Celebrate Reading

I promised to share with you the reading encouragement ideas from your projects. There are some great ideas here, you may want to copy it for future reference. Remember: A library needs to be a happening place.  Here (in no particular order) are the programming ideas from EDT763 spring 2011:

• Author visit 
• "Virtual" author visit using Skype
• Reading "challenge" - classroom v classroom or school wide
• Class newsletter with student book reviews
• Class wiki where students post book review
• Book club during lunch time
• Art contest - students create posters for their favorite books
• Poetry jam for Black History Month
• Place coupons in random fiction titles with questions and small prizes
• Books and Breakfast
•  Weekly specials board (like in a restaurant)  5 great books of the week
• A Shot at Reading - photo contest with pictures of students reading in a unique or funny place, winners made into Read posters
• Leave Your Mark - student created bookmarks
• Write a grant to get e-readers for library
• Genrepalooza
• "Web of books" made with masking tape - inside circle popular titles, working out to classic works
• Celebrate banned books week with paper chains made with titles, authors and cited reasons for books being banned
• Stop Whining Start a Revolution - book discussions of books where young people try to affect social change 
• Match popular songs with books (e.g. Lady Gaga's Born This Way and Almost Perfect or The Earth, My Butt and Other Big Round Things)
• Promote books made into movies
• Teachers post outside their door what they are currently reading
• Hallway and library charts of what students are reading
• Lunch book club
• All school reading time
• Dress as literacy character
• Reading a chapter of a couple of different books on an e-reader
• Mock Printz Award
• Wicked Good book cart (nominated by students) and Book Hall of Fame
• Meet Your Reader - interview randomly selected students and a teacher. Photograph them reading their favorite book
• Books with Bite - displays, Friday night Halloween event to share creepy stories*
• Get Your Draw On - anime and manga drawing contest*
• Books That Make You LOL*
• If You Like This - display*
• Books With Beat - poetry contest*

*You can read more about these at Rachel's wiki at http://readingencouragementplan.wikispaces.com/1.++Home

Contempory Fiction - North of Beautiful (Headley)

Well the James Cook Diversity Award committee met last week - but we didn't decide anything yet :-) We discussed about forty books and eliminated about half of them. There are a few more that we need to read and we will be voting in another month or so. There seemed to be about 6 favorites. One of them is North of Beautiful by Justina Chen Headley (Little, Brown, 2009). It is the story of a girl with a disfiguring "port wine" birthmark over one side of her face. She has had many procedures to try to remove it but nothing has worked. As a child she was teased about it. As a teen she covers it with layers of makeup. Her self confidence is low - but this stems more from her home life than her face. Terra's father is a mean bully. While he doesn't physically hit anyone, his constant put downs makes family life hell. Her two older brothers have moved out and stay far away. Her lovely, demoralized mother eats to survive and has become obese. On the trip home from one more attempt to remove the birthmark, Terra and her mother literally run into Jacob, a gorgeous Goth, who is traveling with his mother and little brother. They develop a friendship. For Terra and Jacob a hot one!

There is a lot in this book. The theme of maps is throughout. Terra's father is a cartographer. Jacob introduces Terra to geocaching - a treasuring hunting game using a GPS. Terra is an artist whose medium is collages. There is travel: part of book is a trip to China to visit Terra's brother. Very well written. I would recommend this book to high school girls who like Sarah Dessen. Hook? I would show them the cover and simply say, "If you like Sarah Dessen, you will love this."

Graphic Novel - Yummy (Neri)

Yummy : The Last Days of a Southside Shorty by G. Neri (Lee and Low Books, 2010) is a very powerful graphic novel. I read it for the James Cook Award Committee and it is on my short list for the award. We meet Thursday - I'll tell you who won at our last class. My other favorites are Hush and Almost Perfect, two books that I have previously blogged about.

Ultimately this book is about our failure as a society to help children in poverty. It is a biography of Robert "Yummy" Sandifer born in Chicago in 1984. He got his nickname because of his love of candy. His parents were continually in prison. His grandmother tried to care for him but had too many grandchildren to deal with. For family, Yummy turned to the Black Disciples Nation gang and by 11 years old, he was a hardened gang banger. Gangs used "shorties", young kids, to do dirty work because they knew they were too young for felony prosecutions. In the summer of 1994, Yummy's gang initiation goes horribly wrong when he accidentally kills an innocent young girl instead of a rival gang member. On the run, he eventually is killed himself by fellow gang members when the heat on them becomes too much. The illustrator, Randy DuBurke, created thick black line drawings set in the "comic book" frame format. They appear ugly. Appropriate for the story.

This book is a very quick read but has a lot of staying power. I would introduce it to middle and high school students by listing Yummy's crimes and then asking the question - was Yummy a born killer or a victim himself? Then I would say "would your answer be different if you knew that Yummy was 11 years old?"

Multicultural - Hush (Chayil)

Hush is one of the dozen or so books I read for the James Cook Award committee this year. And it is one that really stayed with me. It is the story of a closed religious community and it's failure to face the reality of sexual abuse. Gittel lives with her loving family in a Brooklyn Chassidic, (ultra-orthodox Jewish) community. They have almost no contact with anyone outside their little world. Yiddish is spoken first, English second. They attend their own schools, read their own magazines, have no television, listen to no secular radio. Girls attend school until it is time for their arranged marriage at 18. After marriage women wear wigs or scarves so that their hair will not be exposed to the view of anyone but their husbands. Boys attend Yeshiva school focusing on studying the sacred text, the Talmud, at the expense of science and mathematics.  The story moves back and forth between today and 2003 when Gittel's her best friend, Devory was sexually abused by her own brother. Gittel is a witness though she really doesn't understand what she has seen (of course sex education is confined to a lesson before marriage). Devory hangs herself and Gittel is told by all the adults to not discuss what has happened, to forget. Her parents also tell her to forget. Accusing someone of sexual abuse in this community comes back on the accuser. Since there is no sexual abuse in the community, it didn't happen and the accuser must be lying. It is as if Devory never existed. But Gittel can't forget.

This is a really intense book. What makes it so powerful is the truth that is told. The author's name is given as "Eishes Chayil". This is a pseudonym meaning virtuous wife. In the author's note at the end of the book, the author explains that the book is based on her own life. She grew up in "the chosen Jewish nation" in Brooklyn. When she was young she watched her friend being molested, though she didn't really understand what she was seeing. A young boy in her community did hang himself. The author presents the joy and warmth of the ultra-Orthodox world while taking on its terrible inability to confront anything that goes against tradition and its deeply ingrained delusions.

This book is for older readers (gr.10-adult). Readers will learn a lot about life in a closed communities and parallels to other cultures are abundant. Plenty to discuss with this book. I would introduce it to teens with the description I wrote in the first paragraph.

Poetry - You Don't Even Know Me (Flake)

Sharon Flake, You Don't Even Know Me: Stories and Poems about Boys (Jump at the Sun, 2010)

I SIT IN YOUR CLASS
I PLAY BY THE RULES
   I'M YOUNG
        I'M FLY
             I'M BLACK
        SO OF COURSE I THINK
                                       I'M COOL   


I wanted to read this title because we can never have enough good books that urban African American boys can relate to. It is a mix of free verse poetry often with a freestyle rap beat and short stories tackling big issues: teen fatherhood and marriage, relationships with father figures, HIV, seduction by an older woman, living in the suburbs and "talking white", the attraction of the gang life. One of the strongest of the nine short stories "DON"T READ THIS" is written in diary format about a teen whose twin who killed himself because of the abuse he endured from a club adviser. The diary writer is preparing to do the same thing, giving away his belongings, buying a rope, setting a date, practicing.

I liked the mix of poetry and short stories. Some of the poems had more appeal than others but I think boys (or girls who want to understand boys better) will like the book and it may inspire some to write their own poetry.

Sharon Flake's books were very popular in the middle school urban library where I worked in Dayton. They include Money Hungry, Begging for Change, The Skin I'm In, Who Am I Without Him: Short Stories About Girls and the Boys in Their Lives. Check out her website that includes a video of the first poem from You Don't Even Know Me read by teens. I would play that to introduce the book to grades 7-10.