Caldecott and Newbery Awards 2013

It was time for, as one teacher friend put it, the Oscars for librarians this morning, with the webcast of the American Library Association Youth Media Awards live from the ALA Midwinter conference in Seattle, of all places!

The last few years I have put the webcast up on the TV (donated by our lovely PTA) and watched, whether there was a class in the library or not.  Today the 58 5th graders arrived for checkout partway through the webcast, but before the Caldecott and Newbery Awards were revealed.  It was a lot of fun to have some students standing around watching with me as the winners were announced.  At one point one of my 5th grade boys was oohing and aahing with every book announced just like me, as his teachers were laughing at us cheering in stereo.

For once in my librarian career, I had highly recommended the book that won the Newbery, The One and Only Ivan, by Katherine Applegate, as a read-aloud to several teachers who took me up on my suggestion.  At least three classes read it aloud at the beginning of the school year, and students loved it.  They learned all about Ivan and his life at the Tacoma shopping mall, then at the Atlanta Zoo.  We watched excerpts from National Geographic's special about urban gorillas, which showed how very small and concrete Ivan's enclosure was at the shopping mall.

I quote the first chapter to anyone who will listen.

I am Ivan.  I am a gorilla.  It's not as easy as it looks.

I am also a huge fan of Jon Klassen, the author and illustrator of This is Not My Hat, the 2013 Caldecott winner.  Last spring I read I Want My Hat Back to every 2nd-6th grade class, and laughed out loud every time myself.  It was a fabulous text for inference, and the reaction of each class to the end of the book was priceless to watch and listen to.  I highly recommend reading his books to intermediate classes for the reactions alone.

Congratulations to all the winners of the Youth Media Awards, I look forward to reading and sharing all of the titles with my students!

Motivation to Read

I am pleased with my schedule this year, mostly because it groups similar grades together for their library classes, so I feel that I am less scattered and more able to teach consistently across grade levels.  I also have larger blocks of time to really dig into my planning and put together lessons and units without a lot of interruptions.

One theme I have been working on is related to the importance of reading in life.  I administered a survey near the beginning of the year to the 4th and 5th grade students, measuring their perception of themselves as readers and how much they value reading itself.  I started with questions from the Motivation to Read Profile and then added some of my own to create my own survey and find out more about students' interests and ideas about reading.

After the survey I was concerned to find a large percentage of 4th graders did not have a high opinion of reading.  I feel that this is something I can teach, as I understand that students may not like to read and may not choose to do it independently when they have free time, but I think they need to understand the importance of reading in our lives.  So I have been working on some subtle lessons to cover this idea.  

I do not want to push students even farther away from reading by hitting them over the head with this idea during their library time, so I have been reading some stories with this topic, such as Miss Brooks Loves Books (and I Don't!) by Barbara Bottner.  This worked successfully this week with a 4th grade class with a large number of students who scored low results on the survey.  In the book, a student does not like to read and does not understand her librarian, who loves books.  The librarian dresses up in costumes and obviously loves to read and loves to encourage children to read.  The student despairs of ever finding a book that she will love, especially because she is given an assignment to share a book with the class and explain why she likes it, which seems to be an impossible task.  Finally, after many tries, the librarian hands her Shrek by William Steig, and the ugly, warty ogre captures her heart.

After I read Miss Brooks, this class begged me to read Shrek aloud, so I pulled it off the shelf and read it immediately.  They were surprised that it is different than the movie, but mostly they seemed to take to heart that everyone might just have a favorite book out there somewhere among the 10,000 we have in our library.  We just have to find it.  It might be ugly, rude and disgusting, but it will be someone's favorite.

We will continue to talk about favorite books and why reading is so important in our lives as the weeks go on.  I hope to measure a positive change in students' attitudes toward reading and their own self-concept of their reading when I administer the survey again in the spring.

Post Holiday Catching Up

Being out for two weeks for vacation always turns into at least four weeks before I am back up to speed in the library.  These breaks are hard on students, trying to get back into the flow of school, but it is difficult for adults, too.

We are reading the Washington Children's Choice Picture Book nominees in every K-3 library class, which means reading the same 20 titles to all 11 classes.  I enjoy most of them, but even the best book loses its luster after 5 or 6 readings in a couple of days.  So I tend to mix it up, reading two at a time to each class, but choosing new ones part way through the week.  This usually ends up with me getting confused and trying to read books more than once, or I forget to read some to a class and we have to read four the last day before we vote for our favorites.  I think the confusion adds to the fun, myself.

Favorite WCCPBA books so far:

Prudence Wants a Pet by Cathleen Daly, illustrated by Stephen Michael King - a story about a girl who wants a pet so badly that she will take anything she can get, including a stick, a twig, a shoe, or an old car tire.  Prudence doesn't care what the neighbors think, she just desperately wants a pet.  I enjoy the dry humor in this book (which escapes the kindergarteners completely, but as long as I crack myself up, that makes it fun!) and the main character's persistence.

The Sunflower Sword by Mark Sperring, illustrated by Miriam Latimer - I thought this was going to be a simple boy-wants-to-be-a-knight story, purely from the cover illustration of a boy with a colander on his head as a helmet.  But the language is wonderful, with lots of alliteration, and the sentiment that you can turn a friend into an enemy through a simple gesture is a nice illustration of what we call the "Ridgecrest Way" - being responsible, respectful, kind and safe.  It is a touching story that resonates with students, if they don't get distracted by the heart-shaped dragon tail on one page!

Chicken Big written and illustrated by Keith Graves - I am not one for doing voices while reading, but the five chickens in this story just beg to have silly voices attached to them, so I'm doing my best.  A humongous chick is born one day and immediately confuses his coop-mates.  They have no idea that he is a chicken like them, mainly because of his size.  Yet they just have to classify him, so using the little evidence their little bird brains can gather, they come up with crazier and crazier explanations of what this chick really is - an elephant?  a squirrel?  The chick gets more and more confused, but continues to help his friends out despite their obtuseness.   This is a really fun book to read out loud, and, to the confusion of some students, it has led to me randomly saying, "Indoor elephants are dangerous!" with much glee.