By: Molly Ness PHD

Recently, my fourth-grade daughter and I were at our local recycling center, dropping off aluminum cans and plastic milk gallons. As we broke down our cardboard, we noticed an enormous stack of virtually brand-new children’s books. As I shook my head in frustration, my daughter asked me what was wrong.

“These books belong in the hands of young readers, or in a classroom library – not on the top of a recycling pile,” I explained. “Did you know that some children don’t have books in their homes or schools?”, I continued. Fortunate to grow up in a home and area rich with books and in a family of lifelong readers, this concept was incomprehensible to her. She furrowed her brow, “I don’t get it. How can kids not have books? How are they gonna read?” 

Her simple question was our impetus to launch a community book drive. With a few social media posts, some flip-lid trash cans, and many cardboard boxes, my daughter and I have collected nearly 4,000 books for Title I schools in our area. My daughter has become a young literacy activist, high schoolers (in need of fulfilling their required community service hours) box and distribute books, and we’ve made our community aware about our collective responsibility to take action in addressing book deserts.

The Devastating Impact of Book Deserts

Today, over 32 million children lack book access in their homes, schools, and communities. These students live in book deserts – high-poverty geographic areas that lack reading material. Recent research shows significant disparities in the availability of books between high-income and low-income neighborhoods, even within the same city; in a high-poverty area of Washington, DC (with poverty levels above 60%) there is one book per 833 children (Neuman & Moland, 2019).

            When books are not readily available, children suffer. As Neuman and colleagues (2019) explain, book deserts constrain young children’s opportunities to start school ready to learn. Without books, children miss out on chances to acquire vocabulary, content knowledge, and a myriad of literacy skills.  Furthermore, without books children miss out on the vast socioemotional benefits that comes from adult-child reading interaction.

How You Can Help #endbookdeserts

Whether you are a teacher living in an area flooded with books or you teach in a community that qualifies as a book desert, you can join forces with literacy warriors who aim to provide book access and equity. Here are just a few ideas on how to flood students with books:

• Seek Out & Visit Literacy-Rich Areas in Your Communities: Innovative people and programs – beyond our public libraries – are transforming community spaces into literacy hot spots. For example, laundromats are quickly becoming makeshift literacy spaces – as patrons tend to frequent the same laundromats, bring their young children, and spend an extended amount of time there. Embracing literacy as a keystone to healthy child development, Reach Out and Read provides families with books as a part of pediatric checkups. Book banks are gaining momentum, as epitomized by Bernie’s Book Bank in Chicago, and San Francisco’s Children’s Book Project, and Baltimore-based Maryland Book Bank.
• Get Creative Passionate literacy warriors who get books into the hands of their students don’t rest on school vacations or summer breaks and prove that where there’s a will, there’s a way. Teachers in Virginia ride bikes into students’ neighborhoods over the summer, armed with popsicles and books. In Michigan, teachers repurposed a dilapidated school bus into the Big Rockin’ Book Bus; throughout the summer, they deliver meals and books directly to students.
• Send Home Books From Your Classroom and / or School Libraries: Knowing that students might not have books at home, we need to be generous with the resources that we do have. Don’t lock away books in classroom and school libraries during school breaks and summer holidays. Don’t be afraid that some books might not make their way back to classroom shelves. Literacy guru Donalyn Miller says, “I’d rather lose a book than lose a reader.”
• Spread Book Culture: Overcoming book deserts takes more than just placing books in low-income areas. Create book culture by inviting authors to discuss their craft, develop welcoming spaces to discuss books, and constantly talk to and with students about what you are reading to showcase your reading identity. You might foster the reading habits of readers of all ages with cross-community virtual book clubs. In effort to promote a love of reading, ProjectLit provides high-quality, student-selected books worthy of discussion.
• Raise awareness to #EndBookDeserts: Many people outside of the field of education are simply unaware of the presence and impact of book deserts. You might work with local businesses, churches, and organizations to understand the challenge and inspire them to take action and begin a book collection, to help a teacher fulfill her Amazon wish list for classroom books, or donate their time to the many organizations that exist to distribute books.

Ultimately, all of us must champion children’s literacy rights, and be vocal advocates for the importance of book access. As we shine the light on the accessibility of books in our low-income urban and rural areas, we increase our ability to transform book deserts into book oases. When teachers come together – across both book deserts and book floods – all children increase the likelihood of becoming lifelong readers. For more information on the people and programs who work to end book deserts, visit www.endbookdeserts.com.

References:

Neuman, S. & Moland, N. (2019). Book deserts: The consequences of income segregation on children’s access to print. Urban Education, 54(1), 126-147.

Check out Molly’s Website!

By Ellin Keene

It’s a bright autumn morning in your elementary or middle school classroom, early in the year, so much ahead—nothing quite like those early days of promise. Literacy is first up for the day. You present a short mini-lesson (keep it snappy!) in reading and hustle the children off to read independently. You feel that it has taken too long this fall to get them all into the “right” books, but finally, you are ready to dig into real conferences.

You rush to confer with as many students as possible. Just two today. You’re wondering about those three “reading” in the corner. What were they really up to over there? And what about your friend who has abandoned four books in two weeks? You meant to confer with her today to figure out what is going on there. You ask the students to share quickly with a partner as a sort of reflection. Pretty lame, you think. The kids didn’t take it seriously.

Time for writing. You are determined not to forget writer’s workshop this year! Last year it seems that writing always took a back seat to reading or, when kids did write, it was all response to text. So, you roll out a carefully planned writing mini-lesson which, incidentally, is unrelated to the reading lesson. You tell the students that it’s time to apply what you’ve taught in their own writing. You try to make it sound like they’re standing on the precipice of greatness as writers. They look skeptical. Most stare at their writer’s notebooks. You dig in to confer with a student and there is so much work to be done in her writing. You’re overwhelmed. 15 minutes later, you look up and realize that the literacy block is nearly over. No time to reflect on writing today. Determined, you think, “Okay, I really will get that in tomorrow!”

You walk the students to lunch feeling that the class didn’t accomplish nearly as much as they would have liked and that time is too short to address standards requirements, much less lead students to a sense of spirited inquiry. The next day, the process plays out again in exactly the same way. Sound at all familiar? There has to be a better way.

Rethinking Readers’/Writers’ Workshop

The Readers’/Writers’ Workshop structure described above has been used for nearly four decades, yet as early as 1983, Rob Tierney & David Pearson suggested another approach. In “Toward a Composing Model of Reading” (1983), they argue that “one must begin to view reading and writing as essentially similar processes of meaning construction.” They question the wisdom of teaching reading and writing as separate processes and suggest that we view reading as a process of composing, much as we think of writing, and that whenever possible we integrate reading and writing instruction. In most classrooms, their call has gone unheeded.

In today’s literacy world, packaged programs proliferate and nearly always lead teachers down paths to separate instruction in reading and writing. Isolated reading and writing and teacher- or program-driven learning targets are the norm; students rarely set their own goals and are lucky if they have choice in what to read and write, let alone when to read and write. Too often, students experience diminished engagement and teachers know that this is hardly the way to provoke inquiry, engagement, or agency.

I’d like to offer a proposal (get it?) in which reading and writing get married. (And live happily ever after.)  Following a lovely ceremony, they adopt the name Literacy Studio!

In a Literacy Studio:

• Most reading and writing instruction is integrated.
  • If a reading learning target relates to, say, character traits and how they affect the plot, there is one whole group lesson (called a Crafting session) that incorporates reading and writing each day that the class is focused on that objective. The teacher models in mentor texts and writing, cutting in half the instruction time and offering it in a more efficient and integrated way.
• Students choose whether they will read or write following the Crafting Session.
  • During independent work time (called composing) students may choose to apply their understanding of character traits in reading and/or writing.
  • Some may write during the first half of composing time and switch to reading for the second half or vice versa.
  • Some may choose to read (or write) for the entire composing time but will choose the other for the next day’s work.
  • Students keep simple records to show whether they chose to read and/or write during a particular composing time ensuring that all spend a roughly equal independent work time on each during a given week.
  •  Whether they are reading or writing, they are focused on the class learning goal, in this example, character traits.
• Teachers confer and convene small groups.
  • During composing time, teachers have an extended opportunity to confer and meet with small groups. They have planned one lesson, there is one independent work time and one reflection. There is time to get to those kids in the corner, figure out why our friend isn’t sticking with a book and meet with a small group of students who aren’t yet applying, for example, what they know about character traits in their writing.
  • Small groups (called invitational groups) are needs-based and may include children reading and writing at a wide range of present performance level as long as they have a need in common.

• At the end of composing, students reflect.
  • In small groups, pairs or with the whole class, the students discuss how they focused on the learning target as readers and writers, sharing their insights with each other so that when, for example, a reader switches to writing the next day, he will have his classmates’ stories of writing to develop characters to propel him forward.

Let’s marry reading and writing this year!

When reading and writing get married, there is:

• One Crafting Session a day focused on reading and writing!
• One longer Composing Time for independent work and time to confer each day with readers and writers! An Invitational Group as needed!
• One Reflection Session a day that focuses on reading and writing!

Learning reading and writing together makes sense to kids. Students develop perspectives as readers and writers simultaneously leading to a dramatic increase in the quality of their thinking and work in both.

And, teaching reading and writing together makes sense for us. We gain enormous efficiency and time to focus on individual students, but most importantly, we can help kids understand the critical synergy between reading and writing—that’s a gift that will serve them for years.

Ellin Oliver Keene

September 2019

Ellin Oliver Keene has been a classroom teacher, staff developer, non-profit director and adjunct professor of reading and writing.  She directed staff development initiatives at the Denver-based Public Education & Business Coalition and served as Deputy Director and Director of Literacy and Staff Development for the Cornerstone Project at the University of Pennsylvania. She serves as senior advisor at Heinemann, overseeing the Heinemann Fellows initiative and is the editor of the Heinemann Catalogue/Journal.

Ellin consults with schools and districts throughout the country and abroad.  Her emphasis is long-term, school-based professional development and strategic planning for literacy learning.

Ellin is author of Engaging Children: Igniting the Drive for Deeper Learning (2018), is co-editor and co-author of The Teacher You Want to Be: Essays about Children, Learning, and Teaching (Heinemann, 2015); co-editor of the Not This, but That series (Heinemann, 2013 – 2017); author of Talk About Understanding: Rethinking Classroom Talk to Enhance Understanding (Heinemann, 2012), To Understand: New Horizons in Reading Comprehension (Heinemann, 2008), co-author of Comprehension Going Forward (Heinemann, 2011), Mosaic of Thought: The Power of Comprehension Strategy Instruction, 2^nd edition (Heinemann, 2007, 1^st edition, 1997), and author of Assessing Comprehension Thinking Strategies (Shell Educational Books, 2006).

By: Jen Serravallo

Last fall, about a month into the school year, a reading specialist emailed me for help with a very common problem. I wrote back to her directly but realized that because what she asks about is so common, perhaps more would like to spy on our exchange and think about their own classrooms. I wish you a wonderful start to the school year and lots of joyful hours spent reading in this year ahead.

Hello!

I was wondering if you could help me with something we’re encountering with our 5^th and 6^th graders.  They are abandoning books and not finishing them.  Students say they are bored and give up on texts.  Beyond the obvious reasons and solutions, what can we try to get them to stick with a book, work through the boring parts, and finish them? 

Thank you!

Anna

Reading Specialist

Hi Anna,

It’s hard to know exactly what will work without meeting or talking to your kids, but I do have a few ideas. But before I share them, I want to confess that I actually abandon books sometimes. Do you? Sometimes a book I thought I’d love really is boring – why struggle through a boring book when there are so many great ones? Sometimes a different book grabs my attention and I end up hopping over to that one. I do finish books that are good, so I’m not worried about my reading life. So I would encourage you to allow for some abandoning of books – I think it’s a normal part of being a reader for many people.  That said, here are a bunch of things you might consider to try to get kids into books they will love from the start:

1. Do a really critical examination of the books you’re offering kids, and ask the kids for feedback on what you’re offering. Which books reflect their identities, cultures, interests, experiences, language, family structures? Along those same lines, ask kids to tell you what they want — maybe give them an book catalogue order form, some time on the web to browse, and/or take them on a trip to a bookstore. Have them make a wish list. What do you notice about the books they want to read? How do they compare to what you already have?

• Do an interest survey that asks about their favorite movies, TV shows and involve them in coming up with names for bins in your library based on their interests (i.e. “Books That Will Make you Cry” or “Sports Stars” or “Powerful Female Protagonists”). Include them in resorting what you do have so they can think of their identities first when they go looking for new books.

• As they are choosing their books, you could try to encourage them toward books that you (and they) might consider on the “easy” side. My guess is that reading whatever they are currently reading may be presenting them with some struggle and their comprehension is possibly shaky. It’s no fun to read books you aren’t understanding!

• Give them lots of access to graphic novels. The books are deceptively sophisticated and the visuals can provide support for comprehension overall, and visualizing specifically.

• Do book talks, and maybe read the first chapter of a book they might love, and leave the books on ledges around the room. Highlight something about the book that you know will be a draw – the suspense, the hilarious main character, the real-life issues.

• Show book trailers/commercials from publishers that will help do the “selling” for you and get them excited to check the books out.

• Give kids time to talk books to each other. Set them up in partnerships or book clubs and let them choose books together, then set aside time a couple of times a week for them to talk. Knowing they will talk with a friend about their book might encourage them to stick with it and get ideas to talk about.

• Confer with kids regularly. Talk to them about their book choices, how engaged they are with the book, how it compares to past choices. Check-in on their comprehension, and offer strategies to support them with things they need. Offer them positive feedback with ways they might be engaging with the text – using prior knowledge, slowing down to visualize what they are reading, finding more time each day to read to get into their book, and so on.

• Ask your school librarian for help. Librarians know what’s just been released, what’s on the horizon, and what the hottest books are for the grade level this year.

I hope those help!

Jen

Jennifer Serravallo is a literacy consultant, speaker, and the author of several popular titles including the NY Times Bestselling The Reading Strategies Book, The Writing Strategies Book, and Understanding Texts & Readers. A Teacher’s Guide to Reading Conferences takes a closer look at the purposeful, responsive instruction that takes place while conferring. Her latest publication, Complete Comprehension, is a revised and reimagined whole book assessment and teaching resource based on the award-winning Independent Reading Assessment. She was a Senior Staff Developer at the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project and taught in NYC public schools. Twitter: @jserravallo | Instagram: @jenniferserravallo | Website for Jen Seravallo, Click Here

By Lester Laminack

Enjoy, as Lester guides you from teacher-centered to student-centered teacher read alouds!

When you reach the end of an article, a story, or a book do you reach for your notebook to answer a set of questions written by someone else?  Do you feel that your understanding of what you have read, your worth as a reader, hinges on being able to give the answers to someone else’s questions?  Probably not.  Yet it seems that much of our reading instruction relies heavily on having our students answer a set of questions after they complete a reading assignment.  Following reading with a set of questions is a longstanding practice in literacy education.  In fact, many commercial reading programs follow this pattern.  One well-known program assigns a point value to each title, then has the children read and log on to a computer to read and answer a set of 10 multiple-choice questions. Other programs have students read then write answers to similar questions. And if we are teaching from a literature-based approach that doesn’t rely upon a commercially produced program we tend to have our own questions to hold our students accountable.

Questions Can Create Patterns

As teachers, most of us were introduced to Bloom’s Taxonomy as undergraduates in a teacher education program.  We likely practiced developing questions for each of the levels in the taxonomy and began our teacher careers believing that it was our charge to develop good questions that would hold our students accountable and yield proof that they read and understood the assigned text.

We sat with our notepads at hand and read the books, articles, poems, and various other texts our students would read across the year.  We paused at various points in the text to draft the questions we would give our students. We were attentive to character traits, shifts in the plot, nuances in word choice, the author’s use of simile and metaphor and figurative language.  We noted allusions to cultural references and other literature.  We were alert to the role of setting in the text, the way the author used dialog, bias, and narration.  We read closely and synthesized as we developed the questions we would present to the students.  Questions, whether presented by the program or developed by the teacher, may fall into a pattern or categories.  For example, questions about the main character, physical descriptions, main idea, vocabulary, opinion, evaluation, analysis, synthesis, inference, etc.

As students read and respond to the questions presented they begin to recognize the patterns as well.  Does this impact the way they read?  Does it shape what they tend to notice and pay attention to?  In other words, are they reading with the pattern of your questions in mind?  If the answer is, yes, then what are they failing to notice?  What is the cost to comprehension and attention and engagement?

Get In Touch With Ways You Read

Consider your own thought process as you read a text with the intention of writing questions for students to answer.  Are you beginning with a frame in mind? That is, do you begin with thoughts focused on Who? What? When? Where? Why? and How?  Or do you begin with the intention of finding three detail questions, two questions about the character’s motives, three questions that require the reader to interpret, two that require analysis, and one that calls for synthesis?  If the answer is, yes, then how does this frame influence YOUR approach as a reader? How does that process differ from the way you approach a professional text or a book you have selected to read for pleasure?  How does the approach effect your engagement with and your comprehension of the text?  Chances are that you read differently when you read for pleasure than when you read with the intention of developing a set of questions for your students.

Who’s Doing All The Thinking?

I have come to believe that the person who is asking the questions is the person who has done the thinking.  As you read to develop the questions for your students you were summarizing the text at critical points.  You were evaluating the merits of details and the use of Literacy devices.  You were synthesizing information and generating new thoughts.  You were noticing were the text called for an inference or expected you to have adequate background knowledge to connect to a metaphor or allusion.  In short, you were doing the deeper thinking, the more thorough analysis as a reader in service to the development of questions that would yield the proof of your students’ connections and comprehension.

Time To Flip the Read Aloud

I invite you to try something the next time you are reading aloud to your students.  As the story draws to a close and your voice delivers the last line simply close the book and exhale.  Pause for a few seconds and let silence settle over the group.  Then, look at them and speak quietly:  “Think for a few seconds.  Don’t speak yet, just think if you could speak with (author, illustrator, character, expert—beekeeper if the story is about bees, etc) what are the three best questions you could ask?  Think about that, please.  I’ll ask you to share your questions in just a moment.”

Have your notebook ready to jot down the questions as they share. At the end of the day when the students have boarded their buses to leave, revisit those questions and place them into four categories: Vocabulary, Background knowledge, Schema/conceptual frame, and other.  Take note of where the majority of the questions fall.  Think about what this reveals to you about their understanding of the text.  

I’ve come to believe that I find out more about where their understanding fails by examining their questions than I ever got from checking their answers.  

Lester’s books are on Amazon!

Learn more about Lester Laminack, check out his website!

Follow Lester on Twitter @lester_laminack