Tag: Reading challenge

Core Collection & teacher champions

Last year I wrote about my initiative with our core collection and engaging our middle school teachers in “adopting” a book and helping to promote it. During the analytics for our annual report and to justify repeating the exercise in one of our last staff meetings this year, I put together some stats on the results.

Core Collection Summary

Given the dire state of the nation on reading overall for middle school with each grade reading less than in previous years, this is one small light at the end of the tunnel for me – showing that perhaps we need to narrow rather than continue to broaden our collection and focus on many copies of the most popular books?

Another amazing side effect has been the number of our faculty who are now fans of middle school / young adult literature and who have kept on coming back to finish series (I think it’s really important to have book 1 of as many enticing series as possible in the list). It really matters when not only the ELA teacher but also the PHE/Sports coaches and Drama and Science teachers are reading and recommending books.

Another interesting aspect has been that it seems we’ve arrived at a sort of tipping point of students accessing eBooks and AudioBooks in greater numbers than I’ve previously seen. Since we tend to only buy 3 or 4 of each of the core books (plus whatever ELA has a budget for to put in their class libraries) the most popular books tend to be out all the time, resulting in students then using the digital equivalent. I like AudioBooks as it means I can listen (often at 1.5-2x speed) and do my knitting, and I often have to persuade students that listening to audiobooks is also reading. In a culture where very few students are read to, I think it’s also important for them to hear stories – not the least to avoid embarrassing incidents with the pronunciation of words and names!

Of course I know that borrowing doesn’t always translate to reading (see the amazing way the great Nathan Pyle illustrates this below), but on the other hand I’m also comforted by the fact that our ELA classroom libraries have also stocked up on many of the core books and their circulations are not counted in my stats.

Image by Nathan W Pyle – buy his amazing books!

One of the runaway success books I’d like to highlight is “The Academy” by TZ Layton. In common I think with most 10-14 year olds, most of the young soccer players at our school are convinced it’s only a matter of time before they’re scouted into one of the youth leagues and this series feeds their dreams.

Actions & Activities

The actions and activities around the core books this year include:

  • Culling of the least popular (and some of the most popular*) books from the previous year
  • Book overviews on the middle school TV displays
  • Core list on Advisory Slides
  • “Core Wall” in library
  • ELA & MS teacher promotion
  • House points for book reviews
  • On libguide / recommended to parents during parent conferences
  • Weekly Kahoot quiz January – May (inter-house competition)
  • Battle of the Core live quiz assembly – 8 May (moved from January to increase exposure)

* while some of the books were taken out because they just didn’t fly for one reason or another (usually because I’d been misled by a good review without having been able to read the book first, or I misjudged the audience), some have been given wings and are flying on their own without the need to be on a list, or have been adopted by the ELA department as one of their book club books. Of course there is always great irony in choices. After not being able to successfully sell “The thing about jellyfish” by Ali Benjamin all year long, I took it off the list for next year and of COURSE then some young booktokker started recommending it and now everyone wants to read it!

Another side effect has been more faculty coming to me for recommendations for their own reading of for books for their younger kids or nieces / nephews – there is nothing more flattering, no greater gift you can give a librarian than ask for recommendations!

there is nothing more flattering, no greater gift you can give a librarian than ask for recommendations!

In conclusion I’d say if you’re in any doubt about the value of having a core collection, go ahead and try it out. It doesn’t have to be 25 books but it does help to have at least one representative of each genre. Including the first book in a series is always a good idea and I also try to have books that are fairly recent, include books from visiting authors if we have any and to try and tap into the zeitgeist.

Stop the pearl clutching and bring out the smelling salts

Yet again an article despairing how kids are not reading “For Too Many Kids, Books Are Uncool and Unread” with all sorts of “reasons” and little in the way of solutions. So here are a few people / places / organisations who are trying to do something and a little on the work I was doing recently.

Engage everyone

While language arts / language and literature teachers and particularly librarians are often called upon or take it upon themselves to play a role in turning out literate students who hopefully also enjoy reading – it is a mistake to pigeonhole the efforts onto a few people. Just like I spend quite a few hours of my week engaged in coaching students in sport I like to think that my colleagues in other subject areas – including Physical Education etc. could spend a bit of time encouraging students to read. Particularly PHE teachers – since as my now young adult son (previously reluctant reader middle school son) told me “give up mom, middle schoolers don’t listen to anyone except maybe their PHE teachers and sports coaches”.

Last year I started having a core collection (an idea initially started in the UK by CLPE, and carried on internationally by Katie Day) of 25 books per grade for our middle school. We invested in at least 3 copies of most of the books and the books were promoted in the ELA (English Language Arts) classes and the library. Having a narrower selection of books to focus on meant that as a group we could try and read as many of these as possible and “sell” them to students. The news crew of our “Falcon Flyer” also helped with promotion by featuring the books, and they were also displayed on our internal TV screens in the library and MS corridor. A weekly quiz via google forms and the “Battle of Core” assembly were less successful than I’d have liked – but let’s say it was something to build on. However when I analysed the circulations from these 75 books I was positively surprised and just how many had circulated. As can be seen – kids still prefer print, and audio is their least preferred medium.

In my discussion with the ELA department about declining reading there was a strong feeling that promoting the books shouldn’t just be on them – and I took that thought to heart and just before the summer in our last staff meeting with the support of our admin launched the “staff summer reading challenge”

This involved quite a bit of preparation work, starting about 6 weeks before the end of term, including updating the lists for the new year, taking out books that weren’t popular or didn’t resonate with students, getting suggestions from our most avid readers (and asking them to pre-read where I wasn’t sure which book would be better) and making sure we had coverage of genres, levels of difficulty and format (verse novel, graphic novel, nonfiction, memoir, fiction) and our books were reflective of our community – each grade having at least one book with a muslim perspective as we’re in the UAE. Our new list can be found on our reading libguide. Next up was making sure all the books were ordered so that they were available before the meeting and then making new posters, shelf-signs with a summary, badges and a “mini-book”.

The shelf talker signs were based on inspiration from Kelsey Bogan but I wanted them to convey a little more information that I thought would be relevant in the “selling” process – first to our staff and then to our students, so I amended them a bit – the colouring corresponds to the grade, I added the book image and the genre image. Kept the blurb to 20-25 words (combination of publisher blurbs, Magic School AI summary powers and my knowledge of the book – AI can really get things badly wrong with what trigger words would encourage readers and be very repetitive with some phrasing!); I also added whether we had the eBook or Audiobook and the duration of the audio; pages of the book; whether it was part of a series, and the pacing.

Here are the canva files for our Grade 6; Grade 7 and Grade 8 lists – feel free to use or adjust as necessary.

The badges were made thanks to the loan of a badge maker by our design department and the “mini books” are images of the books on a piece of foam that the teachers can stick on their classroom door.

For the meeting, I put all the books on display with their paraphernalia, and the teachers were invited to select a book to borrow for the summer, commit to reading it and to help be the books “key account manager” for the coming year and promote it to students in the coming year. Our communications department helped by taking pictures of teachers with their chosen books (hiding the face) so we can use that for a little promotion guessing game in the new year); teachers borrowed the book and could put the badge on their lanyards. They “claimed” the book by putting a sticky note with their name on the poster. In the end, only 6 out of 52 staff members declined. Several teachers selected more than one book and our drama teacher selected 5 (and sent me a very enthusiastic voice mail last week to say she’d read them all and enjoyed them so much she’d also read all of the rest of the books in the various series, coming to a total of 17 books!).

So, watch this space and we’ll see if this has more of an impact in the coming year.

Other people / organisations making a big difference

Although not always realistic, I am a secret admirer of the “go big or go bust” approach to things. I suspect some times we are actually underestimating the abilities of our students by setting very low goals for them. There is a balance however between something being too daunting versus to infantile. Generally I suggest students should try and read a book a week – something quite manageable if one is truly spending 20-30 minutes a day in focused reading, perhaps combined with audiobooks and some manga / graphic novels. Also, our top readers (ironically – or not – none of whom have mobile phones) manage 2-3x that.

The Neev Reading challenge 2024 of 30 books over 3 months for grades 4-6 combined with author interactions, and a live quiz during the literature festival is a great example of setting a stretch goal, having competitive and noncompetitive tracks and a great starting point to select books. I just love how ideas grow and evolve. When I moved to Beijing in 2018, I was part of the 50 books Reader’s Challenge which I think the librarians at ISB started. In my role of juror for the Neev Children’s Book award, I was chatting to Neev about the challenge, and what worked and didn’t work quite as well – and they grabbed the ball, ran with it and now it’s this amazing thing!

I’ve blogged about the Global ReadAloud before, and still think this is a phenomenal way to involve students and teachers with books and connections with other readers and most importantly the “smelling salts” of reading aloud to them. Here are the selections for 2024. I particularly love “As long as the lemon trees grow” a book that’s on our core list and a fantastic read for older students.

At the end of the school year we have 6 library sessions involving our “upcoming” grade 5 into 6 students to introduce them to the Secondary School library. This year as an exit ticket I asked them to write down their favourite book / author / series. As I roamed around talking to them while they were doing this, I’d say that at least 75% of the books they said they loved the most were books that had been read to them by a teacher, parent, grandparent etc. Reading aloud matter.

Besides her work on the GRA – Pernille Ripp also has some great posters (and books) on encouraging a reading culture, such as the one on “Helping Home adults support adolescent readers”

That’s all I have time for today – if you’d like to have your initiative featured, please let me know!

Making your bed and other stuff

There literally is a book about the importance of making your bed each day. Personally I don’t put much store by that type of advice – particularly as it’s written by a male military type. But I do think it helps to have a reason to get out of bed in the first place. That’s way more important.

Luckily today the pollution had settled down to the red zone so I could go out for a walk along the river with my high duty pollution mask – the blue sky is deceptive – the AQI was still over 150 – but I was not the only one lured outside – the river bank was full of fishermen probably suffering from the same cabin fever as I was.

Our local grocery had luckily stocked up again and some delicious strawberries were available which I could take to my lunch date with some fellow librarians where we had a great book chat. That way I could tick off two things that I think are incredibly important for sanity in this period – time exercising and time with other people.

Now just like the war that would be over by Christmas, I’m wondering if this closure may last longer? I did a little SARS research last night and found out that Hong Kong schools were closed for 7 weeks. Depending when you start the clock ticking (from the start or end of the CNY break) that could take us to the end of March. That means an extended period of not only online teaching but also home-schooling. It also means different things depending on the age of your child(ren) / students.

Possibly the worst hit are our final year IB students – things are really tight between now and 23 May when they graduate. So while 2 weeks isn’t much in the grand scheme of things for most people, it results in a bit of a train smash for their mock exams, finalising projects, doing things that would have helped them create a portfolio if they’re applying to creative tertiary study etc. etc. For all the talk of online and blended learning there’s still a heck of a lot that requires physicality of self and material. And many related activities (sports fixtures, APEC drama etc. have also been cancelled).

Further down the food-chain I can assure you there are good reasons why most of us don’t homeschool – infanticide being one thing that comes to my mind. Beijing Kids had an article on this last year – but that was in a situation where you could do the socialising and gyms and sports facilities were open. Many families are hunkering down and some won’t let their children out of the house or receive guests (not moi).

My husband is still working in Nanjing, I cut my holiday there short on Sunday, so I’m getting the updates from there as well. It seems it has the facilities to take care of patients, and hotels have also been requested to be available for R&R of medical staff. According to him it’s pretty much a ghost town still and more and more areas are shut down. You can follow the live construction of the hospital in Wuhan as well.

Here our compounds multiple entries are shut down and everyone is flowing through one central gate where non-resident ID’s and temperatures can be checked.

And now for some book suggestions. I’ll start with G7 as it is in the middle of middle school and we had a rather cool unit just before the break looking at young adult literature over time – “Changing Times Changing Voices“.  Students read either “Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime” or “The Outsiders” (or both for some) and were encouraged to explore some of the Time 100 best Young Adult Books which we had on permanent display/borrowing plus the current and last year’s Kids’ Read 100 titles.  So – there you have a list of 300 books suitable for teens if you’re short of inspiration!

A side note on the Kid’s Read titles …. last night on twitter there was a post on reading challenges including “reading hard” with Book Riot’s “Read Harder Challenge” * I had a look through the challenge (well worth considering in this time) and realised that our chosen titles covered all the ground amply!

 

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Kids Read 2020 books

* The Challenge – I have some ideas for these – what are yours?

  • Read a YA nonfiction book
  • Read a retelling of a classic of the canon, fairytale, or myth by an author of color
  • Read a mystery where the victim(s) is not a woman
  • Read a graphic memoir
  • Read a book about a natural disaster
  • Read a play by an author of color and/or queer author
  • Read a historical fiction novel not set in WWII
  • Read an audiobook of poetry
  • Read the LAST book in a series
  • Read a book that takes place in a rural setting
  • Read a debut novel by a queer author
  • Read a memoir by someone from a religious tradition (or lack of religious tradition) that is not your own
  • Read a food book about a cuisine you’ve never tried before
  • Read a romance starring a single parent
  • Read a book about climate change
  • Read a doorstopper (over 500 pages) published after 1950, written by a woman
  • Read a sci-fi/fantasy novella (under 120 pages)
  • Read a picture book with a human main character from a marginalized community
  • Read a book by or about a refugee
  • Read a middle grade book that doesn’t take place in the U.S. or the UK
  • Read a book with a main character or protagonist with a disability (fiction or non)
  • Read a horror book published by an indie press
  • Read an edition of a literary magazine (digital or physical)
  • Read a book in any genre by a Native, First Nations, or Indigenous author