17 Reasons for Children’s Books

Eureka! I struck 3-in-1 online gold this week: an international award for children’s books, child-friendly reasons for reading, and gorgeously illustrated free posters for each of the reasons (each illustration by a different Swedish children’s books illustrator).

Fifteen years ago, when I inherited the world literature course at an international school, I was appalled at my own dearth of awareness of global literature. American and British, yes. British Empire, yes. (Rudyard Kipling is India, right?) Even a smattering of western civ: Dante, Goethe, Tolstoy. But Asia? Latin America? Africa? The Middle East? Even anything European since 1950? Nope. Nothing. Nada. 

So I started working on it. I picked one country per year, represented by a student in my class, to get to know at least one author from. I asked parents, “What is one author or work of literature from your home country that you wish your child would encounter in their international school education?” I read at least one work from each year’s Nobel Prize for Literature winner as they won, and tried to familiarize myself with past winners as well. It was great for my understanding of the world; however, many of those wouldn’t be accessible or appropriate for my high school readers. Then 18 months ago I moved down into middle school, and then 6 months ago elementary, and I was at a loss all over again.

Hooray for the Swedish government and its Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award! It is the largest award of its kind (over $500,000!) and has been given annually since 2003 to an international children’s author (11) or illustrator (7), or organization that promotes reading (3) (Fast Facts). The authors have been from France, South Korea, Belgium, US, UK, Sweden, Netherlands, Australia, Japan, Brazil, and Austria (The Laureates). Guess what’s going on my Christmas list!

I was even more delighted with the child-friendly list of reading reasons, as some of my current lists target high school (“Reading prepares you for college and the world of work”) and adults (“Reading protects against dementia.”): 

1. Books can make us laugh and cry. They can comfort us and show us new possibilities.
2. Books help us develop our language and our vocabulary.
3. Books fire our imagination and train us in finding inner images.
4. Books can ask fresh questions that arouse our interest and cause us to reflect further.
5. Books give us concepts to think with. They broaden our consciousness and our world.
6. Books give us knowledge about nature, technology and history, and about other countries and other ways of life.
7. Books enable us to become someone else. They develop our ability to empathize and to feel compassion.
8. Books make us reflect on what's right or wrong, good or bad.
9. Books can explain reality and help us understand how things are connected.
10. Books can show us that most things can be seen from different points of view.
11. Books boost our self-confidence when we realize that others think and feel as we do.
12. Books help us understand that we are both similar and dissimilar.
13. Books offer company when we're lonely.
14. Books are part of our cultural heritage. They give us shared reading experiences and common frames of reference.
15. Books that are read aloud bring children and adults together.
16. Children's books give us access to different artistic forms such as illustration, photography, poetry and drama.
17. Children's book represent our first contact with literature - an unending world that lasts all our lives.

Gorgeous posters of each of those 17 reasons, illustrated by 17 different Swedish children’s illustrators, are available for free download from the Swedish Academy for Children’s Books. I was so excited by this discovery that I printed them out before school that morning, and they were so beautiful I laminated them before the end of the day. 

They are available in 20 languages—none of which are Japanese. At first I was disappointed, and then I thought, “What a great opportunity for my students to have a reason and audience for their bilingual skills, as well as for getting them to deeply engage with the reasons—THEY could do the translation! We could post it around school…and maybe even send it to the Swedish Academy of Children’s Books!” Stay tuned on that brainstorm.

What resources do you have for international children's books, child-friendly reasons for reading, and reading displays?

Revising IS Growth Mindset

 

A student is madly erasing an entire page of writing. By the time it registers with me what he is doing, it’s too late to stop it. The writing is gone. It may not have been the world’s best first draft. Wait…is there such a thing? That is not what first drafts are meant to be. That’s like saying the world’s smoothest bearded man. 

It was the draft we had been polishing for days. After two days getting it out, we’d spent time on making a good lead, adding dialogue, adding details, using “juicy” words…and now it was gone. Why? 

I looked around at other students. Many were busy adding words in the lines between the writing, or sentences in the empty column on the right quarter of the page, or paragraphs on the blank back side of the page. 

It suddenly dawned on me that perhaps the student who erased the whole page thinks that a good piece of writing is a random occurrence. This one wasn’t what I wanted. Pick up the dice and roll again. Maybe a work of Shakespeare will come out. 

I've had students who approached testing like that. Didn't get the grade I wanted? Try a retest, maybe it'll be better. Did I study in between? No, why? How powerless it must feel to live in that headspace, that fixed mindset, lacking a sense of agency, hoping for the best. Feedback doesn't help if a person doesn't know what to do with it. 

Writing workshop, writing process…it isn’t just about writing. Half of the value is students understanding that there are tools for improving—learning, skills, relationships, life. You put yourself out there with a bad first draft, and then you pull out your tools and go to work on the draft. Little by little, you make it better. 

I’m not just teaching 4th and 5th graders writing—I’m teaching them life. I’m teaching them growth mindset. 

Now I’m looking forward to next week and the opportunity to gather my little handful of students that always want to start over, and telling them they have the tools, I can help them, to take a bad first draft and make it better. But nothing will get better without the courage to take that bad first draft, look it full in the face, and pick a spot to start the hard work of revising. Not just so they can grow as writers, but so they can grow as learners and as people. 

Writing revision…who knew it was so important? How do you help students develop and practice a growth mindset?

Creating Classroom Learning Culture

As a teacher, I recognize that it's my responsibility to create my classroom culture. To do this, I need to be clear on my objectives--what they are, and what they are not. My primary objectives are not...

• Students caring about their grades.
• Students being quiet and paying attention.
• A class that is fun.
• Doling out rewards and punishments.

So what's my primary objective? I am focused on creating a culture in which my students understand that they are part of a learning community that is doing something really important: developing our ability to read, listen, think, speak, and write in English. And when they experience that community working together, and feel themselves and their neighbors growing in competence as they support each other—that is a thrill so deep they will want to protect the community where it happens. They will come prepared, they will be on time, they will not throw erasers across the room because that would sabotage not just their own learning, but that of the entire community. 

And, as it turns out, class will be fun because students know they are doing something purposeful, they understand how to do it, and they are seeing results. Students will be quiet and pay attention—or discuss with a partner or ask questions or read or write or whatever is necessary at that moment in order to advance the learning goals of themselves and the community. They will learn, which is its own reward. And the grades will reflect that.

In 30+ years of teaching secondary English language arts, I’ve gotten pretty good at making learning purposeful, helping students understand the purpose, and giving them the tools to achieve it. And at helping them work together to do it even more effectively. Sometimes a personal conversation has been necessary:

• “I really appreciated your contributions to the class last term. This term, I’ve noticed you making sarcastic comments under your breath while making eye contact with friends. It’s distracting everyone. Can you help me understand what’s going on?” 
• “You may be able to easily finish the reading at home, but when you distract your friend, you are preventing him from reading, and you are interfering with the concentration of the whole rest of the class. You’re also sending the message that reading is not important. Is that really what you want to do?”

And in my experience, the classroom learning community flourishes. 

There’s this wonderful thing called experience. Unfortunately, it only comes with time. A couple of years ago, a younger teacher asked me, “How do you know all this?” I answered with a kind of wonder as I realized its truth, “If you couldn’t get better at this profession over time, I’d tell you to leave it right now. But there's hope. You get better.”   

Then I left all of my secondary experience at the door and dipped my toe into elementary—4th and 5th grade English language arts. We started the year great in April, but then behavior started to slip. I managed the class by walking around, but individual conferences became minimal and small group conferences, nonexistent. 

Enter fall term. Same good start, same slippage. Then came the epiphany: I had tried to establish culture by fiat, declaring what I wanted and thinking that made it so. That doesn’t happen. Culture needs constant, intentional nurturing, or it devolves. Which was exactly what was happening in my room. 

Hard reset. We had a little talk about the importance of reading, listening, thinking, speaking, and writing in English and how there’s so much we can learn if we’re all fully here for all 45 minutes every day. And about how one person’s one-minute distraction of 15 people is really 15 minutes of lost learning. 

Now I’m doing a little experiment in supporting classroom learning culture. I start every period asking, “What are we doing here today?” They answer, “Learning how to read, listen, think, speak, and write in English!” I say, “That’s right! Let’s go! We’re going to learn so much!”  Before grammar, I remind them we’re studying how published writers use language powerfully so we can use it the same way when we write. Before independent writing time, I remind them we’re working on writing stamina, and our neighbors are too, and I’ll be conferencing with a small group about their writing. So students can write, solve their own problems (we have a list of the problems writers have and how they solve them), not distract their neighbor, and start on a new piece if they finish today’s revision assignment.

True confession: It isn’t perfect, but it is getting better. There’s less distraction. Less tattling. More writing. And I’m actually through one round of small group conferences!

30+ years in, and I’m still racking up experience. I build the classroom culture. I do it with intentionality and persistence. Even in elementary. 

How do you build a classroom learning culture? How does that affect classroom management? 

What Do Writers Do?

Character chart from CBS interview of Pulitzer Prize winning novelist Anthony Doerr

What was the last thing you wrote? A Facebook post? A business proposal? A parent letter, or an email to your child’s teacher? We’re all writers. Some of us more nervous and reluctant than others, but it’s hard to escape the necessity in the adult world. 

Teaching involves inducting students into an identity in the discipline. As an English teacher, that means I help students see themselves as readers and writers. When that happens, the world is full of models and mentors long after their last essay is graded, and maybe they won’t be as nervous and reluctant as some adults I’ve talked to.

What, then, do writers do? I love it when I come across interviews with published writers, and they talk about the very things we do in class—not because we’re students, but because we’re writers. 

I found one of those interviews last week. A friend sent me the link to an interview on CBS with Anthony Doerr, author of the Pulitzer Prize winning novel All the Light We Cannot See, whose next book, Cloud Cuckoo Land, was just published. There were 3 clips especially that I could not wait to share with 4th and 5th graders the very next day.  

First, I showed Doerr sharing some of his editor’s notes (2:43):

Doerr: [Flipping through a thick sheaf of typewritten paper, rubber banded together, sprouting thickets of post-it notes from every edge.]  This is actually my editor’s questions as she goes through the novel. [Finally stopping on one page he reads...] “This needs a bit of a trim,” she writes. [Laughter.]

The previous day I had just given students feedback on a pre-assessment for setting goals for their next draft. I had told them, “Authors are always working to improve their work. Even professional authors are looking for ways to become better writers. The best way to become a better writer is to ask for feedback. You can look at the feedback, or suggestions, from someone else and use their advice to improve your work. Writers don’t get upset about the feedback. It does not mean they are a bad writer. The feedback is good because it helps them become an even better writer.”* They were skeptical. Their expressions when they saw Doerr embracing his editor’s feedback were priceless!

Next, I showed Doerr’s intricately hand-sketched character chart (3:20). Some of my students found sketching helped them come up with good ideas for their fiction narratives last term. Who knew this was a thing that published writers do!

Doerr: I’ve got a hundred and five characters with names in the novel. As you can see, Zeno  intersecting with Seymour and Anna…

Voice over: So many that he drew this diagram to help visualize his literary labyrinth.

Doerr: I tried, just for my own mind, to braid all their intersections together.

Finally, I showed them Doerr speaking of the difficulty of writing and of his desire to improve (4:13). This resonated so deeply with my experience of writing.

Doerr: I don’t think of myself as all that good yet. I’d like to think I’m getting better at my work.

Interviewer: Come on, you really don’t. You’ve got to think you’re pretty good.

Doerr: No, I genuinely don’t. Language is just this system all the time of failing…You’re almost expressing what you want to express, but you can’t quite get there, and so writing itself has this humility built into it, almost, for me.”

At the end one student asked, “Are any of us going to be writers?”

Clearly, I have failed at communicating this to all my students—some of them may publish books, but all of them will be writers, ARE writers right now. Showing these 3 clips gave me another chance to help them understand that, and to understand that as writers, we seek feedback to make us better, drawing is a perfectly respectable planning tool, and even great writers know they can improve.

How do you help your students understand what writers do?

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*Quote from "Lesson 9: Setting Goals" in Jamie Sears’ Not So Wimpy Teacher, 4th grade personal narrative writing curriculum) 

Reading Like Writers and Writing Like Readers

Photo by Yannick Pulver on Unsplash

An audible gasp escaped from several 4th and 5th grade students as I read aloud a text they were following along in: “Either my dad didn’t see me rolling my eyes, or he was ignoring it.”*

The gasp was not in response to the content, but to (dare I say it?) the mechanics. Yes, it was the “Pattern of Power” that we’d been examining in the first 5-10 minutes of every class this week: “I use a comma and ‘or’ to join two sentences to present choices.” 

One of my goals this academic year (April 2021-March 2022) is to explore using this approach with 4th through 7th grades. The longer I stick with it, the more students are really grasping the connection between reading and writing, and the choices writers make to produce an effect for their readers. (“Why Learn Grammar and Conventions?” was my initial post.)

Other patterns: Earlier this fall we had done “I use a comma and ‘so’ to join two sentences to show cause and effect” (“Scavenger Hunt: Examining Writers’ Choices”). Before summer break we had worked with “I use a comma and an ‘and’ to join two sentences,” and “I use a comma and a ‘but’ to join two sentences to show contrast.”

One day recently, as students were combing through mentor texts calling out, “I found a ‘comma so!’” and so forth (they were really just supposed to be looking for “comma or,” but we were discovering that those were a lot rarer than all the others), a student who had just joined the class this term called to me excitedly about every comma he found: “I found a ‘comma I’! What does that mean?” I told him it was a great question, and we’ll examine it later.

Another day this week, students were writing, and one called out, “I used ‘comma or’!” My husband says I may get hooked on elementary…

We’re not covering the ground we would in a traditional grammar unit, but I think by the end of this year these 4th and 5th graders will have a working understanding of mechanics that will stick with them. I’ve had honors and AP English students tell me they’re just totally confused about when and why to use commas. 

I’m looking forward to continuing the experiment.
 
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*“Spicy!” from Jamie Sears’ Not So Wimpy Teacher 4th grade personal narrative writing unit