So my first year teaching I wanted to have a game for my 2nd graders to explore the library and discover new books. I’ve blogged briefly about this game before. We spend a lot of time in second grade talking about how we choose our books, how to find summaries on the backs and inside the dust jackets of books, and basically just how we find the books we like. I do another activity called “Judge a Book By Its Cover” (I talk about Drop Everything and Read in that post). Judge a Book By Its Cover came in real handy this year when my 4th graders started Wonder; they remembered the 2nd grade game immediately and understood what I wanted them to do.

Anyway, I concocted this version of Musical Chairs for the library, and I called it “Drop Everything and Read.” Yes, I blatantly took the title of my game from this. But, I actually mean it a little more literally.

The kids walk around the library with their shelf markers, moving constantly just like in Musical Chairs. The game is exactly like Musical Chairs, really. When I yell out “Drop everything and read!” the kids must immediately use their shelf markers to pull a book from the closest shelf to them, drop to the floor, and start reading it. From any page, or from the summary. I time them, then they stop and put the book back and start again. If they don’t use their shelf markers (like the two students above), they are out. If they talk, they are out. I tell them my job is to catch them and get them out, their job is to stay in the game.

If the kids find a book they want to check out this way, they put it at their seat and keep playing. We check out 2 books at a time in second grade. And if they forgot their books, they can play the game but have to put every book they pick back on the shelves. Kids find a lot of treasures this way, and we always play the game after we’ve spent a good month talking about book selection and personal choice.

I felt like posting these photos I took of us playing recently because this game is always such a hit with the kids. They practice using shelf markers, they learn about keeping the shelves neat, and they discover books they might have otherwise overlooked. Did I mention that if I catch them hovering around their favorite books they can also be out? They have time at the end of class to look for whatever books they want, but while we’re playing the game they have to keep moving. It has to be a random book they drop and read. No dashing across the library to grab that book they really, really wanted. We save that for checkout time at the end.

Maybe I’ll play this with them next week.

I love this time of year at school. Every year during the short Thanksgiving week I have the 3rd and 4th graders help me change The Library Tree from fall to winter. It’s a small thing, but I love those rituals.

I’m also really getting into the change in direction with my back bulletin board and display. That area was completely ignored during the reign of my “Spotlight On” boards, but I’m definitely getting more foot traffic now with September and October’s boards. And I’m kind of in love with my December board, too.

I live for doing bulletin boards, no matter how simple. Some of my coworkers roll their eyes at me when I tell them this, but I need to put my fancy art degree to good use somewhere.

I also love this time because it kind of just works out that the space between Thanksgiving and winter break is when I do some of my favorite activities with my classes. Last year everything was moved earlier to squeeze it in before my maternity leave began in March, and I didn’t get that same thrill. So this week I’m kind of remembering how much I really do love December (and late November) in the library.

Here’s an example: I’m set to start Hugo Cabret on Monday with all the 3rd grade classes, it will be the 5th year that I’ve taught this book. But I’ll be at a workshop next Thursday, so I decided at the last minute to start it today with my Thursday 3rd graders. I wasn’t in the best mood this morning; it’s been a long week. But the second I launched into my annual Introduction to the Awesome of Brian Selznick, I immediately felt content and almost teary-eyed as I looked at another class of gobsmacked third graders fill up with wonder as they get ready to take that ride with me. That book never lets me down, and my day was pretty awesome after that.

This week the kindergarten classes all started our Laura Numeroff circle stories unit. Yes, it is technically “circular stories”, but you try getting 60+ kindergartners to say that over and over again, week after week. I do, by the way, have first and second graders who still bounce into the library to tell me about “circle stories” they’ve read that are just like the ones from kindergarten. That is rad, so I’m not changing it. Anyway, we’ve read If You Give a Mouse a Cookie and If You Take a Mouse to School this week. We start slow, but since we need a week to be authors and another week to be illustrators, I have to decide if I want this unit to continue into January. We usually start this unit the week after Halloween, but…that obviously didn’t happen this year. So I have to decide, ending it before winter break is so tidy and wonderful.

I also moved the first grade Wordless Stories unit to December this year. We’ll start fresh in January with Clementine, but I kind of couldn’t wait any longer to read The Adventures of Polo with them. Again, it just felt like the right time of year to do it.

The second graders are reading The Velveteen Rabbit this week and next! One of my favorite stories all year, and that will segue into the first chapters of The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane before break.

And then, finally, my 4th grade classes are still working their way through Wonder and absolutely loving it. The storm definitely threw off my timing, so I will have to start looking at chapters to trim from the reading. But we’ve now all finished the “Choose Kind” chapter and had our big talk about that theme. Again, such a great time of year to be doing it.

I love this time of year at school.

My fabulous and amazing mentor Dee sent this out today, and I love it. Zazzle is now selling prints, tees, bumper stickers with this Burning Through Pages graphic (in addition to some other equally outstanding book nerd goodies). I support everything about this.

I cannot overstate what a marvelous fall read-aloud Bob Raczka’s Fall Mixed Up is. I have read it to all of my 1st grade classes, my Multiply Disabled class, and I’m getting ready to read it to my kindergarten classes. I think this might even be my favorite read aloud of the year so far.
I bought this book last year hoping to get some use out of it, but I guess in my pregnant haze I decided it would be too confusing after all to read with classes. Not to mention the fact that I was furiously trying to squeeze in all of my Big Important Units with each grade before I went on maternity leave—we were kind of rushed last year. But this year I brought it out, and it was a huge hit.

Someone has gotten fall all mixed up. From the first sentence (“Every Septober, Every Octember, Fall fills my senses with scenes to remember.”) we know something isn’t right. Red pumpkins, bears collecting nuts for the winter, turkey legs and stuffing for trick or treaters. It’s all wrong! Can the readers sort it all out?

The more animated you get with this one, the better (I personally like to play dumb and pretend I don’t know it’s all wrong). I also had the kids make some fall collages to hang in the library. That took 2 weeks, so the next week we read Bob Raczka’s sweet but less hilarious Who Loves the Fall?. This title also went over well, especially when we reminded ourselves of all the fall things that went wrong in last week’s book.

So. Much. Fun.

Last week was Respect Me Week at school. We focused on anti-bullying education as well as just general acceptance–it was a big school-wide week of tolerance. I suggested and loaned lots of various titles to the classroom teachers and then kept a few to use in my library classes. Here’s what we did:

In kindergarten we’re getting ready to check out our library books for the first time this week, so last week we decorated our library cards. We talked about respecting our library books, not fighting over books if someone else has what we want…that sort of thing. The kindergarten teachers read Chrystanthemum for Respect Me Week, and I always forget that and do it the first week of school with the kids. And since I really wanted to get them started with books next week, I kind of left Respect Me Week at that with kindergarten.

I read My Name Is Elizabeth! by Annika Dunklee and Matthew Forsythe and My Name Is Yoon by Helen Recorvits with the first grade classes. My Name Is Elizabeth! is a really charming book released earlier this year about a little girl who does not want to be called Beth, or Liz, or Betsy. And she makes sure everyone in town gets it right. And My Name Is Yoon is a much lauded book about a little girl who moves to America from Korea and does not like the way her name looks when written in English. Her struggles to fit in here in America are revealed in her reluctance to learn this new alphabet and be this new version of Yoon that looks so different from what she knew in Korea. These are not anti-bullying books, but when I couldn’t get my hands on Hooway for Wodney Wat in time I decided to go with these and talk about the value of your own identity rather than bullying. Both of these books were a huge hit, bigger than I expected them to be. The kids loved reading and talking about the importance of a name, your identity, and asserting it in the different ways that Elizabeth and Yoon do. I was surprised by this one, they were really into it.

With my second graders I read The Ant Bully by John Nickle. This is a quirky one, but I’d checked out a lot of my good titles (like The Recess Queen, Mim, Gym, and June) to classroom teachers for second grade. The message came through loud and clear, though, and the kids loved it. We talked about walking a mile in someone else’s shoes and tried to imagine other animals who have a really tough life.

They had a lot of empathy for both characters in the end, and they were positive that Sid could be reformed with a visit to the ant colony. And the kids were great at extrapolating; if Lucas picked on the ants because Sid picked on him, maybe someone even bigger was picking on Sid.  And then they shared experiences they’d had seeing bullies outside of a school setting (one little girl said she’d seen a man hit his wife once in a store). They really understand what bullying is and what it causes…they all knew that Lucas was looking for someone smaller to pick on to relieve his own helplessness with his bully. I got great discussions out of this book, beyond what I was expecting.

And then in 3rd grade we read the amazing Patricia Polacco’sMr. Lincoln’s Way. This was another powerful one that surprised me. “Mean Gene” has a racist father who pressures him to avoid those who are “not our kind”, but his wonderfully perceptive African American principal Mr. Lincoln finds a way to get through to him and change his life. Gene comes close to calling Mr. Lincoln the “N” word but stops himself after the first letter. And when I asked students who knew what the “N” word was, every black student knew it but almost none of the other students did. And when I explained (without saying the word, obviously) what it’s ugly meaning was many of them were shocked that someone would think to call anyone a name based on their skin color.

This was another great read aloud that brought out a lot of mature and thoughtful responses from the students. Mr. Lincoln sees that Gene loves birds, and he gets Gene to channel his anger into the positive task of drawing birds to the school’s atrium. And having someone believe in him just makes all the difference to Gene. It’s a hugely sensitive book about acceptance and respect, and the kids responded so positively to it. When Gene starts to go back to his bulling ways by picking on some Mexican students, Mr. Lincoln points out all the different birds living harmoniously in the atrium and calls the students his “little birds.” So to go along with this one we drew pictures of a unique bird–if you were a bird, what would you look like? I only had time to do that activity with one class, which was a shame because they had some great ideas. I’m debating continuing it this week.

And then finally, I had the 4th grade classes. And I started Wonder, our new 4th grade novel. I will write a separate post about what a miraculous book that is, but you can get an idea here. I was observed by my supervisor, principal, superintendent, and 2 prospective board of ed members doing this lesson…and I was really proud of this one. I’m pushing the 4th graders with it, but I talked it out with my principal and supervisor over the summer and got their full support. And I really wanted to start it during Respect Me Week, I haven’t started any other novels with classes yet.

Wonder is about August Pullman, a 10-year-old NYC boy starting 5th grade in a new school. Actually, it’s his first time in any school. Auggie has been home schooled until now because of some serious medical conditions that have kept him in hospitals a lot throughout his short life. And his biggest medical condition is his face. Auggie has some severe facial anomalies. And he’s terrified to start his new school because all he wants is for the world to see him like he sees himself–an ordinary kid, on the inside. But he knows that’s not what people see when they look at him. Ordinary kids “don’t make other ordinary kids run screaming from the playground.” This book is just so amazing.

And so to start it with the 4th graders, I asked each of them to write a paragraph predicting what it would be about and whether they thought they’d like it based solely on the front cover. I didn’t tell them anything else about it in September (other than how awesome it is), and they had to tell me if they would pick it up if they saw it on the library shelves. And they were right on me, reminding me that in second grade I’d specifically taught them not to judge a book by its cover. They totally got this right away. So I gave them 5 minutes to write, and then we shared our thoughts. Most of them didn’t think this would be a book they’d check out on their own, and most of the boys thought it would be insanely boring. I think Lucas’s response below sums up some of the strong feelings the students had based on the cover:

After we shared our thoughts, I told them that I actually loved the cover, but when I first heard about this book and what it was about, I thought I was going to be bored to death. Which is 100% true. Sometimes when I hear about children’s books that deal with diversity and Big Important Issues I assume they will be very heavy handed with the morality and, frankly, kind of insufferable. Without revealing what the book is about, I basically told them the 4th grade version of that statement. And I told them that I could not have been more wrong about this one; by the end I was crying, cheering, and couldn’t believe it was ending.

So then I collected their papers and told them I’d be saving them until we finished the book, so we could compare our first impressions with our last. And I read them the first 7 pages (which include the “farting nurse” story of Auggie’s birth) and let them tell me what this book was about. They impressed me, really. They all got it, when I asked why I had them judge the book by its cover first several of them said because Auggie gets judged the same way. And by the end of class almost all of them had already drastically changed their first impressions. Even Lucas. They are officially hooked on Wonder, and I can’t wait to keep reading it with them.

It was a great week of discussions, but I’m most excited to keep going with Wonder.