Guest blogger: teaching kids to read in kindergarten

Dear Aunt Debbie,

I have some thoughts on books about edgy issues, and will post about them soon.  Right now, I have one more addition to our discussion of teaching kids to read.  Our guest blogger tonight is Clara, mom of Isabel's good friend Vera, and a kindergarten teacher here in New York.  I asked her a few weeks ago to weigh in on the subject, and here she is:

Dear Annie,

I'm glad you asked for me to guest blog about learning to read. As a teacher of kindergarten and first grade for six years, I work every day to teach all kinds of readers how to read, love books and feel confident in their reading abilities. Very close to my heart is also helping parents feel confident in their role as their child's first and most important teacher.

I'm so excited for you and Eleanor that she is learning to read! Obviously both of your girls have a big love of books, which is no surprise. That Eleanor can read at her age is special and should definitely be encouraged. I'm also relieved to hear of your awareness that too much pressure could be bad for her, and even poor book choices could dampen her interest.

When parents ask me advice for encouraging and teaching their children to read at home, I give different advice depending on the age and type of child they have. For a child who shows no interest in learning how to read, I suggest immersing them in highly engaging books based on their interest (chosen for content rather than reading level, for parents to read with the child) to nurture a love of books. This will soon enough turn into a motivation to read independently. Books like The Yucky Reptile Alphabet Book, by Jerry Pallotta, will have a young naturalist's rapt attention, and happen to sneakily also teach letter recognition and phonemic awareness! For a child who desperately wants to read but is anxious and possibly behind his or her peers (or siblings), books should be made by the parents and children or selected very carefully from a book store. These books should include just a few words that the child can figure out from the pictures so that the child feels success right away and doesn't get discouraged by any struggle yet. A book like this may be homemade with family photos, with text like "Mommy loves me," "Grandpa loves me," and so on. After the child "reads" that book from memory, the parent can ask the child to point under each word next time he or she reads, so the child starts to get the idea that one word on the page matches to one spoken word, and begins to naturally pick up on cues like looking at the first letter. 

And finally, for eager young readers who are naturally beginning to crack the code like your Eleanor, I suggest getting started with short and repetitive books with a high level of picture support. All of the books in the Brand New Readers series, which can be found online and in bookstores, fit that bill. In school, we use books that are even more reliant on a pattern. For example, a book called "Who Lives in a Tree?" may have only 8 pages following the pattern of "A squirrel lives in a tree. A bird lives in a tree. A raccoon lives in a tree," and so on. These books are great for school, but are nearly impossible for parents to find outside of a specialized catalogue. Also, they are incredibly short and boring to read more than once or twice. My five year old students who are reading books at that level read 8 to 10 of those books every week in their personal "book baggie," and exchange the books for new ones once a week. Books like the Brand New Readers have a story, and recurring characters. I use them less at school because they often appear to be very easy, but break the pattern that a child has predicted so that the child needs adult support which they can't have 100% of the time at school. Perfect for reading at home! Rereading books at this stage is so crucial for memorizing high frequency words, so the more fun the stories are, the more likely your child will want to read them over and over.

For home reading and teaching of reading, I would move from books like that to books that are often called "level 1" in book stores. I think your Aunt Debbie has pointed out that all publishers use different criteria for their so-called levels, which drives parents mad. What I suggest looking for is again high interest books, but also books that are SHORT. The classic early reader Danny and the Dinosaur, by Sid Hoff, for example, is 64 pages long. Not short! Others, like this Scholastic Level 1 reader, have half the pages, and more importantly only a sentence on each page. 


Books like Dr. Seuss' Hop on Pop are in fact exhaustingly long. While it does a good job of teaching short vowel spelling patterns, no child aged 4 to 6 has the stamina to read it! Early chapter books can be challenging at first, so I recommend books that children think have chapters, but really have separate stories, like the Poppleton series by Cynthia Rylant. As a gauge, in New York City Poppleton is the level we want first graders to be reading between spring and June of first grade. 

This was a very long letter to a mom who sounds like she knows what she's doing already. But it's so important to check ourselves as parents, especially when we realize we have been presented with a child who is either ahead of or behind the curve for their age group. I am far too wordy in my letter writing today, but if you had insisted I write a one sentence piece of advice to parents on teaching their children to read, it would be this: "Read together, every day." For a child who associates reading with love will not find it difficult to love to read.

Best wishes on your reading adventures!

Thanks, Clara!


Love, Annie

Edgy issues

Dear Annie,

Of your Margaret Atwood list, Handmaid's Tale and Cat's Eye are the only ones I've read.  I like the idea of having them on a high school-and-up shelf.  I vividly remember reading her first novel, 
The Edible Woman, pretty close to its release in 1969. It's about a young woman who finds herself in a suffocating engagement. Gradually, she finds there are fewer and fewer foods she can face eating. It starts with meat, then eggs, and her appetite keeps getting narrower and narrower.  She feels she's being consumed by expectations of those around her, but she herself consumes less and less.  Back then, the term eating disorder wasn't in wide circulation.

I carry a number of young adult books with edgy themes, but I tend to shy away from two particular issues: eating disorders and suicide.  I don't know enough about teenage psychology to feel confident about selling books detailing how a character does it.  Laurie Hals Anderson, the author of Speak, recently wrote 
Wintergirls, about a high school girl lost in the world of anorexia.  The character has already gone through one hospitalization, and a friend with whom she had a pact to avoid eating has died.  There's a lot of detail on how to get around adult supervision and demands to eat.  It's fascinating and feels very realistic -- I learned a lot, although the ending is slightly unconvincingly optimistic.  It feels like a book that needs your community of readers, rather than becoming a lone reading experience.  I don't carry it.

I was equally unenthusiastic about
Thirteen Reasons Why by Jay Asher.  It's a novel in which a high school girl records audiotapes detailing 13 reasons why she's committing suicide -- each reason is associated with someone she knows.   That description was enough for me to decide I didn't want to bring it into the store.  Then it got lots of very positive reviews, a few customers talked to me about it, and I finally read it.  The book tells the experience of one of the 13 students who receives the tapes after Hannah dies.  He had a crush on her when she arrived as a new student, but real connection between them didn't quite happen.  The tapes detail a downward spiral of Hannah trying to overcome her outsider status; she's bruised by a mean-spirited social group; and labels that get unfairly attached to her lead to her being increasingly abused.  In her depression she sees no way out, but as a final act she leaves the tapes to show 13 people how each of them -- even ones who seemed unconnected to her victimization -- contributed to her despair.  "Everything affects everything," she says.  It gives a reader plenty to think about the social interactions of high school, and a push to examine one's own complicity in actions that could create someone else's misery.  There's something weirdly hopeful in it, even though it's about Hannah's tragedy.  A sense that some people can learn from their mistakes.  So I've broken my own embargo on the subject and am carrying this one.

Love,

Deborah

Grown-up reading: Margaret Atwood

Dear Aunt Debbie,

I have yet to see the Hunger Games movie, but was struck today by a Jezebel post summarizing some of the racist reactions to the casting of Rue as a black girl which were captured on Twitter.  It's a disturbing piece, and also points out how often people who declare themselves to be rabid fans aren't actually reading all that closely.  The Jezebel post quotes the first description of Rue in Suzanne Collins's novel: "She has dark brown skin and eyes, but other than that's she's very like Prim in size and demeanor...." A second post provides a run-down of the probable or certain skin color of every other major character in The Hunger Games.

Both pieces of commentary posit that Collins includes people of different races in the Hunger Games universe as part of her social criticism: the upper-class people in the Capitol are white and blond; the people in the Districts have a variety of darker skin tones.  It's not an issue I paid a lot of attention to while reading the books, but looking back now, it's clearly there.  (Nice to see, by the way, that the Ender's Game cast is similarly diverse.)

You asked last week about suggestions for contemporary adult authors whose books would make sense on your store's expanded YA shelves.  The first author who leaped to my mind would keep excellent company with the dystopian visions of Suzanne Collins and Orson Scott Card, though her body of work encompasses far more than that one genre.

I'm speaking, of course, of Margaret Atwood: novelist, essayist, poet, short story writer.  I started reading Atwood in high school, and teach her disturbingly prescient novel The Handmaid's Tale every semester in my Women's Voices course.  The Handmaid's Tale takes place in Gilead, a near-future version of the United States in which birth rates have plummeted, and the government has been taken over by religious fundamentalists who relegate all people to specific, rigid social roles.  Women are not allowed to work, read, or have their own money, and are divided up by function: Marthas cook and clean, Wives are the upper-class partners of Commanders, and Handmaids are fertile women who are assigned to Commanders in the hope that they'll produce more babies via what is essentially state-sanctioned rape.  The narrator, Offred, isn't a heroine in the traditional sense.  She's a fairly normal woman who dreams of escape but is kept in her place by fear; she's who most of us might be in the same situation. 

This isn't science fiction, but what Atwood calls "speculative fiction": everything that happens in her books is possible, if you take to a farther extent things people have already done in the world, and done to each other.  Atwood wrote The Handmaid's Tale in 1986; when I teach it, we read a packet of accounts of women under fundamental Islamic regimes in Afghanistan and Iran, and the parallels are frightening. 

Atwood is a terrific storyteller.  Her prose is gripping and easy to read, and she often structures her novels as a series of small revelations.  You begin in a world where you don't understand the rules; with every chapter, she gives you more information about what happened in the past to bring you there as well as what's about to happen in the future.  This is an author who knows cliffhangers.  Her books feel like pleasure reading, but scratch the surface and there are all kinds of deeper questions at play: about gender relations, about power, about genetic modification and the environment.

I'd happily hand The Handmaid's Tale (or Cat's Eye, or The Robber Bride, or The Blind Assassin, or Oryx and Crake) to a high school student to explore solo; each of them also rewards deep study.  I'd love to see them on your shelves.

Love, Annie

Books, movies & the thought process

Dear Annie,

Ah, the power of beautiful writing.  There's another quote from the New York Times piece you cited on brain science that I especially liked:

...individuals who frequently read fiction seem to be better able to understand other people, empathize with them and see the world from their perspective. This relationship persisted even after the researchers accounted for the possibility that more empathetic individuals might prefer reading novels. A 2010 study by Dr. Mar found a similar result in preschool-age children: the more stories they had read to them, the keener their theory of mind — an effect that was also produced by watching movies but, curiously, not by watching television. ....

I've been thinking a fair amount about translating the emotional states of fiction to the screen since seeing The Hunger Games movie Thursday night.  Visually, it felt very true to my mental picture of the book.  Your quote from Natalie Babbitt describing "a lovely greenish glow in the forest, a glow pierced everywhere by tree trunks like fingers thrust into an aquarium full of tinted water" could be about scenes in the movie.

The strongest part of
the book is being able to follow the main character's state of mind and her thought process as her strategy evolves before and during the games.  And given that she rarely talks with other characters about it, that process is really hard to convey in a movie.  It's much easier to show the action, and her reactions to the action.  (Spoiler Alert for the rest of this paragraph)  There's a pivotal scene in a cave where Katniss decides to buy in to the star-crossed lovers strategy.  Reading it, we see that she's  struggling with the decision, and that her feelings about Peeta are extremely mixed.  Her decision is an act of strength.  The movie can't convey her struggle, and instead it shows her responding to direction from Hamish, her coach.  I felt it turned her into a wimp in a crucial scene where she's actually incredibly strong.

Given the blockbuster nature of the film from its inception, in other ways it kept fairly true to the book, though.  But as with the Harry Potter movies, I wonder if someone who hadn't read the book would be able to follow what was happening.  Many parts of The Hunger Games were telescoped into visual flashes in the film.  Some worked (a loaf of bread in the rain, returned to several times), and others did not (was that rice in a briefly glimpsed riot?).

It did much better than some.  Like for instance the disastrous movie of the amazingly wonderful The Golden Compass.  The Next Big Movie in YA books seems to be on the horizon.  The cast for a movie version of Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card -- a sci fi classic -- has just been announced.  The book, first published in a short version in 1977, then expanded to the
novel we now know in 1985, has never made it to the screen.  Most of the characters in the book are between 6 and 11 years old, and Card was apparently opposed to studios' desires to make Ender older.  Some sort of compromise seems to have been reached, with Asa Butterfield (better known as Hugo) in the lead.  He doesn't look like he's six years old, but he's not 16 either.  The cast is stellar, with Harrison Ford and Ben Kingsley playing grizzled commanders.  Ender's Game, like The Hunger Games, has so much riveting, often violent action in it, that one worries for the lead character's internal life.  Ender's thought process -- both strategic and emotional -- is the the heart of the book.  The movie's due out in 2013 -- we'll find out then if we'll be able to see all of Ender.

Love,

Deborah

Reading improves the mind -- literally

Dear Aunt Debbie,

I'm intrigued by the latest question you've posed, about contemporary adult books which would be appropriate for the YA shelf, and I've started thinking about possible answers.  Over the last several days, however, both Eleanor and I were felled by a nasty flu, and we're in recovery mode.  So here's a promise of a nice juicy post on Margaret Atwood next week, and a brief reflection on sick reading and the beauty and power of well-constructed sentences.

Post-fever but not quite ourselves again, Eleanor and I stayed home and spent much of the day reading Natalie Babbitt's The Search for Delicious, which you sent Eleanor a while back.  I don't think I'd ever read it before, though I know Babbitt from the brilliant and wrenching Tuck Everlasting.  What a lovely book!

It's a fable of sorts.  Babbitt sets up a story on two levels: a magical level filled with ageless creatures who care for different parts of the earth (dwarves in the mountains, mermaids in the waters, woldwellers in the forests, winds in the skies), and a human level with kingdoms and people who fight each other all the time.  The backstory involves a lovely young mermaid named Ardis, who loses her favorite doll and weeps for it for hundreds of years.  The hero is a 12-year-old boy named Gaylen, who is tasked with going out into the kingdom as the king's messenger to poll the people on what food should become the definition of the word "delicious" in the Prime Minister's new dictionary.  Simply asking this question gets everybody upset, and with the aid of a bad guy, brings the country to the brink of civil war.  Gaylen meets all kinds of people in his travels, from the human world and the natural/ageless magical world.  Of course, the stories come together, and the ending is satisfying to all.

There's a lot to like about this book -- interesting and thoughtful perspectives about the ways in which nature and human beings interact, and how nature's time frame is very different from human time (much like Tuck Everlasting, actually).  As our reader Annette pointed out months ago during our discussion of books with maps, there's quite a nice map of Gaylen's journey on the first pages.

I was struck today, however, by the beauty of Natalie Babbitt's language.  What a joy to read aloud!  She has well-balanced sentences, a wide-ranging and evocative vocabulary, and a way with similes and metaphors.  A few samples (try reading them aloud to see how good they feel to say):

There was a lovely greenish glow in the forest, a glow pierced everywhere by tree trunks like fingers thrust into an aquarium full of tinted water; and Gaylen slipped between them like a small fish.  With the trees all around him and the rain dancing on the leaves high over his head, he felt as if he were going deeper and deeper into a world that existed tranquil and quite separate from the one he had left behind (42).


The woman on the porch peered out at the boy and the big horse in his royal draperies, and her eyes opened very wide.  She put aside the bowl of potatoes she had been peeling and called in a loud voice, "Mildew! Mildew!  Come here at once!"  Then she came down the path.  She was a big woman with a red face and red hands and she wore a dark jacket and a great many skirts and petticoats.  The man who had been plowing loped puffing to her side and they both stood staring up at Gaylen with their mouths open (66).


Gaylen sat behind the boulder and frowned.  Everywhere he went, it seemed, Hemlock came after or had already been, weaving in and out of his path like an ill-intentioned wasp.  He waited until the clang and echo of Ballywrack's hoofbeats faded before he came out of the shadows.  He wrapped the loop of Marrow's reins around a loose rock, gave the horse a pat of reassurance, and stole away to the tunnel to follow.  Feeling his way, he crept into black darkness down a twisting corridor of cool, smooth stone.  The corridor was dry and fragrant -- it smelled, surprisingly, of apples, like the cellar of a well-kept farmhouse (94-95).

As I was reading these passages to Eleanor today, and enjoying them immensely, I was reminded of a New York Times article I read last week.  According to the latest research in neuroscience, reading vivid descriptions of sensory details or intense emotional exchanges stimulates the same regions of the brain that actually experiencing these sensory details or interactions would stimulate:

Last month,...a team of researchers from Emory University reported in Brain & Language that when subjects in their laboratory read a metaphor involving texture, the sensory cortex, responsible for perceiving texture through touch, became active. Metaphors like “The singer had a velvet voice” and “He had leathery hands” roused the sensory cortex, while phrases matched for meaning, like “The singer had a pleasing voice” and “He had strong hands,” did not.


I highly recommend the rest of the article.  And then, of course, recommend that you go right back to reading fiction.


Love, Annie

Grown-up reading

Dear Annie,

Whatever New York City is paying you, it isn't enough.  I am so consistently impressed by your teaching.  You put so much thought and preparation into it, and you care so deeply about what your students will get out of it.  One of your points which particularly struck me was reading a book as a community experience.  It's not the teenager and the book alone: it's a group of people who have read the book by themselves processing it together.

At the store, we've been working on an expansion.  New shelves for the book section will be arriving in about a week and a half.   I'll have about 100 feet of new shelves -- very exciting.  A lot of it will help relieve pressure on already overloaded sections, but we'll be adding new books in several categories.  I bring this up now because one of the sections that's expanding is our Teen/Adult area.  When I read your post, it flashed through my mind that I should bring in a copy or two of Rule of the Bone.  And then I thought no, the reason it works for high school freshman is that you're shaping the entire discussion.  This is not a book one wants to hand to a kid and walk away.

I'm in the middle of reading an adult book right now:
The Glass Castle, by Jeannette Walls. It's a memoir of growing up in a highly dysfunctional and eccentric family.  Somehow I wasn't aware of it when it made a big splash on publication in 2005.  A customer recommended it to me: it had been assigned to her son when he was a junior in high school.  Makes one think a lot about the parent-child relationship.  It will probably end up in our expanded Teen/Adult section.  I'm casting about for more contemporary books that will appeal to high schoolers and parents.  I've done pretty well expanding our fantasy reading up to adult levels.  And in more traditional literature, we have a range of 19th and 20th century adult books.  Many of them pop up on summer reading lists; some are there because staff members feel a special connection.  Austen, Brontes, Dickens, Doyle, Dumas, Golding, Huxley, Lessing, Orwell, Rushdie, Salinger, Steinbeck, Twain, Vonnegut (am reeling off this list from memory -- would have more if I were looking at the shelves). Lots of them are wonderful, but I want to carry some more surprising and current ones too.  Ones that high schoolers can connect with, without necessarily having a community to discuss them with.

Suggestions?

Love,

Deborah

Explicit content

Dear Aunt Debbie,

I need to figure out when I'm going to see that movie.  Like you, all of my students, and thousands of other people in the interestingly wide demographic that has become obsessed with the books, I whizzed through the Hunger Games trilogy.  I'm not sure at what age I'd want my kids reading it, but I have two good friends with 9 and 11-year old daughters who loved the series.  I do know that it's the kind of book I'd want to read with my kids, so that we could discuss the issues involved: both the intense violence, which gets quite graphic at times, and the larger social issues raised by Katniss's struggle.

Later this week, I'll be introducing a similarly fraught text to my ninth-grade students.  Russell Banks's Rule of the Bone contains all kinds of intense content: drug use, sexual abuse, child pornography, murder.  Every year, before I give it out to my freshmen, I have a moment of doubt: is this material too controversial?  Is it damaging to expose students to some aspects of the shadier sides of our culture that some of them may, so far, have escaped?  Then I bite the bullet, hand out the book, and spend the next month leading intense, real-world discussions of a text every one of my students finds gripping.

Rule of the Bone is narrated by Chappie (a.k.a. Bone), a 14-year-old pothead who lives in upstate NY.  Chappie's voice is informal and full of attitude -- lots of long, run-on sentences that feel breathless and realistically teenage-y.  In the first chapter, he steals from his mom and stepfather to buy pot, smokes, and holds his stepfather's rifle up to the window to imagine shooting people walking by.  It's not hard to tell that he's been through something bad, though the details of what's happened to him don't emerge immediately.  There's a lot of anger in the narration, but Chappie is also an appealing anti-hero.  He's been called a next-generation Holden Caulfield, and I think the comparison is apt.

As the story progresses, Chappie undergoes a series of transformations: he is presumed dead after a fire, and runs away with a friend; together, they get tattoos, and Chappie reinvents himself as Bone because of his chosen symbol (see book cover).  Other major characters emerge: Froggy, a.k.a. Rose, a little girl who Bone tries to save, sort of; I-Man, a Rastafarian illegal immigrant who takes Bone under his wing.  Much of the second half of the book takes place in Jamaica.  Because of the journey aspect of the book, and the racial themes which become prevalent as Bone grows close to I-Man and tries to emulate him, Rule of the Bone has been likened to Huckleberry Finn as well.

Teaching Rule of the Bone allows me to break open conversations with my students about identity, race relations, drug use, abuse, sexuality, what it means to be a family, and all kinds of juicy symbolism.  Given the TV and movies they watch and the video games they play, I'm pretty sure that most of the content we address, while shocking, isn't out of the realm of what they've seen before.  The difference is that we're analyzing it in a community.  By bringing these subjects into the classroom, we can identify and explore them -- it's a kind of safe space.

I introduce Rule of the Bone by providing my students with a list of the most frequently banned books of the last decade.  (I'm stacking the deck here: the #1 banned book is Harry Potter, which elicits immediate shock waves.)  Using this list as evidence, I ask them to debate the statement:

"Student exposure to controversial material should be limited in some cases."

I give them rules for the debate: one person at a time, direct opposing arguments, etc.  Then I sit back and watch them make all the arguments on both sides.  In the last five minutes of class, I tell them that the book we're about to read contains controversial material.  I encourage them to think about all of the arguments they've made for allowing mature students to handle complex and touchy subjects.  I ask for their maturity.  I ask them not to read ahead, but if they do, not to spoil the plot. Then we read a really excellent, complicated book -- together.

Love, Annie