Early Literacy Feeds

The Obama administration urged educators and policymakers today to embrace a host of digital-learning approaches it says will make K-12 schools better, including putting a computing device in the hands of every student. "Learning is at the center of the whole plan," said Karen Cator, the director of the office of educational technology for the U.S. Department of Education, "Technology allows us to create more engaging and compelling learning opportunities for students and allows us to personalize the learning experience."

Lakewood School seventh-grader Brendon Pietschman smiled when one of the first-graders he was working with in the hallway pronounced a tricky little word. "That's right," he told her. "Good job. Now keep reading." All seventh- and eighth-graders at the rural K-8 school must take Literacy in Action, a class designed to help them learn how to mentor young readers while improving their own literacy skills.

Learning to read is serious business. But that doesn't mean it can't be done in a fun way. Because Dr. Seuss was always pushing the boundaries of what was possible for beginning readers, it seems fitting that this year's winner of the Geisel Award is "Benny and Penny in the Big No-No," a graphic novel written and illustrated by Geoffrey Hayes. The award, presented annually by the American Library Association, is named for the man better known as Dr. Seuss.

Ten students sat around a table as they silently read material provided for the comprehension section of the statewide test in which they were participating. But their answers weren't so quiet. Each student sat in front of a Perkins Brailler, a machine that resembles a typewriter but with only nine keys. By pressing various combinations of the keys, students typed their answers about the readings in braille. Each loud clack of the keys alerted the other students in the room that someone had an answer and was recording it, intensifying the speed at which each performed.

I'm not in the habit of sharing much personal news on my blog, beyond my plans to watch Red Sox games (30 days and counting to opening day). But I have some personal news that is going to be relevant to my blogging, and it's well past time to share.

Mheir and I have been together for more than 20 years (we met in college) and have been married for six years. During our time together, we've given many, many children's books as gifts, and talked with lots of people about the importance of raising readers. We've purchased beautiful custom bookshelves, and filled our house with books.

And now, we've decided to try our hand at growing a bookworm of our own. This may be surprising news to readers who assumed that anyone who talks about children's books as much as I do must already have several children at home. But we're expecting our first child in mid-June. A girl. The doctors say she's quite healthy, and she's certainly energetic already. We're having all of those reactions common to first-time parents - from excitement to terror. But happy. Definitely happy.

My blog friends won't be surprised at all to learn that we're reading to her already. We haven't been able to judge her reaction to the books yet, but Mheir is starting to have some favorites. I'm already keeping a reading journal for her, as Susan recommended recently at Booklights. [Mine is html-based, so that I can easily share the lists on the blog, if I so choose.]

Ironically, growing a bookworm of my own will probably mean that I have less time to talk about children's books and growing bookworms here on my blog. But I'll certainly be enhancing my knowledge in the picture book category in the short term. And I look forward to having the chance to put my "Tips for Growing Bookworms" into action longer-term.

I ask for your patience in the coming months, when my blogging will be a bit less regular than usual. Mheir and I would also love to hear your book recommendations for babies. We've started a wish list on Amazon - I used Betsy Bird's Top 100 Picture Books poll for some ideas, and I'll be tuning into Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast with extra attention, too. Of course we have some ideas of our own, too, but we could always use more.

Thanks for sharing in our news!

I’m up a wee bit early this morning, partly because I’m jazzed about Share a Story ~ Shape a Future 2010 which starts tomorrow, but mostly to enjoy a cup of coffee and a bit of quiet morning, and the Sunday *paper*. That’s what Sunday’s are for, right? Here are a few of the tidbits I’ve found this morning.

The cover story for this week’s Parade magazine is What America Cares About, which is covered in the article “Compassion Counts More than Ever,” by Michael J. Berland. It is very heartening to see the great numbers of people volunteering in their communities. According to the Parade.com poll, “Ninety percent [of parents] said that they are working hard to teach their children the importance of activism.” What is not so heartening is that when Americans were asked how they would donate $100,000 for charity, literacy comes in13 of 16. Wow! So many of the higher-ranked problems – research to cure disease (2nd), poverty relief/job assistance (6th), public health (10th), would significantly benefit from eliminating illiteracy. Don’t get me wrong, these are very important issues that take all of us, it is just disheartening to see the perception of what literacy is and how it impacts our world.

I wish I had an excuse to head to Massachusetts. The Wavepaint Gallery, Ipswich MA is hosting “The Illustrator Show,” a display of works by children’s book illustrators Jarrett Krosoczka, Ed Emberley, Jamie Harper, Andy J Smith, Mary Jane Begin, Pat Lowery Collins, and Julia Purinton. The exhibit includes original illustrations will be presented beside their printed books. The Exhibit runs from March 1 to April 23. There is an illustration lecture/reception on April 23, 2010, from 4 to 7 pm). The Gallery Della-Piana in Wenham will have their own exhibit of children’s book illustration at that same time, so grab the kids and have a fun afternoon traveling up or down route 1A admiring art for children’s literature. Maybe I’ll luck out and some of my Northeast-based blogging friends will visit and tell us more … or maybe there will be a virtual gallery, too. (via Andy J. Smith on JacketFlap.com)

In today’s Charlottesville Daily Progress, librarian Jacqueline Lichtman tells us about the Tumble Book library at the Jefferson Madison Regional Library.  “Tumble Book Library, an online collection of animated talking picture books, … includes animated boos, reading comprehension quizzes and educational games. Kids love the movement and the voices, as well as reading along.” I’d love to link you to her article, but I couldn’t find it on DailyProgress.com. Grrr! Bottom line: TumbleBooks is purchased by schools and libraries, but is available for FREE to students and patrons. There are 30-day free trials ont he TumbleBooks.com website.

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Once a passionate advocate for injecting greater competition and accountability into the U.S. education system, the New York University scholar Diane Ravitch realized three years ago that her views had evolved to a point where she was contradicting herself on a regular basis. Like any good historian, she decided to set the record straight.

Say the word "librarian," and most people conjure up a frumpy, bespectacled woman shushing people — Marion the Librarian. The image is outdated, Marilyn Johnson argues in her impassioned celebration of librarians and archivists, cleverly titled This Book Is Overdue.

Children's literature will take over the University of Redlands campus next week as it hosts the 14th annual Charlotte S. Huck Children's Literature Festival. This year's festival will feature six keynote speakers, including Pat Mora and Chris Soentpiet, as well as a new children's literature illustration exhibit.

It seems there's no end to the places Principal Dujuana Ambrose-Dessau would go for her students — as evidenced by her rooftop reading of Green Eggs and Ham Tuesday afternoon from the top of Park Lane Elementary School in Darby, PA.

Oh, the shame! The 2010 Winter Olympics have come and gone, and not once did I mention them or how in love I am with Vancouver. What a beautiful place! I’ve only seen it from the deck of a ship journeying from Alaska. I definitely want Vancouver to be the destination next time. Now I have only memories …

We had an Olympics oops in our house … opening night, no less. (image source: 2010 Winter Olympics on Wikipedia). It’s one of those “funny thing happened on the way to the Coliseum” type stories, so bear with me a sec.

For weeks before the event, every time we saw a commercial about the Olympics, Catherine would twirl about pretending to be an ice skater. Having told her about all the pageantry, she wanted to see that, too. That first night, she was over the moon about being able to stay up late to watch the Opening Ceremonies. Here we are thinking she’ll get to see all the beautiful stuff and learn about Canada.

And what do the organizers do? They move the parade of athletes to the TOP of the program so the athletes could see it. Shift gears. The colorful uniforms were good for a little bit, but then Catherine wanted know when Team USA would come in, since “U” is near the end of the alphabet and the skaters would be right after that. Having listened to the stadium announcer introduce each country first in French, then in English, we assumed (ahem concluded) that everyone was entering the stadium using the French alphabet. SO-O-O thinking that we would be the États-Unis d’Amérique, we told Catherine she could stay up until the American team entered the stadium. Silly parents …

We were W-R-O-N-G, but there was no backing off that promise. Team USA didn’t enter the stadium until about 10:30, and as soon as we got the commercial break. The TV went off.  By then Catherine was too tired to argue to see the show, and off to bed she went. The next day, though, our 21st Century girl asked if we could pull up the videos of what she missed.  So we found the Opening Ceremonies Encore on MSNBC. [Note: Link takes you to the Encore on the MSNBC website. NBC/MSN make you downoad "Silverlight" to watch the videos.]

About five minutes after settling in at the computer, Catherine came running out of the office asking for paper and a pencil.  She wanted to create a list so she could remember “all the weird things I see.”  Writing because she wants to? All right! She was busy writing for an hour!

Snow indoors … totomes (totems) …  whales coming out of the floor … waves really making a circle and turn to samen (salmon) .. and turn to totemes … guy with tatoot belly … leaf exploshon (explosion) …

and so on.  She filled both sides of a page and was so excited to read to us everything she saw. A gold medal performance. There are lots of lessons in this story, but my favorite is that you just never know where inspiration will come from. Even a video can be a writing prompt …

Was Catherine the inspiration for this month’s Prompt Idea post at Booklights? Well, head on over and tell me what you think …

Image source:

Opening Ceremony, Vancouver Sun

Team USA and Vancouver 2010 logos – Wikipedia

Copyright © 2010 Scrub-a-Dub-Tub, a Reading Tub Blog. This Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact legal@childrens-literacy.com so we can take legal action immediately.
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Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is presiding over the rollout of the largest competitive grant program in his department's history. So it was not surprising that the first question Mr. Duncan faced from lawmakers on Wednesday in an appearance before Congress was whether the Obama administration would try this year to rewrite, or reauthorize, No Child Left Behind.

Twenty-five percent of Utah's third-graders would be held back under a new statewide legislative proposal. Sen. Karen Morgan, D-Salt Lake City, wants anyone not reading at grade level beginning in the third grade to be held back until they can. She says a quarter of Utah's third-graders aren't at that level. "Reading is the foundation of learning," said Morgan, sponsor of Senate Bill 150, which cleared another hurdle Monday morning.

Weekend Edition's ambassador to the world of kiddie literature, Daniel Pinkwater, reviews a classic book for children, The Bear That Wasn't by Frank Tashlin. Pinkwater and Host Scott Simon read from the book together and get a couple of good laughs.

For each of its seven years, SMIF's BookStart program has strived to put a book into the hands of every child across our 20-county region. Together with donor partner Capstone Publishers, SMIF (Southeast Minnesota Initiative Foundation) established BookStart with a mission to encourage a lifelong love of reading — and to ensure that every child has a book of his or her own at home.

Education reformers have long dreamed of a day when schools could rate every K-12 teacher in the USA based on how his or her students perform on a standardized test. It's a simple, bipartisan dream that has captivated both President Bush (it's a cornerstone of his 2002 No Child Left Behind education law) and President Obama, who's putting test scores squarely at the center of his emerging education agenda. But a new, large-scale survey finds that only one in 14 teachers thinks it's a "very accurate measure" of teacher performance. They give more credence to kids' evaluations, actually.

Kindergartner Breon Stepney looks forward to his weekly reading session at Barclay Elementary/Middle School with Caroline Bennett, an employee at the Johns Hopkins University. That bond between Bennett and Breon is exactly what Baltimore schools CEO Andrés Alonso and Hopkins President Ronald J. Daniels envisioned when they unveiled Tuesday their new partnership, "Johns Hopkins Takes Time for Schools," which allows the 14,000 employees at Hopkins to take two days of paid leave a year to pursue service opportunities in the school system.

In the past seven years, the state's funding for preschool programs has more than tripled, and early education was a hallmark of former Democratic Gov. Timothy M. Kaine's policies. But faced with an unprecedented shortfall, the Republican-led House has proposed a budget that would cut back on early education and could signal a philosophical shift about funding for these programs.

First lady Michelle Obama celebrated Dr. Seuss' birthday Tuesday by reading "The Cat in the Hat" to a group of children wearing red-and-white-striped stovepipe hats like the book's main character.

Books: Gifted series. Book 1: Out of Sight, Out of Mind. Book 2: Better Late than Never. Book 3: Here Today, Gone Tomorrow.
Author: Marilyn Kaye
Pages: 240, 224, 224
Age Range: 10-14 

This week I read the first three books in Marilyn's Kaye's Gifted series. Three other titles are slated for publication later this year (Book 4: Finder's Keepers, Book 5: Now You See Me, and Book 6: Speak No Evil). This is an original paperback series, aimed at middle school age readers. The books feature a group of nine middle school students who, along with their regular classes, meet once a day for a special "gifted" class. Here gifted refers not to academic ability, but to paranormal ability. Each student has a special skill, such as mind-reading, turning invisible, or predicting the future.

In the first book, Out of Sight, Out of Mind, the narrative viewpoint shifts between that of popular mean girl Amanda and loner bad girl Jenna. We learn that Amanda's talent (or curse) is that when she feels sorry for someone, she leaves her own body and inhabits theirs (leaving a sort of programmed clone in her own body). When Amanda, in spite of her best efforts to remain mean and unsympathetic to everyone around her, lands in the body of fellow student Tracey, both girls are changed by the experience. Jenna, a mind-reader, figures out what's going on, and together Amanda-Tracey and Jenna work to mitigate a threat towards another classmate, visionary Emily.

In the second book, Better Late than Never, Amanda is back in her own body, and pretty much back to being a mean girl who shuns her fellow gifted classmates. She does, however, start to show some interest in popular jock Ken (who can speak to the dead). Meanwhile, when Jenna's long-lost father appears out of nowhere, Tracey raises questions about his true intentions. 

In Book 3, Here Today, Gone Tomorrow, several of the students are threatened, and in fact they start disappearing one by one. It's up to Emily to use her highly unreliable gift for prediction to figure out what's going on and save her friends.

All three books are very quick reads. They read like installments in a single story, rather than standalone titles. There are various threads left to be resolved in future books, from individual questions about the students (what accident led to Ken's gift, and why is Sarah so reluctant to use hers?) to the implication of a large-scale conspiracy to take advantage of the teens' gifts. The mysteries aren't particularly suspenseful - kids will be able to see all of the bad guys coming, but they are entertaining.

One thing that I like about the books is that the characters are far from perfect. Amanda is vain and shallow, though she does help the people around her from time to time. Jenna is from a disadvantaged home, and values her status as goth loner-girl. But she finds it surprisingly nice to have a few friends. Tracey is the older sister of a set of septuplets, and her family life adds a bit of comic relief to the series. most of the students are haunted in some way or another by their gifts, and also struggle to control their abilities. Many of their abilities seem to have evolved, in fact, from circumstances in their personal lives (Like Charles, the kid in a wheelchair who can move objects with his mind, for example).

I'm not sure how well these books will hold up for adult readers. Marilyn Kaye has a slight tendency to rely on coincidences in her plotting. The middle school setting is largely cardboard (popular girls in the bathroom putting on makeup, jocks picking on the boy in the wheelchair, etc.). The school could be set anywhere - there's nothing unique about it. 

However, I think that the Gifted books are worth a look for middle school libraries. Especially once the next three books come out (between April and October of this year). I found them quite readable now, and I think that I would have read them compulsively when I was 12. I mean, what middle schooler wouldn't like to think about what they'd do if they were invisible or could read the teacher's mind? The Gifted books are also quite suitable for fifth and sixth graders, age-wise. While there's some talk about dating, it's of the passing notes variety - there's no real attraction going on. Personally, I found these books just the thing to take my mind off of work-related stress during a rainy week in February.

Publisher: Kingfisher
Publication Date: June 9 - October 9, 2009
Source of Book: Review copies from Blue Slip Media
Other Blog Reviews: Curling Up by the Fire, A Good Addiction, The Story Siren, Reading Junky's Reading Roost. See also an author interview at Shelf Elf.

© 2010 by Jennifer Robinson of Jen Robinson's Book Page. All rights reserved. All Amazon links in this post are affiliate links, and may result in my receiving a small commission on purchases (with no additional cost to you).