Slice of Life - Time to read

I posted this photo on Facebook a couple of days ago. It was of the books I read over break. Why did I post it? One, I love pictures, I love taking them, putting different filters on them, seeing if I can get the photo to look like what I visualize. Also, I posted it because a few years ago I began living my true life. Talking about books as much as I actually read them. Owning up to my obsession with everything on the printed page. My theory was, at the time, that if I shared my reading life with my friends – people would associate me with books. I might inspire others to read. I would give them someone to turn to when they needed a title, and so on.

So far it seems to have worked. I get messages all the time from friends I haven’t seen since high school – asking for advice to get their kids to read, asking for book recommendations, etc.

I should say, I don’t put the photo up – or talk about how much I read – to brag. I fully realize that I read more than many of my friends. But I have just as many who blow past me in reading. I will also be the first to admit that I read really fast. If I want to study a book, I have to slow down. Most of the time I’m doing what I call a “quick read”, read every word but at a fast pace and get the story down. If I want deeper thinking about a character, I reread.

So why? Why would I spend all of this time reading these books? I consider it part of my job description. There is just no way for me to recommend books to students if I haven’t read them. And I’ll be honest here, sometimes I get a little tired of the comments that infer I have no life if I read this much. Or teachers that ask why would I bother to read kids books when there are so many great books for adults. One – I don’t teach adults. Two – in my opinion kids books, especially young adult books, trump adult books every time.

As to how do I have a life if I read this much – honestly that’s pretty easy. I do spend time with friends and family. I do actually even have hobbies outside of reading. Fortunately for me, I don’t appear to find reality TV and police dramas as enthralling as the TV executives seem to think all Americans do. As a result, I watch roughly one hour of TV a week. (Big Bang Theory and How I Met Your Mother) That frees up quite a bit of reading time right there. J Add those minutes to the ones I steal in the morning when the dog has awoken me before the sun, the ones when Liam pats my side and takes an hour to go to bed, the ones I stole as I read standing at the counter waiting for the water to boil for dinner, the ones where I sat listening to an audio book en route to get groceries, the ones where I read in the driveway, just to find out who kidnapped the king. Those minutes add up. It is what I tell my students and words that I live by. 

Slice of Life is sponsored every Tuesday by Stacey and Ruth from Two Writing Teachers.

It's Monday! What Are You Reading?

I’m joining Jen & Kellee (and many other bloggers) in discussing what we are reading this week. Join us! Go to their site and link up your own blog.

Holiday #bookaday, I adore thee. A time to try and power through some of the many wonderful books sitting around my house. And while I didn’t get through every book, I made a nice dent. Or would have if I would STOP. BUYING. BOOKS. Oh well!

So in the last week I read:

My favorite from this week would absolutely be The Raven Boys. WOW! What a book.

Up next I have The Peculiar. Beyond that, we’ll have to see what calls my name from my “to read” shelves.

Happy Reading!
Katherine

Sharing my reading life

I have Nancie Atwell and Donalyn Miller to thank for two huge changes in my relationships with my students over the past few years. Six years ago I saw Nancie Atwell speak at a conference. She talked about how she shared her life with her students – that they knew so much about her, they even knew her favorite candy. Two years ago I saw Donalyn Miller for the first time. She explained that we needed to share our reading lives with our students. We needed to explicitly teach our reading habits to help our students develop their own reading lives independent of us.

So, what am I doing with that information? Well, as a result my students know a lot about me. They know the basics – who my husband is. The fact that he is six foot seven and I am five foot two – it makes for an interesting photo. J They know about my boys and my dog. They know my “favorites”, for example the know my favorite spot to eat by myself in Champaign is Café Kopi (I can read there.) They know my favorite store is Barnes and Noble. They know I REALLY like M&M’s. They know I drink Coke Zero. They know that if the room is messy, especially my desk, I can’t concentrate. They know I am a huge fan of Apple products. They know I love to read and write. They know my dream is to write a book that would help teachers.

As a reader they know where I like to read – Café Kopi or my favorite reading chair at home. They know that I always have a reading plan and they have seen pictures of my “to read” shelf in my bedroom. They know that I try and read for a certain amount of time each day. They know I am trying to read all of the Newbery winners in order. They know I have friends that are readers just like me. They know I plan for reading when we go on a break like the past two weeks. And they know I make a goal for every year related to reading.

So, why are these shared items important? I am a big believer in relationships. In fact, almost every paper I wrote in grad school had some element of the importance of relationships with your students in it. Once the relationship is built, you can get your students to really grow because of that relationship. It goes without saying, just as I let my students know me, I work hard to really know them.

Knowing all of this I came away from this Christmas Break with three items I want to share with my students on Monday. Three new realizations about reading that I think will help them in their own reading lives.

One I have already touched on – the Book Gap Challenge. Realizing I have avoided reading “the classics.” I already have a list of books I want to tackle this year as a result. This will be important because I am teaching a non-fiction unit in January. I will be asking them each to read non-fiction books. This is a gap for about 90-95% of my students. We will discuss why recognizing our gaps and trying to fill them is important. 

My stack a few days ago. I had read the ones on the right.

Another item I want to share with them is something I realized as I read so many books over break, the first 50 pages or so are tough for me. I read really fast, but only when I’m “hooked.” Most books take me at least 50 pages to get hooked, to really understand the characters. For the first 50 pages I put the book down a lot, check Twitter, bake cookies, etc. This is when most of my students tend to abandon books, so I think this is something they will identify with. I will talk about how I do abandon books, but only have I have gone past the first 50 or so. This does not mean I will tell them they can’t abandon before page 50, just that I know myself and that’s what works for me, they need to discover what works for them.

Finally, I was reminded again last night of the importance of having friends that read. I was finishing The Raven Boys and I knew I had a friend who had read it. The book had hooked me – after the first 50 pages, of course – and I kept questioning what was going on. Because my friend is also a reader, we proceeded to text on and off as I finished the book – over the next four hours we exchanged over fifty texts. They began with questions about a character from the book and how sad I was that something had just happened. The texts then extended to symbolism in the books, connections to characters from other books, and more. I need to share this with my students so they can see why having friends who read AND discussing books with them would be beneficial.

Come Monday morning these three realizations will be shared with my students during our mini-lesson. I hope they will help my students continue to reflect on their reading lives and what their own habits are. I can’t wait to be back in the classroom and discussing books with the kids.

What counts as reading?

Over break I have spent a lot of time on Twitter – actually, who am I kidding, I always spend a lot of time on Twitter. On several different days I have been part of a Tweet thread on what “counts” for books in our classrooms.

Many teachers ask students to read a certain amount of books a year. In The Book Whisperer Donalyn Miller shared that she challenges her students to read 40 books each year. They kept track in their notebooks. Here’s how I have always interpreted Donalyn’s book challenge for her students – as a goal. I’ve seen the photos of her students at the end of the year holding up numbers of how many books they’ve read. Some were over 100, some well below 40. She said that doesn’t mean they cannot get an “A” – one set of boys with lower numbers had doubled or tripled what they read the previous year, how is that not success?

So do I have my students make a goal of how many books they will read? Absolutely. I tell them the goal has to be above 40. Mainly I picked 40 because I know it will shock them. I know they think they can’t do it. They can. Do I keep track of how many books they’ve read on a regular basis? Nope. They do, but I don’t even look at it. I glance at their notebook in reading conferences, ask if it is up to date, but I don’t keep track. Honestly, that’s for a few reasons. One, it would be one more thing on my plate and that plate is pretty full as it is. Two, I want them to own this, not me. So when several kids mentioned before break that they needed to adjust their original number, they were already almost at it, the class decided to do just that. I was fine either way – I reached my Goodreads goal for reading in August – I think. I didn’t readjust, just figured I’d see how far I could surpass it. That being said, I like letting them make the decisions here.

As for what counts, which we’ve been having a lot of conversation about, I think I might be in the minority when I say I count anything. So yes, graphic novels, picture books, rereads, audiobooks, another book in a series (Seriously, a friend’s daughter goes to a school where books in a series don’t count. WHAT?), I count them all. I’m sure I have some of you questioning that – picture books count? I could read 40 in a day. Yep, so can I. I think the reason I count anything is because I’m sending a message here – reading counts. Heck, I’d count a magazine if they wanted to read that. My student Matt has read 140+ graphic novels this year. Last year he says he was not a reader. Should I tell him that we need to count each graphic novel as a ¼ of a book? Or only ones with X amount of pages will count? What message would that send to him? If you ask Matt if he is a reader now, his answer would be a yes. He actually ran into a bus one days (it was parked) when he was leaving school because he was reading as he walked.

What I have found is that the more they read – of any format – the more they want to read. Do some get stuck in ruts that they only want to read graphic novels, they only want to read fantasy? Yes. Are they sometimes reading below their reading level? Yes. I’ll tell you a secret here, though. I read 508 books last year. Easily 450 were below my reading level, maybe more. I’m still a pretty good reader. My entire goal for the year is to help them fall in love with reading. They need to find their niches – what do they love? Counting what they read shows that I value their choices. The higher the volume, the more exposure they are getting to stories, characters, plots. I value rereading because I do it. Books I love, characters I love, I like to visit again and again.

Even saying all of this, I do try and help them get out of a rut. For example, with Matt after about 80 graphic novels we talked about goals in one of our conferences. I asked if he thought he should try and branch out. He agreed but I could tell he was nervous. He wondered if he was only a reader with graphic novels. I book talked many books for him, all ones I was sure he would find success with. He ended up choosing The One and Only Ivan by Katherine Applegate. I think he felt that the sparseness of the text on the page was non-threatening. He devoured it and went on to read several other books in verse. Then he went back to graphic novels. All I ask of him, of all my readers, is that they try something else now and then. I tell them, how will you know if you like it if you don’t try? Same thing I tell my sons about vegetables, come to think of it.

So as I go back to school on Monday I will tell my students of my own #bookgapchallenge. What genres do I avoid reading? For me I tend to shy away from the classics. As a result, my first book purchase of this year was Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. I’m going to tell them why I am challenging myself to read these books. Then we are going to look at the goals they made for the second half of the school year. We will discuss how they will accomplish those goals. But that does not mean I will stop counting graphic novels, or that I will discourage them from reading them. Who knows, maybe they will one day write some of those comics that I can place in my library. Or maybe those will be the gateway books into a life of reading for them. That is absolutely something I want to encourage. 

Resolutions for 2013

My necklace with my one little word for 2012 - BE

2013. I used to have resolutions every year – lose weight, work out every day, eat healthy, etc. Often those resolutions didn’t last even until my birthday (end of February). So last year I went with a reading resolution – read 300 books – and one little word as a resolution. Both resolutions were actually met.

My reading resolution was easier than I thought. When I made it, I was nervous. I had read 263 the year before and felt like I was reading an awful lot. This year as I finished my last book yesterday I looked at the number, 508. That’s awesome, but I realized something. That’s a really high number, for me. I have friends who read three times that this year. I have friends who read much less. All of them read a lot. We all chose to challenge ourselves in our own ways – and as adults we are allowed to do this. I like bringing that idea into the classroom as well. Let my students create their own challenges; this ensures they are more meaningful and more tailored to each person instead of a blanket goal for all.

As for my one little word, this is what I wrote last New Year’s Day about it:

Be

• Be the best wife, mom, teacher, and friend I can
• Be good to myself
• Be a role model for others
• Be a writer
• Be a thinker
• Be a reader
• Be true to myself

I think I did pretty well on this goal with the exception to the second bullet – Be good to myself. I absolutely made more time for myself this year – and I’m good about doing things I want to do and not putting myself last, but I am my own worst critic. My inner voice is not kind to me and I struggle a lot with that.

SO…. Goals for this year? My reading goal will be 600 books, but with a caveat. I realized I haven’t read some of the “classics” or, if I have read them I don’t think I understood them. So some of those 600 will be devoted to discovering those. First up, Pride and Prejudice. I still will try and make my way through the Newbery books as well.

My one little word is:

Be

My focus is:

• Be the best wife, mom, teacher, and friend I can
• Be good to myself
• Be a role model for others
• Be a writer
• Be a thinker
• Be a reader
• Be true to myself
•  Be serene (Serenity prayer becoming a mantra) J

I wish you all the best year ever. I look forward to all of the blessings of a new year and am grateful for all I was given in 2012. It was amazing.