Finding Great Books

Earlier today, I was on Oprah.com searching for something about her book clubs. (It was my first time visiting that site! Anyway!) I noticed that she had lists of great books for certain age groups. This got me thinking about other great books for kids to read. This has always been a question that parents ask me and I always send home a list of some classic books for kids to read to help parents get ideas as they go to the library. So, now I have some websites that others have shared with me or that I have just found through the years. Here you go:

Since I mentioned it already, check out oprah.com where she has suggestions separated by ages from 3-5 to 6-9 and 10-12 and even some books for you. Check it out. (I haven't spent a lot of time on this site, but it looked like it would be great and helpful!)

Here are some other sites:

1. Caldecott, Newbery, Coretta Scott King and other Awards
2. This is another great list of 100 books separated by ages as well. Some of my favorites are here

3. This is a list of great picture books
4. For those of you in Utah, or those who just want to find other great books, here's a great one for you! Utah Children's Book Award
5. IRA Teacher's Choices
6. Orbis Pictus--NCTE's Award for Nonfiction
(Let me just put a plug in for nonfiction. This is something that we need to get our students reading ... especially when younger. Research shows that there is what is referred to as a fourth grade slump in reading. Kids seem to be reading on level, or many kids do, up until 3rd grade and then there is a dramatic drop. Some say that it is because by fourth grade, so much of what kids are being asked to read is informational texts and they haven't been exposed to it enough to be familiar with it. The more kids can be exposed to this type of text, the better reader they will become and the better prepared they are for the older grades. This is a topic for another day, but I just wanted to put in a teaser and hopefully a good plug for reading informational texts. Don't think that it's boring. There are really a lot of great informational texts out there that kids will really be interested in! Give it a try!)
7. Notable books for a global society
8. National Council for Social Studies Notable Books
9. Children's Literature Web Guide
10. Carol Hurst's Children's Literature Site

I hope this is a great start to finding some great books out there for kids to read!

One important thing to remember. If you are a parent, remember that just because the books are separated by ages on some of these sites, doesn't mean that it won't be too difficult or too easy for your child to read. A lot of times the books listed are actually by interest. On another post, I'll talk about how to figure out your child's reading level if you are a parent. (This has always been another big question that I get from parents.)

Carrie

Oral Language and Conversation

Recently I was reading a book called Knee to Knee, Eye to Eye: Circling in on Comprehension by Ardith Davis Cole, which I would highly recommend. I thought part of it went really well with what I wrote last time on the blog. She talks about the importance of conversations. In this world, kids are texting, e-mailing, twittering, facebooking, blogging, etc. etc. they hardly ever have a face to face conversation. Recently I heard a story about two boys walking down the hallway together texting each other instead of having a conversation. This is a real problem. Kids don't know how to have a conversation. Growing up, my parents made sure that we sat around the dinner table together and talked and had conversations with one another. Now, there were a lot of us and sometimes it turned out to be a shouting match, but other times it turned out to be great. We would stay sitting around the table where we would continue our conversations. On vacations we didn't have the videos or the games or anything like that, so we would play games with each other and talk to each other. Even on the bus ride home we didn't have anything to listen to, we had to talk to each other. (The conversations were not always great, but I learned how to change the topic or something so that the conversation improved.) Anyway! A very important part of reading and comprehension is learning to have a conversation with others. Have you had a literature circle or a book club with a group of your students and it is dull, quiet, or even scripted? This is how mine seem to be so often. I always gave my students jobs to do and they would do their job, share their job, and that was it. They didn't talk about anything else. I never even thought about the fact that maybe they didn't know how to have a conversation. Well, in this book, she gave some suggestions on how to teach your students how to have a conversation. She suggested having students watch a part in a movie where they have to identify what the listener and speaker are doing to make it an effective conversation. They take notes and then you discuss it as a class. She also suggested going down to the lunch room to watch older kids having a conversation and taking notes of the conversation. There are many people that are involved in Book Clubs nowadays. She suggests video taping these so that kids can identify what makes the conversations effective and so forth. I thought these were so great! I didn't know this, but she also references Oprah.com as having some book clubs that you can watch. One last suggestion, video tape your own students who are great at discussing and share it with your class the following year. Finally, it is important to discuss with the class what makes a great conversation after watching each of these. Then, make a class list (this would be a GREAT interactive writing!) to hang on the wall that you can reference often throughout the year and add to it as kids notice other things that make a great conversation. I think this sounds REALLY exciting! Good luck!
Carrie

Oral Language

Earlier this week I was talking to a friend of mine who was sharing a concern that she had about a little 3 year old that she babysits 2 days a week. She mentioned that he doesn't talk a lot ... and not because he's shy, but because he doesn't know a lot of words. This got me to thinking about oral language. Oral language development is a key factor in learning to read. The larger the child's vocabulary, the better able he/she is to read. One year, I taught a student that had a VERY difficult time reading. I found it interesting, however, that if I gave him a book about trucks, he was able to read a much more difficult book than he could have otherwise. I think that, first of all, he was more interested in the book about trucks than he was about ANYTHING else, but also, he had a much broader vocabulary to draw upon when reading these kinds of books.

The easiest and best way to help your child with their oral language development is to talk with them. The more words they hear and encounter, the broader their vocabulary will be. An interesting study done by Hart and Risley (1995, 2002) studied 42 families of varying socioeconomic backgrounds. They recorded every word spoken at home between a parent and their child. A couple of things that I found to be so interesting were the differences between professional families, working class families, and welfare families. Children, on average, in a professional family, would have had some type of experience with 42 million words; in the working class family, 26 million words; and in the welfare family, 13 million. Not only that, but children in professional families hear 10 times the amount of positive and encouraging words than welfare families hear per hour. I'm not writing this blog, however, about the differences between all the socioeconomic groups. My purpose is to show how important it is for children to be in a world of language. Children who are talked with and encouraged, are going to know more words, just because they hear more words.

So, what can we do? I recently took a class where we discussed oral language. In that class, our teacher gave us several ideas, which can also be found in the book, Teaching Children to Read: The Teacher Makes the Difference (Reutzel & Cooter 2008).  His ideas are for classroom teachers, but can also work for parents. I also have added some of my thoughts and ideas to his.

Interviews--this can be a formal interview or an informal interview. I used to have a project, when I taught 4th grade, where my students had to interview one of their parents about their job. At home, my parents used to have interviews around the dinner table, asking each one of us about school. (At least it felt like an interview!) Then we would also have monthly or every few months a more formal interview with my dad so he could see how things were going.

Play "Simon Says" with your child or even "Mother May I?". These are great activities that teach about commands, and with "Mother May I?" you are teaching them to be polite. :)

My niece (5, almost 6) calls my mom every Sunday and talks with her for about 15 minutes. The funny thing is, the last time I talked with her, my niece did most of the talking. This is a great opportunity for little kids to learn that phones used to be for talking, not texting. :)

Of course, another great opportunity to talk is by reading aloud a story together and then talking about the book. (This is great with any age. The older they get, the deeper the conversation can be.)

Another opportunity for learning to communicate and develop oral language would be if a child has to persuade an adult to let him/her do something. For example, if your child wants to go play with a friend, they need to be able to persuade you that this is a good idea. (I used to have to do this all the time at home: "I'll practice my piano right when I get home.")

When your child is young, play with him/her. Pretend with them. Make a puppet together and retell a favorite story, or just make one up together with puppets or other toys. Reutzel and Cooter talk about using puppets to retell stories in the classroom. Sometimes shy children will open up if they can use a puppet.

While teaching 3rd grade especially, my students LOVED to tell me jokes. This is another great opportunity for the child with their oral language development. You can tell them jokes and let them tell you jokes. I remember in my family, every Monday night we would have a family meeting that we called Family Home Evening. Everyone in my family had a job to fill for this and one of the jobs was to share a joke. I still remember my brother's joke about Benjamin Franklin. It made absolutely NO SENSE, but we all laughed anyway. He later became quite the joke teller. He discovered one of his many talents, I guess.

Small group activities are another great way to get the children talking. Small groups can do anything from reading together and discussing the story to doing a science experiment together. Sometimes small group work is better and a wonderful opportunity for a less certain child to talk ... they are a lot less intimidated in a small group.

Anyway! There are some ideas that can hopefully help us have positive communication with our children: our own children or our students to help them develop their oral language. Reading really starts with oral language. The more words they know or are familiar with, the better readers they can be.

Carrie

(All scholarly information for this entry comes from Teaching Children to Read: The Teacher Makes the Difference 5th edition by D. Ray Reutzel and Robert B. Cooter, Jr. (2008). This includes the Hart and Risley study referred to.)

Read Aloud

Read Aloud time has been one of my favorite times of the day as well as my students' favorite time. My first year, I taught 4th grade. We were reading Where the Red Fern Grows. We would read everyday after lunch. My students were so quiet during this time that you could hear a pin drop. I remember the day that I read and we learned that, and watch out, I am going to be a spoiler, the dogs died. There was not a dry eye in my class that day ... the boys, the girls, and the teacher were all crying. It was my first time reading it and that day, we bonded as a class. Read aloud time really brought us closer together as a class. I would always get really excited about reading and this fed off onto my students. There are SOOOO many things that we can teach during read aloud.

Every time before we started reading, I would hold up one hand and we would do a five finger summary. One student would say one thing that happened in our reading from the day before. After we had said five things, we would then read for that day. This was great for the kids who had been absent the day before because they knew that we were going to review so they didn't have to ask what had happened. It was also great helping kids learn what a summary was. As part of the summary, they needed to say one thing from the beginning, a few details from the middle, and then where we had ended.

Read aloud was also a great time to practice our visualization skills. While teaching 2nd grade, my students and I were reading The BFG, one of our favorites. This book has a great section that describes what the giant looks like. Before reading this section, I would tell the kids to "turn the TV on" in their minds so they could picture what he looked like. Then after reading it, I would have the kids go back to their seats and illustrate what they pictured him to look like from the description. It is always interesting to see what they come up with. It was also a great assessment for me to see who was really paying attention.

This time also helped many of my students who didn't like to read learn to love reading. It was also fun for many of them to hear me read to them ... it took away the stress of reading, but also gave them the opportunity to "read" a more difficult book than they could on their own. 

So, why read aloud? Why should we do it? First of all, it increases a child's oral language and increases a child's vocabulary as well. I think, from my own experience, if done correctly, reading aloud can help a child learn to love reading. After reading a book to my students, often my students will go to that same book when I am finished reading it or they will try to find a book by that same author. In the text, Teaching Children to Read: The Teacher Makes the Difference, 5th Edition by D. Ray Reutzel and Robert B. Cooter, Jr.,  (2008) they give a list of Dos and Don'ts that I think can be helpful for teachers and parents alike. Here are a few.

Dos

1. Use rhymes, raps, songs, chants, poetry, and pictures to stimulate oral language development, listening, and interaction with others.

2. Read aloud to children at least 10-15 minutes daily, more often if possible.

3. Read picture books to all ages, but gradually move to reading longer books without pictures as well.

4. Vary the topics and genre of read-aloud selections.

5. Read books that stretch children's intellectual and oral language development.

6. Allow plenty of time for interaction before, during, and after the reading.

7. Occasionally use hand movements or puppets or dress up in costume while reading aloud

Don'ts 

1. Don't read aloud too fast

2. Don't read aloud something you don't like yourself. (Also, if while reading you discover you don't like the book, it's OK to admit it to the kids and don't finish it, trade it for a new one.)

3. Don't read aloud books and stories that exceed children's emotional development

4. Don't use reading aloud as a reward or punishment

These are just a few. The most important thing about reading aloud is to DO IT!

Have FUN!!!

I'm a Teacher

I'm a teacher. I'm a mom. I'm a student. I am dedicated to education. It seems that in everything I do, it has something to do with teaching. I have enjoyed several years of teaching. I have taught, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th grade. I loved each grade. I think one thing that I have learned is the importance of literacy. I believe that literacy is the backbone of education.
Growing up, reading was my least favorite time of the day. I struggled with reading. I struggled with reading for most of my elementary, junior high, and high school career. When I took my ACT, I remember struggling with the reading portion. Needless to say, reading has been difficult for me. I think that is one reason that I feel so passionate about literacy and teaching our students from the very beginning how to be successful readers. Successful readers, in my opinion, learn how to be life-long learners, which is a major goal for educators.
My purpose for this blog is to help teachers and parents (whether you are a parent of a public school child, private school child, or you are homeschooling) by sharing research based teaching ideas. I will focus much on literacy, but I will also discuss other subjects. Since I have taught elementary school, I will focus on elementary ages. My master's degree focuses on early childhood in addition to the older elementary ages. I hope that we can help each other so we can improve children's education throughout the country and even the world.

Carrie