great help that is for the library. I hope everyone who reads this has someone in their community who is willing to do cool things like this for the library and the kids who use it.

 

Reading Rockets and summer reading

Now that we’ve reached Memorial Day weekend and we’re on the cusp of summer, it’s - of course - time to be promoting summer reading programs in our libraries. One site that has some good material targeted at parents all year long is Reading Rockets, a site from WETA public television. They have a pretty good summer reading site, “Get Ready for Summer!” that’s more school- and teacher-oriented than public-library oriented, but it’s good to pass along to any parents and teachers who are looking for worthwhile material on reading.

While you’re at the Reading Rockets site, you should also scoot over to some of the good informational pages elsewhere on the site. I particularly recommend the “Strategies to Help Kids Who Struggle With Reading” page, which will point you to some brief but pithy articles that should interest parents with kids who are having reading problems. They can help parents - in particular parents who come from lower-income families - figure out how they can help, and get help for, their kids.

The important point we should all remember is here, and it’s kind of scary. But it’s true:

Unfortunately, the older a child is, the more difficult it is to teach him or her to read. The window of opportunity closes early for most kids. If a child can’t read well by the end of third grade, odds are that he or she will never catch up. And the effects of falling behind and feeling like a failure can be devastating.

I’ve seen so many boys, I mean kids, turn off to reading after third grade, because they didn’t get help soon enough. So we should be encouraging parents not to wait and not to delay. And we should be encouraging those parents to read, read, read aloud to their kids with reading problems.

 

Why boys (and men) read less

Here’s a great Philadelphia Inquirer story I found through LISNews.org - it’s called “Men - in general - are not ones for the books.” The female author, Jen A. Miller, bemoans the fact that the most of the guys she’s known just aren’t book readers, and wonders why that is. She writes:

According to Publishers Weekly, 68 percent of book purchases are made by women (and we suspect they are buying for themselves, not the men in their lives).

And the National Center for Education Studies reported that 71 percent of women, vs. 57 percent of men, have read a book in the last six months.

“If I had to make a huge, sweeping, overgeneralized statement, guys probably read less - and less fiction - than women,” says Jeff Garigliano, a senior editor at Portfolio magazine and the author of Dogface, a “guy” book about a punishing summer camp for kids who’ve been bad.

Well, duh, Jeff. Those of us who make our living trying to get kids (which include boys) and books together have known this for, well, decades maybe?

Garigliano has an interesting - and totally wrong - notion of why guys don’t read as much fiction as girls. He speculates that males “think they should have outgrown the notion of make-believe, so they can’t find as much enjoyment in fiction.”

Large percentages of the boys and men I know love guy fiction, which is almost entirely make-believe. It’s just that very little guy fiction is in novel-style books. It’s in TV shows, movies, and comics. It’s Star Wars, Sandman, Batman, Lost, the Terminator and Predator films, and all the other stuff guys (and more than a few girls, too) look at for fun. How many guys will be going to see the new comics flick Iron Man, and then the new Indiana Jones movie, between now and Memorial Day? You betcha; see you there.

But it is true, as we all know, that guys prefer their books to be nonfiction. And Miller quotes - guess who? - our pal Jon Scieszka, who it’s great to see popping up in so many of these Net and newspaper stories. He tells the truth, so I give him a cheer.

 

What? Peep Jousting?

Yes! If you’ve never heard of the sport of peep jousting, you should hightail it over to the Boys Rule! Boys Read! blog and check it out. (However, a warning: it involves a microwave oven.)

Here’s Darth Bill of the Public Library of Charlotte & Mecklenburg County (NC) explaining exactly how it works, in his Feb. 28 post:

Now if you have never heard of peep jousting, you are in for a treat. What peep jousting involves is putting two Easter Peeps, each equipped with a trusty tooth pick (pushed into each peep), facing each other onto a plate and then into a microwave. The peeps will expand in the microwave and the first peep to stick the opposing peep with a tooth pick is the winner. Think I’m crazy?

No, not at all, Bill. (The photo shows Bill eating one of the exploded peeps.) I think it sounds rather cool myself (except eating the melted peep - I’ll pass). I’ve seen plenty of librarians do strange things with peeps over the years (it sounds like the subject for a Ph.D. thesis to me), but this one takes the cake, or, er, the peep. Where do these ideas come from? Watch this YouTube video, not from a library, but it shows the general idea:

Now, go try it at your library!

 

I interviewed Jon Scieszka for SLJ

You may have seen that I interviewed Jon Scieszka for School Library Journal’s February issue. The actual interview took place at the very end of December in Scieszka’s Brooklyn home. On the third floor, he has a “study” filled with books and a small room with his PC that looks like what you would (or at least I would) imagine a writer’s work area would look like.

It’s kind of a shame that our conversation, which was actually a lot longer than the piece that made it into the magazine, had to be edited so heavily, but, hey, that’s the magazine biz. We talked for quite a while about his new series, Jon Scieszka’s Trucktown, which is perfectly suited to the youngest versions of the boys he’s tried to lure into reading throughout his career. (Although he told me that he visited a local preschool with the galleys, and quite a number of the girls there liked the series, too.)

The first Trucktown book, Smash! Crash!, about two anthropomorphic (and hyperactive) trucks that enjoy creating as much chaos as possible, is now out from Simon & Schuster. He also has an autobiography of his childhood years, Knucklehead, coming out from Penguin next year.

It also turns out that Scieszka and I share a similar background; we were both born in Michigan (he in Flint, me in the Detroit area) in the 50s, and went to parochial schools during our elementary days. He was great fun to talk to, and I’m hoping that he’ll be able to make a real difference publicizing reading, in a fun, nutty way, to America’s kids as the new National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature.

 

Jon Scieszka gets busy

Whoa and hooray - here we see what happens when Jon Scieszka gets busy as the Library of Congress’s new National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature. He’s written a great column for New York’s Daily News, promoting his belief that adults don’t need to go into a nervous tizzy over the fact that American kids are reading less than they have in previous decades. Instead, he says, we simply need to make certain kids know that reading “for pleasure” can be fun. When you’re young, who wants to do something that isn’t enjoyable?

Here’s my favorite quote, about an incident from the ten years he spent teaching elementary school:

I once casually told my class of second-graders that we didn’t need to finish every book we started. If we didn’t like it, we could start another, find something we liked.

They were stunned. “You can do that?”

And so for the next week, of course, no child finished any book.

Scieszka believes that kids should be given access to read whatever they want. “Avoid demonizing television, computer games, and new technologies,” he says. “Electronic media may compete for kids’ attention, but we are not going to get kids reading by badmouthing other entertainment.” He knows that if we do, we’re falling into the classic trap previous generations did of making the things the adults loved most, and the things that were “best for children,” the things that kids wanted most to avoid. And look at what happened to us.

(Thanks to Jen Robinson’s Book Page for the tip.)

 

Scieszka Named Children’s Literature “Ambassador”

I’m enormously happy to see that the Librarian of Congress has named Jon Scieszka to a new position as the US “national ambassador for young people’s literature.” The job, developed by the Children’s Book Council with the Library of Congress, appears to be based on the Children’s Laureate program that’s been going on in the UK since 1999.

Why create this position? Think of all the surveys and studies that show that Americans are reading less, most notably the National Endowment for the Arts’ To Read or Not to Read. It’s clear that in this multi-distracting video-game-filled time, American kids often behave as if reading just isn’t important:

“There’s a huge population of kids who would be or can be readers, but just choose not to,” said Mr. Scieszka, who runs a Web-based literacy program aimed at boys called Guys Read. “Kids see it just as a school activity or something that just can’t compete with a Nintendo Wii or just hanging out and text messaging your friends. Parents and booksellers and teachers are dying for some help.”

Scieszka, the author of many funny books such as The Stinky Cheese Man and the Time Warp Trio series, is a popular speaker with a just-twisted-enough sense of humor. He’s been long fascinated and challenged by why boys in modern America aren’t reading much, and many of his works, including his upcoming “Trucktown” series, have been designed to be boy-friendly. The first Trucktown picture book, Smash! Crash!, appears next week.

The Cheerios division of General Mills - Cheerios has been running a “Spoonfuls of Stories” promotion to distribute books for several years - is sponsoring the program to the tune of $50,000. Scieszka will receive a $25,000 stipend for traveling the country and talking to kids, parents, teachers, librarians, booksellers, and others about things we all can be doing to promote reading among young people.

It looks like a great program, and I think Scieszka is a great choice to launch it.