Credit WBFO News photos by Eileen Buckley

UB’s Center for Literacy and Reading Instruction (CLaRI) is a non-profit center that has served hundreds of children and families in Western New York for 50 years. There is no charge for the reading program. While the children benefit from the reading and writing instruction, this program also provides the grad students with intensive hands-on teaching time before they head off to the classroom for their practicum.

Do these kinds of programs exist for library school students focusing on early literacy and children’s services? If so, SLJTeen would love to hear about them. If not, what are you waiting for?

Downtown Mwtapa, Kenya

Back in early 2011, SLJTeen reported on this librarian’s dream to build a library at the Jambo Jipya Academy in Mwtapa, Kenya, with the assistance of the organization Reason2Smile. Reason2Smile Inc. (R2S) is a registered non-profit whose mission is to encourage individuals around the world to be in service to others. This is done by educating people locally and nationally on how they can positively impact others, and by providing funding to organizations in developing countries which provide education, food, clothing, and healthcare to orphaned and at-risk children.

The Jambo Jipya Academy is the first school to be financially assisted by R2S and under the leadership of Kenyan native and school director Christine Mwende and executive director Keela Dates Grimmette, the school has grown from 25 students (2004) to 300 students today. Mtwapa is 10-15 kilometers north of Mombasa on the coast of Kenya.

Reason2Smile and Jambo Jipya have become an important part of my life since getting involved in the spring of 2010. I am now a member of their Board of Directors and am a member of their Educational Committee. This past July, my family traveled to Kenya and South Africa and we had the privilege to stay in the home of Ms. Mwende and visit the Jambo Jipya Academy and the future Mtwapa Children’s Home. To say this visit was life altering would be a vast understatement. My family and I got the chance to meet and talk with the students and teachers that we had heard about and seen pictures of.

Donna Rosenblum (c.) and son with future residents of Mtwapa Children’s Home

We observed classroom instruction and spent recreation time with the children at a local field, playing keep away, jumping rope and of course, playing soccer. At the end of the day, we accompanied the orphan children back to their home where we got to know each other by talking and playing games. The children also performed for us with choreographed song and dance routines.

One of the many highlights was watching my 20-year-old daughter sitting with a group of girls, talking and braiding hair, while my two sons (ages 17 and 13) engaged in animated conversations with children they had just met. The bonds of friendship we made will certainly stay with us for a lifetime. I left Kenya with a renewed sense of dedication and commitment to Reason2Smile, Jambo Jipya, and the future Mtwapa Children’s home. I always knew that my work and financial input were making a difference in the lives of children, and now I had the opportunity to see it first-hand.

Jambo Jipya soccer players

That is why I love being involved with R2S and Jambo Jipya—there is a personal connection with this school, and its students and staff are unique and priceless. I became an educator in order to work with students and help them achieve their goals and dreams. Now I get to do this on a global scale. For me, Reason2Smile has filled a void that I didn’t know existed. The level of gratification I receive from being apart of this organization is not possible to put into words.

Rosenblum with Alfan, a student she sponsors

There is still so much work to be done but it is nice to know we are making an impact. My commitment to build a school library for the Jambo Jipya Academy is close to fruition. The fundraising is almost complete and Jambo Jipya is hoping to expand and purchase the land adjacent to school. This will be the future home of the school library, and I am hoping that this becomes a reality in late 2014 or early 2015. I will be returning to Kenya in April 2014 and will keep SLJTeen updated as events unfold. Until then, kwaheri (goodbye in Swahili)—for more information visit the Reason2Smile website.

By Nell Coburn

“I want to know your top 10 best practices for storytime,” a colleague said to me a few months before I retired. “You’ve been in youth services four decades and you’ve long been a storytime trainer at Multnomah County Library (MCL). I bet you have some best practices I’ve never even thought of.”

This was an irresistible challenge, because it’s storytime that’s kept me in youth services for 40 years and storytime that I’ll miss most in retirement. Storytime is the premium service for children in public libraries across the country. For many youth librarians, it’s the most treasured part of our job. I’m sure my colleagues are aware of many storytime best practices, but I can suggest a few that might not be on everyone’s list.

I’ll start with something I’m passionate about: My longstanding belief that storytime is for children and adults. When I trained as a youth librarian in the 1970s in Prince George’s County, MD, storytime was a kids-only affair. As in most public libraries, parents and caregivers waited for their children outside the program room. A few of us encouraged them to join, but many librarians felt intimidated by the adult presence.

Back in those days, storytime was for three to five year olds. When we started offering programs for two year olds—and eventually, babies—we needed adults to accompany their children. It soon became obvious that everyone was benefiting from storytime. Now, most libraries make it clear that storytime is very much for children and their adults. I’ve underlined some key phrases from the MCL website’s description of storytime: “Parents learn how to foster early literacy skills to prepare their children for learning to read. Librarians answer questions about books and library services, and teach parents how to interest their children in books.”

How does that transfer into best practice? The Association for Library Service to Children (ALSC) and the Public Library Association (PLA) offer some effective techniques in their early literacy initiative, Every Child Ready to Read @your library, accessible online (everychildreadytoread.org). Since that venture began over a decade ago, MCL librarians have made it standard practice to make direct comments to adults during storytime.

Here’s an example: After sharing a book like Raffi and Nadine Bernard Westcott’s Down by the Bay (Crown) or Westcott’s The Lady with the Alligator Purse (Little, Brown, both 1988), a librarian might say: “Singing and rhyming help children learn that words are made up of different sound combinations. In songs, each syllable has a different note, so it’s easy to hear distinct sounds. Children who can do this are better able to sound out words when they are learning to read.”

Adults appreciate knowing that storytime materials and techniques are supported by research and boost early literacy skills. For many, this gives storytime more legitimacy and educational value.

Even more important than sharing such information with grown-ups is the ability to ensure active adult participation in storytime. The best storytimes are those during which adults are fully engaged—shaking out their wiggles, clapping, singing, dancing, and encouraging kids as they interact with the books.

This can be facilitated in multiple ways. I like to hang large-print copies of regularly used songs and rhymes on the wall, or have a collection stapled together in a take-home handout. It’s easier for grown-ups when the words are right in front of them. It helps storytime presenters, too: We don’t have to memorize all those songs! And a handout encourages parents and caregivers to share the songs and rhymes with their children later, further strengthening their early literacy skills.

Adult involvement has all sorts of positive outcomes beyond the educational ones. When grown-ups are engaged, we have fewer “adult behavior” challenges, such as chatting or cell phone use. This leads me to another best practice: Establish clear expectations for both adult and child storytime behavior. Effective instructions are positively worded and presented in simple, direct language. The focus should be on what storytime participants should do, rather than what they should not do.

Consider posting your expectations, briefly mentioning them at the beginning, or handing them out before a series of storytimes. For example, a clear, friendly statement may help adults realize that cell phone use during storytime is not appropriate. Here’s one to try: “Adults: Please help me make this storytime a good experience for all by turning off your phone, or putting it on vibrate. If you must accept a call during storytime, please step outside the room to do so.”

Help young parents understand that it’s best to take their child out of the room if he or she is disruptive, and that they are welcome back when the child is ready. According to MCL staff, this instruction is especially appreciated by immigrant parents with no storytime experience who may not know how they and their children should behave.

Likewise, a brief, straightforward statement can inform adults that we don’t expect their two year old to behave like a five year old: “Welcome! This is a storytime designed for two year olds, so please know that it will look different from some other storytimes you may have attended. Two year olds need to move, so we plan lots of movement activities and we don’t mind when they get up and roam around the room during the stories, as long as they don’t hurt themselves or disturb others.”

Adults who are actively involved and understand the educational value of storytime may be less likely to be chronically late. Of course, nothing is predictable where young children are involved, and there will be occasions when traffic, a child meltdown, or some minor home crisis will result in latecomers. The best practice here, I believe, is to welcome all attendees warmly and make them feel comfortable. Recently I observed a Spanish-language storytime during which families trickled in from 10 to 10:30 a.m. Everyone seemed fine with that, and the newcomers slipped into the group seamlessly. Spanish-speaking staff say that a relaxed regard for time is culturally appropriate, another factor to consider in our approach to latecomers.

I’ve always felt that one of storytime’s main purposes is to introduce children and grown-ups to the riches of the library’s collections. Adults often need a nudge in the direction of poetry and the fine information books available to children. To encourage them in these areas, I believe we should make it a point to feature poetry and nonfiction books in storytime.

Here are some suggestions. Byron Barton’s Building a House (Greenwillow, 1981) and Joy Cowley and Nic Bishop’s Red-Eyed Tree Frog (Scholastic, 1999) are fascinating and well-paced for storytime reading. A poetry book I’ve used again and again is Jack Prelutsky and Marc Brown’s Read-Aloud Rhymes for the Very Young (Knopf, 1986), a gem containing a great selection of poems to match with picture books. The collection includes an assortment of poems about mud, puppies, and other ordinary things that delight small children and connect storytime to their immediate world. Try pairing Lillian Schulz’s “Fuzzy Wuzzy, Creepy Crawly” caterpillar rhyme with Eric Carle’s book The Very Hungry Caterpillar (Philomel, 1969). The short poem nicely reinforces Carle’s simple science lesson.

If I have one pet peeve, it’s people who come for storytime and leave immediately after. In MCL storytime training, we encourage staff to invite participants to explore the collection and “find something wonderful to take home!” We also urge storytime presenters to accompany families to the shelves and offer assistance. Staff should not be expected to return to a public service desk right after their program. They can make themselves most useful by roaming the shelves with the participants they’ve just put under the storytime spell.

Often, adults like to linger and socialize after storytime. If you find that they aren’t also visiting the collection, set up a small selection of enticing materials in the program area. Encourage everyone to browse. You may even wind up doing quick booktalks about materials you’re encouraging families to check out. Include some cool materials for adults—a new cookbook, seasonal craft books, gardening books, magazines, or DVDs.

How do we stay fresh when we do storytimes week after week, year after year? We need to look for opportunities to continue our education in storytime techniques. Even after 40 years, I love learning new rhymes and songs from colleagues. I love seeing how someone else approaches a title and discovering which new titles work well for them. The best way to grow our storytime skills is through observation, an important part of new staff training at MCL. Veteran staff benefit from observation as well: We should all get out of our own libraries and observe our colleagues elsewhere several times a year. Managers can support this practice by incorporating it into yearly staff performance appraisals.

MCL youth librarians also enhance their skills through a practice called “storytime highlights.” During several monthly youth services meetings, a few librarians share a favorite song, rhyme, puppet story, or activity. They also meet periodically for “circle of practice” sessions before the meeting. Each session focuses on supporting skills in a specific area, such as toddler time, family storytime, or songs and rhymes for babies.

I’ll close with one of my strongest beliefs about storytime. Perhaps it’s more of a “best concept” than a best practice, but it affects everything else we do. This is something I learned from the wise Marjie Crammer, who for decades headed the children’s department at the New Carrollton (MD) Library. Marjie would tell her staff: “Storytime is not about you; it’s about the children.”

Over the years, I’ve adjusted that a bit: “Storytime is not a performance; it’s an interactive experience between you and the people in front of you on any particular day.” Staff attending MCL storytime training say this is what they remember most. It takes the pressure off and keeps the focus on the children. Come to think of it, let’s move that to best practice number one. I don’t doubt it will hold for another 40 years.

Nell Colburn served as a children’s librarian for over 40 years at Multnomah County Library in Portland, OR, and at public libraries in Maryland, Virginia, New York, and Washington. She is the 2013 recipient of the Oregon Library Association’s Eveyln Sibley Lampman Award for significant contributions in library service to the children of Oregon. She also cowrote SLJ’s “First Steps” column with Renea Arnold from 2004-2012.

The Lockwood Lions’ crosstown rivals, the Grovehill Giants, seem to have it all. Or do they?  When the cheer squad and the football players get together, it always gets intense. But there are two sides to every story—whose side are you on?

Do you know any struggling or reluctant teen readers? Enter to win a collection of leveled readers, including the new Truly Fine/Forever Hot from the Grove Hill Giants Series. Send an email to SLJTEEN@SDLBACK.COM with your name, title, your library’s name, shipping address and email. Five winners will be selected in a random drawing on August 1, 2013 and notified via email. One entry per person; prizes will only be shipped to U.S. addresses.

Saddleback Educational Publishing has been the leading source of solutions for struggling learners in middle school and high school for over 31 years.  Saddleback believes that by engaging the reader with age-appropriate covers and content, even the most at-risk and struggling learner can achieve success.

Arne Duncan, Michelle Kwan, Sam Kass, and Rep. John Kline at the first Let’s Read! Let’s Move! event. (l. to r.). Photo by Leslie Williams

U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan hosted the first Let’s Read! Let’s Move! event of 2013 on Wednesday, July 10, at the U.S. Department of Education headquarters in Washington, D.C.  Along with Rep. John Kline of Minnesota, chairman of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce; Sam Kass, executive director of Let’s Move! and senior policy advisor on nutrition, and Michelle Kwan, member of the President’s Council on Fitness, Sports & Nutrition and Olympic figure skater, the celebrity guests read to a group of students. Kwan then led the children in a session of fun, physical activities.

How to counter the “summer slide”? Simple, kids during the out-of-school months should read more books, according to Annie Murphy Paul. And libraries play a critical role, as the journalist and author documents in a recent post, republished below.

Murphy Paul, who writes a weekly column for Time.com and has written several books, including The Cult of Personality (S&S, 2005) and the upcoming Brilliant: The New Science of Smart (Crown, 2014), specializes in how people learn.

This fall, she will deliver the keynote address at SLJ’s Leadership Summit held this year in Austin, TX, September 28-29.

Other articles of interest by Annie Murphy Paul:

Save The Readers! A Defense of “Deep Reading”

The Epidemic of Media Multitasking While Learning

Rules For Thinking In A Digital World

How To Stimulate Curiosity

To learn more about the summit and to register, visit the event page or email sljevents@mediasourceinc.com.

Photo by John Morgan.

All photographs ©Philip Greenberg/Courtesy of Brooklyn Public Library.

 At one of his toddler programs at the Bay Ridge Library in Brooklyn, Chris Lassen covers a table with contact paper, sticky side up. Parents and caregivers look at him skeptically when he tells them what he had done, but the kids know exactly what to do. Little hands reach out and touch the table over and over again to feel this new sensation. In the process, brain cells are connected and the little ones hear and learn a new word: “sticky.”

Across the country at a library in Fort Vancouver, WA, Kendra Jones tapes zip-closure bags to her windows with two colors of paint inside. Toddlers squish and scribble the paint to enjoy “no-mess finger painting.” Through this tactile play experience, their fingers develop fine motor control and they begin to learn the science and art of color mixing. Kendra reports on her blog that both parents and children are quite chatty as they mush and mix.

Both of these library activities are prime examples of play driving language development and early literacy. Early childhood research has always highlighted the many benefits of play. The expanded and updated toolkit Every Child Ready to Read (ALSC/PLA, 2011, 2nd. ed.) features play as one of the five key early literacy practices parents should engage in with their children to promote reading readiness. A University of Iowa study reports that 18 month olds who play with diversely shaped objects learn new words twice as fast as those who play with more similarly shaped objects. A recent study of 1 to 2 year olds finds that those who play with blocks with their parents for just 20 minutes a day score 15 percent higher on language development tests and are 80 percent less likely to watch television. The research touting the benefits of play goes on and on.

The play gap

Studies notwithstanding, many parents are mystified as to how to play with a very young child, particularly one who is still gaining language. What do you say to a baby who can only babble? What do you do with an active toddler on a cold and rainy day when going to the playground is impossible? (I know, I’ve been there.) In the 2010 Play Report, a global survey of older children and their parents initiated by IKEA, 45 percent of parents said that they don’t have enough time to play with their children. Even when parents do find the time to play, 26 percent said that they are “too stressed to enjoy it.”
We also surveyed parents and caregivers at Brooklyn Public Library about their challenges playing with their children, and many mentioned struggling with how to engage a baby or toddler with a short attention span.

Even more troubling, research has also shown that low-income parents engage less in literacy-rich experiences than their wealthier peers. The landmark Risley & Hart study (Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children, P. H. Brookes, 1995) notes that, by the time children are three, those from educated and high-income homes have heard 33 million words and their low income counterparts have heard only 10 million. The disparity in the amount of talk between babies and parents of different income levels and education backgrounds is enormous, adding up to massive advantages or disadvantages for children in language experience long before they start preschool. The study finds that the more parents talked to children, the more their langague use increased, utilizing a richer vocabulary with more positive affirmations. When parents sit down to play and talk with their children they draw out babble and burgeoning language from babies and toddlers.

All parents want what is best for their children, and many often think that a very young child’s activities must take a school-like approach. In the race to learn more and more, earlier and earlier, some parents turn to packaged programs for babies and toddlers that incorporate developmentally dubious flash cards and video, such as Baby Einstein or Your Baby Can Read. Many parents have not heard that play is itself a rich and unparalleled learning activity. A child stacking blocks is developing math skills. When babies pull books off the shelves, they are experimenting with gravity and figuring out the properties of books (much to a shelver’s chagrin). Trips to the sandbox and bathtime water play are all early science experiments.

Enter Read, Play, Grow

Connecting the dots for parents between play, language development, and early learning has been the driving force behind First Five Years programs at Brooklyn Public Library. Since 2009—with special grant funding and some help from the staff of New York City’s Infant Toddler Technical Resource Center—we have been creating an in-house curriculum of simple, easy-to-replicate play activities for babies and toddlers dubbed “Read, Play, Grow.” Our recipes for play are deliberately simple. Blocks are made out of cereal boxes. Play dough is edible. Peek-a-boo magic tricks can be performed with a scarf stuffed into a paper towel tube. We aim to show parents and caregivers how simple play can be for little ones and how easy it is to make it happen with everyday materials.

Read, Play, Grow activities are also designed to be easy to incorporate into existing baby and toddler programs. After storytime, librarians set up one to three play “stations” constructed from simple household materials. Parents and caregivers have ample time to interact with and observe their children in the act of playing and learning. Each station has a sign that explains the activity, and we offer tips for things to say to encourage early literacy development along with safety warnings, where warranted.

With these tips, we hope that we’re helping grown-ups to engage with their children. Recent research in early literacy has noted that parents who are supportive and responsive to their children’s chatter and other first attempts at language have children who perform better on early language assessments. It is also important for staff to model these interactions with children. When parents and caregivers see library staff or other adults get on the floor to play and talk with a child, they see first-hand how to engage with a child. From my experience, this kind of direct observation speaks louder than a million parenting workshops.

Talking with a baby or toddler during playtime can sometimes feel awkward, particularly when a child is not talking back. That is precisely why parents should see these interactions modeled. Here is a composite transcript of one exchange that occurred in our library programs during which an 18-month-old boy is stacking blocks made out of cereal boxes:

Librarian:“I like how you’re stacking the blocks.”

Child looks at librarian for a few seconds and puts another block on top.

Librarian: “You put another block on top of the blocks. You’ve got a tall tower! Are you going to knock it down?”

Child looks at the librarian and then back at the tower and knocks it down with a smile.

Librarian: “Boom, boom, boom! You did it! You knocked down the tower!”

While the child said nothing, he was obviously taking everything in and understanding what the librarian said. The librarian put his experience into words and modeled to the parent things to say while playing at home.

Getting hands-on

While we love to show parents how they can make blocks out of cereal boxes, we also show them how they can check out blocks from the library—board book blocks. Parents sometimes look a bit dubious when we suggest playing with library materials, but it gives them permission to loosen up. We line the books up as dominoes or stack them into a tower. Usually a toddler will wander over and knock it over or start a domino rally going to complete the demonstration.

Another favorite activity for babies: tape tactile elements to the floor to create a sensory crawl zone. We have used bubble wrap, foam, textured bath mats, quilts, and pot holders. Visual elements also work well, such as black-and-white patterned bath towels or shiny paper. Little sitters and crawlers get to take in some new sensations as they explore, while staff and parents are talking to them about things that are “bumpy,” “smooth,” “soft,” or “rough.”

Many librarians want to create a program that results in something toddlers can take home. While the goal of giving the child a product based on a theme is laudable (I did this early in my career), all too often, the parents and caregivers complete the paper plate fish that requires motor skills that the toddler does not yet have. Young children are still getting the feel of what a paper plate is and what it does, and are not yet ready to make it into a fish. This is why we have incorporated open-ended collage, process-based activities into our toddler programs. Sensory collage is one of my favorites. We give children a variety of things to glue to their papers, such as textured papers, cotton balls, burlap, and bubble wrap. Children get to explore these materials. They may never stick them down on their paper, and that is just fine.

The playdate, multiplied

For the past three years, our Central Library has hosted the annual Big Brooklyn Playdate. Each time, over 100 babies and toddlers (and their parents or caregivers) have come out to play. Brooklyn Public Library staffers transform the Dweck Center—usually the site of gallery exhibits—into a baby and toddler play space with various “play stations” around the room that parents, caregivers, and young children can explore together. Again, we place signs near activities to give parents tips of things to say and ways to interact. For the first time this year, we borrowed an idea from the Parent-Child Workshop playbook and invited “roving experts” (child development experts, a pediatric physical therapist, and a child sleep expert) to our event to be on hand to answer questions from parents.

The head of our mail room at the Central Library always knows when the Big Brooklyn Playdate is coming because we ask her for her largest cardboard box. We cut a variety of shaped holes and doors in it. Sometimes we give kids crayons or sidewalk chalk to decorate it with, but they are usually so engrossed in crawling in and peeking out of the box that this is unnecessary. Lots of language happens in and out of the box, with squeals and giggles offering delightful punctuation.

The surprise hit of the Playdate is an activity we call the “The Un-Sand Box.” It is two large tubs filled with shredded paper from our office shredder. Who knew recycled documents could be so much fun? The kids love throwing, tossing, and scrunching the “snow” as many of them like to call it. Of course, the paper does go everywhere, but it cleans up easily enough with a push broom. The very first time we tried this, we hid small toys in the paper for the children to find, but we quickly learned it was pointless. The shredded paper was the thing.

The annual Big Brooklyn Playdate is the biggest event we do for babies, toddlers, and their caregivers at library. The feedback is that everyone wants us to do it again every week. We publicize it on several local mommy blogs and family websites, bringing in families with young children who have never been to the library before. Outreach efforts to local early childhood organizations also hook up a group of teen moms from a local high school.

Two years into Read, Play, Grow programs and after the first Big Brooklyn Playdate, we surveyed parents and caregivers about the program’s effectiveness. A full 74 percent of respondents reported gaining new ideas to use with their children and 44 percent said they use Read, Play, Grow activities at home.

Come out to play

With President Obama calling for more funding for early childhood education and a New York Times article from 2011 reporting high-powered Manhattan parents attending block-building workshops, it seems that the educational pendulum is once again swinging back to embracing the value of play. While it comes naturally to children, some of us grown-ups need help—and even permission—to get down on the floor and stack blocks, squeeze dough, and make a mess.

Brooklyn Public Library’s programs are just a few of the playful activities going on at libraries throughout the country. From play installations that would rival most children’s museums to in-house-developed play activities using materials rescued from the recycling bin, ours is just one of the many libraries putting play front and center.

Has your library come out to play?

Rachel G. Payne is the coordinator of early childhood services at Brooklyn Public Library. She has reviewed children’s books for SLJ and Kirkus, served on the Caldecott Award Committee, and presented on early literacy at conferences nationwide.

Deb Delisle, Assistant Secretary for Elementary and Secondary Education, U.S. Department of Education, and Richard Gonzales, Senior Advisor for Early Childhood Development, Department of Health and Human Services, joined Ralph Smith, Managing Director of the Campaign for Grade Level Reading, and Susan H. Hildreth, Director of IMLS, for a joint press event today highlighting the report.

“This report issues a call to action: Now is the time for policy makers and practitioners to fully use the capacity of libraries and museums in their early learning efforts,” says Hildreth in her introduction to the report. “Libraries and museums reach millions of children each year. It is exciting to bring that capacity into focus so that libraries and museums can more effectively engage in early learning strategies at the community, state, and national levels.”

For IMLS, the report is only the first step in a deeper and expanded commitment to the youngest and most at-risk children in the United States, Hildreth says. She notes, “We will be pursuing special efforts to assure that libraries and museums can reach under-served children and provide opportunities that can make a difference that will last a lifetime.”

According to the report, libraries and museums support learning are by increasing high-quality early learning experiences, engaging and supporting families as their child’s first teachers, supporting development of executive function and “deeper learning” through literacy and STEM-based experiences, creating seamless links across early learning and the early grades, positioning children for meeting expectations of the Common Core State Standards, addressing the summer slide, linking new digital technologies to learning, improving family health and nutrition, leveraging community partnerships, and adding capacity to early learning networks.

The report also outlined areas and questions that deserve further impact study, and specific recommendations for improving early learning outcomes and increasing school readiness through federal, state, and community efforts.

Federal policy makers, for example, should include museum/library grants in funding priorities, support research to identify best practices for early learning in museums and libraries, and invest in professional development for museum and library staff.

Communities, the report recommends, should include museums and libraries in initiatives designed to increase family engagement in school readiness, examine ways to help vulnerable, underserved families access museum and library services, and launch public information campaigns.

For districts and schools, the report calls for joint professional development to teachers and museum and library staff, and the establishment of partnerships between schools and local museums and libraries that support building content knowledge.

The report also highlights and details current successful programs in New York (the Children’s Museum of Manhattan); Idaho; Texas (Children’s Museum of Houston); Washington; Virginia (Richmond Public Library, Arlington County schools); Pennsylvania (the greater Pittsburgh region); Florida (Miami Science Museum); Massachusetts (Boston Children’s Museum); Maryland (city of Baltimore).

Jean Marzollo and Robie H. Harris.

Lovers of children’s picture books and early literacy advocates—including a pediatrician, a jazz singer, and numerous published authors and illustrators—gathered earlier this month in New York City for “Literature for Early Childhood: What Do You Need to Know?” a day conference sponsored by the Bank Street Writers Lab. The event brought together child development experts, educators, and creators of children’s literature.

Keynote speaker Dr. Perri Klass, a pediatrician, opened the event with text from Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown—who was an early member of the Writers Lab—to the delight of attendees and staffers such as Bank Street Center for Children’s Literature interim director Jennifer Brown.

Klass also shared insights about her training of doctors for the Reach Out and Read literacy partnership, where she serves as medical director. The organization’s mission is to work with doctors who in turn give new books to their patients along with advice on the importance of reading aloud to children. The goal of these efforts is to eventually reduce the socio-economic reading divide.

In her training of physicians, Klass says she emphasizes brain developmental stages and things that should be observed both with the child and parent. For example, when a six month old babbles, he or she is requesting interaction—and parents should respond by reading aloud. By this simple act, a child’s imagination is stimulated, language is developed, and a love of books is fostered, she says. Klass also notes that “rich kids hear more words” and a gap in vocabulary begins at 18 months.

The conference turned from the scientific to the creative during “Creating Books for Early Childhood,” a panel discussion between Amy Hest, author of Charley’s First Night (Candlewick, 2012); Robie H. Harris, author of Who Has What? (Candlewick, 2011); Jean Marzollo, author of I Spy School Days (Cartwheel, 1995); and Nina Crews, author of The Neighborhood Mother Goose (Greenwillow, 2003).

The group discussed the creative processes involved in writing a book for children, and how it is unique and particular to each individual. According to the authors, Amy Hest brings herself back to childhood when she writes and never tests any of her books with children before publication, although Jean Marzollo reads funny passages aloud with kids to see which get laughs. And for her part, Robie Harris said she depends upon her illustrator to provide the humor.

Attendees were then treated to a musical interlude: a jazz rendition by Louise Rogers of Chris Raschka’s Charlie Parker Played Be Pop (Scholastic, 1997). Rogers and storyteller Susan Milligan then went on to demonstrate how to combine music and reading for kids in their presentation, “Jazz Mosaic: Ideas to Help You Bring Music into Your Classroom Every Day.” One idea that really resonated with the crowd: playing a blues instrumental as background muisc while reading Judith Viorst’s Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day (Atheneum, 1987) with kids.

After some autographing for attendees, the day culminated with closing keynote speaker Laura Vaccaro Seeger, a Caldecott Honor recipient for Green (Roaring Brook, 2012) and First the Egg (Roaring Brook, 2007). First the Egg  was also named a Theodor Seuss Geisel Honor Book

Laura Vaccaro Seeger autographs copies of Green (Roaring Brook, 2012).

Seeger spoke about the craft of her writing as well as the distinctive use of die cuts in her artwork. She also noted how that technique forces the reader to see an image one way and then another.

The inaugural event was a success, according to Brown, who tells School Library Journal that she hopes it will be the first of many such events for the Writers Lab. “We could not have been more pleased,” she says. “The event stressed the essential need for books in early childhood literacy and development.”

The Bank Street Writer’s Lab was created in 1937 to encourage quality writing for children. Its membership has included authors Margaret Wise Brown and Edith Thacher Hurd.

Tim Federle with kids on World Read Aloud Day bus.

From Belarus to Brooklyn, the world’s students, teachers, and librarians marked the fourth annual World Read Aloud Day on Wednesday with a diversity of celebrations and special events. The special day was created by Pam Allyn and Lit World, a nonprofit organization she founded that encourages a global celebration of the invaluable practice of reading aloud.

Allyn kicked off the international celebration in a blustery New York City atop of a double-decker GrayLine bus that visited an elementary and middle school in the Harlem. She was joined on the road by Kwame Alexander, author of the Acoustic Rooster  (Sleeping Bear, 2011); the Story Pirates, an educational theater group; and Clifford, the Big Red Dog. Later in the day, author Tim Federle appeared to talk about his debut book Better Nate Than Ever (S & S, 2013) about a teen trying to break into the world of New York theater. The group was greeted by cheering children that climbed aboard the second story of the bus for a reading and a schmooze with Clifford.

Technology played an important role for World Read Aloud Day for Matthew C. Winner,  media specialist at Longfellow Elementary School in Columbia, MD. He along with others established connections for WRAD via a GoogleDoc and, through promotion through blogs and Twitter, this online document now hosts more than 70 educators who coordinated their WRAD Skype schedules.

John Schumacher, librarian at Brook Forest Elementary School, Oak Brook, IL,  hosted Skype sessions with several authors including Newbery Award winner, Katherine Applegate. Both he and Ernie Cox, media specialist at the Prairie Creek Intermediate School in Cedar Rapids, IA, hosted Joanne Levy, author of Small Medium at Large (Bloomsbury, 2012). To make the author feel more welcome, Cox decorated the podium on which the laptop sat with Levy bookmarks and book covers, creating a virtual shrine for the author’s Skype visit.

“Reading aloud brings character voices to life,” Cox told School Library Journal, noting that having an author visit, even virtually, brings character voices out in a way no one else can.

In Georgia, Kathy Schmidt, media specialist at Rock Springs Elementary in Lawrenceville, GA connected her students with students in Falmouth, ME; Truro, MA; and Van Meter, IA. They read aloud to each other from their favorite books. In a similar student-to-student reading, Matthew Winner used technology. His students connected with their peers in 11 different states using ebooks available on WeGiveBooks.org, a project funded by Penguin Young Readers in which schools in need receive books from the publisher based on the number of times the ebooks are accessed.

Photos by Rocco Staino

Winner tells his teachers and students, “just imagine the number of books we’re donating to schools in need just by reading for WRAD!”

Public libraries also joined in the celebration. In Wentzville, MO, kids celebrated the joys of reading aloud with a story every hour for 12 hours. Amy Koester, children’s librarian at the Corporate Parkway Branch of the St. Charles City-County Library District, coordinated the twelve books for the day, ranging from preschool picture books and preschool nonfiction in the morning to picture books, poetry, and nonfiction that will appeal to school-age kids during the afternoon and evening readings. All who participated in one of the WRAD readings will add their names to the library’s “reading wall” in its foyer, making a visual proclamation of how much they value reading at the library, Koester told SLJ.

Meanwhile, in Brooklyn, Melanie Hope Greenburg was Skyping with a school in Belarus, talking about that universal mythical creature, the mermaid. Greenburg’s 2008 book, Mermaids on Parade (Putnam) tells about the annual mermaid parade held in Coney Island.  She made the Belarus through Facebook and said she was happy to do so because some of her ancestors came from the region.

Authors also connected with readers face to face to celebrate the day. Roxie Munro, who was recently nominated for the first Cook Prize for her Busy Builders (Marshall Cavendish, 2012), visited the children at Bellevue hospital to real aloud to the patients.

The national World Read Aloud Day celebration ended with a stop at the Books of Wonder bookstore where Brett Helquist, Greg Foley, and John Kloepfer were guest readers.

To see captions on the slideshow below, click “Show Info” in upper right corner.

Photo by Hemera

Being out in the field, talking to teachers and librarians about the Common Core (CC), I’ve learned as much as I’ve taught. My world is often centered in my study (where I research and write), or in the graduate classes that I teach, or in the K–12 classrooms that I visit. In those spaces, I’ve learned, secondhand, about students being told they can only read an “L” or an “R” book—and how parents have demanded that libraries rearrange their collections from A to Z, according to carefully determined reading levels, so their kids can read totally non-frustrating texts. But it took being at a workshop out on Long Island, NY, for me to really understand the fundamental clash between guided reading and Common Core—something that many of you doubtless experience daily.

At the workshop, librarians spoke of their schools being, in effect, taken over by guided reading crews with their alphabet soup of labels and rigid instructions. That type of approach made absolutely no sense to me, so I did my homework. I learned that guided reading began as a good idea: breaking classrooms into groups by reading levels didn’t work since poor readers didn’t improve when they were clumped together, so teachers needed a new way to match individual readers, reading levels, and texts. So far, so good. Indeed, as one reading expert told me, providing a space, say 20 to 30 minutes daily, where, as part of the reading diet, a learner experiences clear sailing seems at worst harmless and at best a step toward success.

But this relatively benign approach has turned into an expensive program complete with minatory reading coaches who run around mandating to librarians what kids should be allowed to read. The second problem is that the steroidal guided reading monster is directly at odds with the Common Core.

As literacy expert Timothy Shanahan pointed out in “The Common Core Ate My Baby and Other Urban Legends,” a recent article in Educational Leadership, limiting students to below-frustration texts doesn’t necessarily help them (see, especially, “Legend 4: Teachers Must Teach Students at Frustration Levels”) nor does CC require all kids to tackle weighty tomes far beyond their previous reading ranges. In the early grades, where students are working to become fluent readers, CC doesn’t demand that they read more complex texts. And it’s precisely in that preK-to-2 band that learners may need some reading time where they don’t have to struggle. And that brings us to content.

The key clash between guided reading and CC is that those A-to-Z labels have nothing to do with content—they are about the ease of decoding. Starting in earnest in second grade, CC stresses that knowledge is a key part of literacy. This cuts two ways. Every elementary school librarian knows that a student who’s passionate about a subject isn’t daunted by the text’s difficulty—the multi-syllabic names of dinosaurs being a prime example. Curiosity drives readers on from one record, one wacky fact, one sports stat, one set of rules on how to care for pets, to another—and the text’s length or structure isn’t a formidable barrier. In turn, the Common Core standards emphasize that in order to read a student must identify details that add up to evidence and tap into modes of thinking that add up to argument and point of view. You can’t build those muscles without what librarians used to call “stretch,” or challenging, books.

Whether young people are on a sports team or practice an instrument, whether they play Minecraft or chess, they realize that to be good at something you have to work at it; you have to test your limits. Reading works the same way: you build muscles through confronting and overcoming a challenge, and you’re drawn to that challenge because you have a specific goal. We in library land know of many reading goals that appeal to students—books they want to tackle because they find them engaging, interesting, and exciting. Common Core adds the goal of preparing students for a successful life after school. That is the sort of guided reading that makes sense to me.

Photo credit: D. Feingold

In addition to best-selling mysteries and thrillers for adults, James Patterson also writes for young readers, and he’s extremely proud of his “Middle School” series. The latest entry, I Funny, is told from the point of view of a middle schooler who uses humor to help him cope with a physical handicap and the loss of his family. In this case, laughter really is the best medicine for Jamie Grimm, the narrator of I Funny.

Your series for young adults, like “Maximum Ride” and “Daniel X,” have been checked out so many times from my library that they’re falling apart. What makes them so popular with teens?

Well, when my 14-year-old son, Jack, was younger, I told him that I expected him to read every day during his summer break. Jack was never a huge reader, but his mother and I told him that we would make sure he had really cool books to read. Cool books are ones that he wouldn’t put down and when he got done he would ask for another one. When kids are younger, we want them to read, read, read, and they will only do that if they like what they read. Kids in middle school need books with stories that move along, stories that they love, and pages that practically turn themselves so kids won’t pick up a  book and say that they don’t like it and they don’t like reading. I think that books need a lot of meat in them. For example, Maximum Ride is really about a couple of things beyond the story line like dealing with being different. It is really about kids taking responsibility for their own lives. My most popular books are the Middle School books.

Why did you create the website Read Kiddo Read? Has it made a difference in kids’ lives?

Absolutely! Part of my interest in creating the website was watching Jack grow up and watching his attitude toward books.  Even with his friends who are very bright, it has always been a struggle to get them to read at least on their own time. That is a big stimulus for me. As individuals we cannot do much to help the health care crisis, budget situation, or global warming. Unfortunately, we spend a lot of time just talking about these things, which doesn’t help anything, and I am big on doing stuff. As individuals, we can most times get the kids in our houses reading or our grandchildren reading, or we can even help our local school get more books. So doing something to get kids reading is a big deal for me. I have been trying other things too, like working with independent bookstores to hold essay contests, where kids write about a book that most affected them. I have set up over a 100 scholarships at different colleges across the U.S., and they are all for teachers.  We plan to double this number in the coming year. We have even set up a program at Vanderbilt University to bring in kids every Saturday to help improve their reading skills. I am testing an after-school program in four middle schools in Palm Beach County to get kids help with their reading, and we pumped 700 to 1,000 books in all these schools. If we can get a cadre of kids reading, the teachers will notice when their reading improves and more kids will start reading and over time this will improve the neighborhoods. I do all of this because I can. We must help kids build good habits and break down bad ones. Getting kids to read will not happen overnight. We must keep at it and get the right books into the right hands.

Why does the “Middle School” series focus on humor?

Humor is one of the ways to get to kids. Combining the prose and illustrations makes the book more like a movie, and that’s a cool thing. All the Middle School books are good stories. I think that I Funny is my best.

I like I Funny‘s  main character, Jamie Grimm. Could the story have played out the same way if he wasn’t in a wheelchair? Are you worried that some people might be offended because he makes fun of his handicap?

I like the idea of a kid having a terrible break in life, rising above it with comedy, but yes the story would still be valid if Jamie didn’t have a handicap. Nobody should be offended by this book.  I am not big on political and social correctness, because I think it is more important to be a good human being.

Which gets us to the contest for the Funniest Kid in America. What kind of response are you hoping for? How does the contest relate to your literacy work?

Some kids are going to be brave enough to submit videos, but we are going to put a lot of videos up on the website for kids to watch and that should be fun. I recorded a bunch of short pieces with Zach Gordon, who was in the Wimpy Kid movies, to introduce the idea of the contest. We want to get kids attention and hopefully this will help them start building the habit of reading.

Elizabeth Kahn is the librarian at Patrick F. Taylor Science and Technology Academy in Jefferson, LA. She writes reviews for School Library Journal and Library Media Connection as well as a blog to chronicle the happenings in her school library at Tales from a Loud Librarian.

Nationally, there are more than 700,000 teens in custody each night—teens who have been abused and neglected, teens who are entrepreneurs, teens who have experienced many major losses, teens with adult experiences and low reading levels. Due to the fact that minorities are disproportionately confined, too many of these teens are African American and Latino. Being underground, they’re the canaries in a coal mine, exposing what’s poisonous in the environment. There are many opportunities to reach these young adults both in and out of custody. My hope is that this column can bring to light new finds for these “urban” readers.

According to a December 2012 Anna E. Casey Foundation report, nearly 4.3 million young adults (ages 20 to 24) are unemployed and truant. That 4.3 million translates to a national 74 percent teen unemployment rate. With those statistics, it’s an understandable and even somewhat logical choice to turn to an underground economy. Kenny Johnson’s memoir, The Last Hustle, is unique in providing insight into the normality and reasoning that led to his choice of a life that was devoted to crime. The consequences? He spent over 20 years in city, state, county, and federal prisons. Booker T Huffman’s From Prison to Promise tells a more familiar story of a neglected child who turns to the successful role models he sees growing up: gangsters and drug dealers.

Most of my teens were initially victims, with their victimization not adequately addressed. Meg Medina’s fantastic Yaqui Delgado Wants to Kick Your Ass (slight quibble: the title should be Is Going to, not Wants to) deals with bullying and the way that teens facing difficult and challenging circumstances hold their fear and vulnerability underground. Check this out along with these other featured titles.

*The names of kids have been changed.

Takoudes, Greg. When We Wuz Famous. Henry Holt, March 2013. Tr $16.99. ISBN 9780805094527.

Gr 8 Up—The jury (my kids as well as myself) is still out on this title. It reminds me of Matt De La Pena’s pacing style—slow to start, yet ultimately an engaging read. In one of the first chapters, Francisco’s girlfriend, Reignbow (yeah, really), is talking openly to the police. From my experience, this is completely unrealistic and I’m not sure my kids will make it past this point. But by page 61, I was rapidly turning the pages as Francisco struggles with attending the white prep school on a basketball scholarship and feels torn by his loyalty to Reignbow and his messed-up foster kid brother who’s on the streets. Takoudes made a movie with teens from Spanish Harlem and the book is based on the film.

Huffman, Booker T with Andrew William Wright. Booker T: From Prison to Promise. Medallion Press. 2012. Tr $14.99. ISBN 9781605424682.

Gr 8 Up—Booker T was one of eight children. His hardworking father died of a stroke when he was 10 months old, and his equally hardworking mother died of surgical complications when he was 13. Without her, the family fell into chaos, leaving Booker T and his youngest sister to fend for themselves. His mother’s house gradually decays around them as the electricity, water, garbage and other services are cut off, while his older siblings are living their lives to various dysfunctional degrees. Booker T then turns to the successful role models he sees around him: gangsters and drug dealers. In junior high, he becomes a father but doesn’t have the wherewithal to deal with it and blames his girlfriend and abandons his son, just as he was abandoned. Ending up in prison with a job in the laundry, he talks his way onto the weight-lifting team. Upon his release, he recognizes his responsibilities, gets his son out of foster care, and is on his way to becoming the six-time world wrestling champion and public figure he is today. It’s not action-packed, but rather a straight-forward, no-frills commentary.  Reluctant readers will find the trim size appealing and subject matter of interest, and other teens will pick it up for a quick read.

Johnson, Kenny with Shanti Einolander.The Last Hustle. Non-Duality Press. 2011. pap. $16.45. ISBN 9780956643285.

Gr 8 Up—Street lore says that a life of crime leads to only one of three places: death, prison, or going crazy in prison. There’s a fourth option that isn’t talked about much but experienced by some—a deep spiritual awakening leading to complete and total transformation. This isn’t a religious conversion, but an awakening to the true nature of life so that abiding peace is found even in the most challenging of circumstances. The latter was Kenny Johnson’s experience. He writes, “Prison was where I discovered my soul and so much more.” Throughout his life, he desired freedom. Ironically, prison offered him the challenges of confinement and pain as well as the time to read, study, and take classes. Teens who are looking for titles like Jarvis Masters’s Finding Freedom: Writings from Death Row (Padma Publishing, 1977) will enjoy this book.

Medina, Meg. Yaqui Delgado Wants to Kick Your Ass. Candlewick. March 2013. Tr $16.99. ISBN 9780763658595.

Gr 9 Up—There’s a lot packed into this vibrant small book which will make it a favorite for teens. When the stair to their tenement collapse, Piddy’s mom, an immigrant from Cuba, insists on moving.That means a new school.The trouble begins right away when Yaqui Delgado targets 16-year-old Piddy with threats. Piddy doesn’t even know who Yaqui is, much less what she has done to instigate these threats. Living in fear, her grades suffer, and she finally figures out that to avoid trouble, it’s easier to skip school. Piddy is tough, and knows the rules of the streets, but she doesn’t want to fight. But that doesn’t work—Yaqui tracks her down and inflicts a brutal beating that’s posted on the Internet. Subplots include a boy with an abusive father, Piddy’s desire to work with animals—elephants, to be exact—a wonderful hair salon/aunt/neighbor contingent, and Piddy’s longing for information about her father whom she’s never met. Lots of action with a realistic setting, dialogue, relationships, problems, and solutions make this book a winner. The cover—a blue locker with graffiti for the title—will attract reluctant readers. The content will keep them reading to the end and wanting more, especially to hear Yaqui’s story.

“

Financial Literacy

Grade Level 7 Up

Cost Tiered pricing begins at $595 for an annual subscription for schools and public libraries, and is based on student enrollment or cardholder numbers.

Overview Don’t let the simple homepage layout fool you—there is a ton of information in this database. Rosen has revised and updated material from more than 500 new and backlist titles, readying it for online use—and that effort shows.

Topics are timely, relevant, and made accessible to the intended audience. The homepage displays a list of seven broad financial topics that users can select; these range from “Entrepreneurship and Career Skills” to “Role of Government” to “The Market Economy.” The homepage also offers two featured articles: “Making Sense of It” discusses a current event, while “Take a Closer Look” typically contains a story with video; the one displayed at the time of the review, for example, stars teenage girls discussing how to start and market a small business. Users can also try one of six different financial calculators or get involved by answering the daily quiz or poll. Resources for teachers and librarians include Common Core and state-specific standards correlations, promotional materials, and Web buttons.

Content and Usability To get an idea of the content available here, users will want to browse by simply drilling down into a topic of interest. For example, clicking on the homepage topic “Personal Finance” brings up a list of related issues, which include “Credit and Debt,” “The Economy and the Individual,” and “Income and Careers,” to name a few. Under “Credit and Debt” are four relevant articles including “First Credit Card and Credit Smarts,” which is presented in very manageable sections. “Entrepreneurship and Careers Skills” offers helpful advice on job seeking, including how to write résumés and cover letters and prepare for interviews. Articles are divided into 8 to 12 prominently labeled subdivisions. “Previous” and “Next” navigation buttons allow readers to easily turn to the next screen.

A search box is provided for more specific queries. In addition, topics may be browsed alphabetically or by subject, and doing either reveals the depth of material provided.

Layout This database is not cutesy but rather reflects a more serious approach, a smart choice for the topic and intended age group. The interface is pleasantly consistent and predictable. Every article is presented in the same way, with a menu of sections on the left and the text on the right. At any time the user may click on the large “Financial Literacy” link on the top left to go to the homepage.

Some of the pages could use additional back navigation buttons. For example, after clicking on a calculator there are no buttons within the database that will bring the user back to the calculators’ menu page. Also, the “Browse A-Z” and “Browse Subject” buttons do not work when using Internet Explorer 8, but were fine on the iPad (Rosen recommends the use of Internet Explorer 9), while, using the iPad, moving the mouse over a highlighted word provides a definition that is then hard to remove.

Rosen offers a user-friendly option to print or email either a section or the full article. Six financial calculators help with, for example, auto loan payments, college costs, and budgeting. Each article includes “investigate” topics that encourage related reading on the subject.

Articles can be translated into 50 different languages using a built-in Google Translate option. There are text-to-speech capabilities, although the voice is robotic and thus the pacing and pronunciation are off at times. However, for students who need the audio, it is a valuable feature. Article citations are provided in APA and MLA formats. The material is written in plain language, although unfortunately the authors are sometimes condescending or preachy (“teenagers should turn off the television and learn…non-exportable jobs…”).

The Common Core and state-specific standards correlations can be viewed on screen or exported to an Excel spreadsheet. Social bookmarking allows for sharing of articles, and the material is iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch, and netbook compatible.

Verdict This accessible database hosts a wealth of information for students and provides teachers with a solid resource to support financial-literacy lessons. Rosen has taken into account the needs of students and teachers in creating this comprehensive tool for the classroom, and the end product is a valuable, dynamic resource.

Stephanie Farnlacher is a librarian at Trace Crossings School, Hoover, AL

Words Are Delicious: Food Writing in the Classroom

I bet this was the only NCTE session in which each attendee was given an Oreo! Presenter April Brannon, from Cal State Fullerton, started off the session with a discussion of poems about food, featuring Pablo Neruda’s Ode to Tomatoes and Donald Hall’s Eating the Pig, and how these poems can be used to boost students’ reading and writing skills.  Both student-teacher and individual student work was showcased, including Eating the Chicken Nuggets, inspired by Hall’s aforementioned poem. With an Oreo in hand, each member of the audience was asked to contribute a simile, metaphor, alliterative phrase, personification, image, or hyperbole which Brannon then used to create an ode to the iconic cookie.  Brannon was followed by Elle Yarborough from Northern Essex (MA) Community College, who focused on developing literacy skills by investigating food. Attendees were asked to watch “The Soup Nazi” episodes from Seinfeld and read Molly O’Neill’s essay “The Soup Man of 55th Street” (from the New York Cookbook [Workman, 1992]), comparing the various ways in which Al Yeganeh, the real-life owner of the famous soup restaurant, was characterized on the popular sit-com. Yarborough also talked about how she uses road-food writers Jane and Michael Stern’s wonderful piece “The Lobster Roll Honor Roll” (from the August 1994 issue of Gourmet magazine) as an example of investigative food writing. The Sterns combine history, culture, and social norms in the retelling of their quest to find Maine’s best lobster roll. You might want to ask your students to select a local culinary favorite, research its origins and variations across the region, and even gather recipes to produce their own food writing. All of these activities can easily be converted to library programming for teens and tweens.

Inspiring Readers with the Newest Young Adult Literature Winners

How many booktalks can be squeezed into about an hour? A lot, as proved by presenters Jennifer Walsh (Forsyth Middle School, Ann Arbor, MI), Daria Plumb (Riverside Academy, Dundee, MI), and Jennifer Buehler (St Louis University, MO). This group, chaired by Teri Lesesne (Sam Houston University, TX), created a grid to keep track of the number of awards that 2011 titles have received during the past year, then they organized the titles according to the number of award lists they have each appeared on. It was no surprise to hear which two titles appeared on the most lists: Ruta Sepetys’s Between Shades and Maggie Stiefvater’s The Scorpio Races each appeared on six awards lists. The presenters were able to race through 20 titles, halfway through the three award lists, before the closing bell rang. Their incredibly useful and informative list of awards and titles can be found on a handout on NCTE’s 2012 website.

Learning Lessons from YA War Literature

Session chair, author, and Brigham Young University English professor Chris Crowe gave an excellent overview of the types of YA literature that can be used in the classroom to help readers connect with those who have lived through a war. Jen Bryant, an award-winning novelist, poet, and biographer, spoke about war’s effects on society and the people “left behind,” and explained how she writes about those experiences. For example, in her verse novel, The Trial (Knopf, 2004), the growing fear and distrust among Americans of Germany as World War II approached became a major factor in the trial of Bruno Richard Hauptmann,  who was accused of the murder of Charles Lindbergh Jr. In Bryant’s novel The Fortune of Carmen Navarro (Knopf, 2010), a high school dropout and a cadet from Valley Forge Military Academy and a long-standing military family stumble into a romance, as the war in Iraq plays out in background, which puts an additional strain on their relationship.

Author Dean Hughes embeds his readers directly into the battlefield in his war novels. In Hughes’s Soldier Boys (Antheneum, 2001), two young men—a German and an American—come to understand each other’s motives for fighting in World War II as they see their friends and colleagues die around them. Ricky Ward thinks that going to war will solve his problems with his violent father and dismissive girlfriend, but readers of Search and Destroy (Antheneum, 2005) discover that the Vietnam War is scarier and more complicated than anything Ricky has left at home. Visit the NCTE 2012 session site for an excellent bibliography of YA war literature and more from the authors.

Igniting the 21st-Century Spark with Big Ideas and Technology

If you’ve been thinking about using technology and books to connect with classroom teachers and teens, look no further. This NCTE session featured three dynamic presenters who have incorporated technology into their literature lessons to enhance writing and comprehension skills. Catherine Reeves, a University of Wyoming grad student, shared Hyperstudio presentations that she created to teach Sylvia Plath’s confessional poetry. Reeves’s student not only had to master the technology, they nad to research images from the 1950s to use in their own presentations. And that’s not all: they also had to write their own confessional poems and create a Hyperstudio presentation to support it. At Montana’s Arlee High School, kids in English teacher Anna Baldwin’s multicultural literature class created a YouTube video entitled “Perma Red: From Our Vision,” which includes students’ photographs, along with selected music, and text excerpts from Debra Magpie Earling’s Perma Red. Baldwin also created a teacher’s guide for the video project as part of her entry for the PBS Teacher Innovator awards, which recognize innovative preK-12 classroom educators, media specialists, technology coordinators and homeschool educators who use digital media to enhance student learning. . The final presenter, Tiffany Rehbein, an English teacher from East High School in Cheyenne, WY, described the process she uses to help students create book trailers, which are shown on the school’s TV station. The kids’ videos not only showcase students’ works—they also encourage their classmates to read. Rehbein’s book-trailer resource guide and checklist can be found on the NCTE session hand-out site. This session was chaired by Beverly Ann Chin, Director of the English Teaching Program at the University of Montana at Missoula.

Literature Lover’s Lament: Learning to Love Nonfiction: Connecting Real-World Texts to the Common Core Standards

Even though it meant racing directly from the airport to the MGM Grand Conference Center, this session was not to be missed. Featuring the powerhouse trio of UCLA’s Carol Yago, UC-Irvine’s Carol Olson, and Carleton College’s Deborah Applebaum, the audience was treated to a terrific overview of what the Common Core standards really mean to English teachers and their classroom materials. While there was discussion of the use of cognitive toolkits and the Reading Framework for the 2009 National Assessment of Educational Progress, which librarians certainly need to be aware of, much of the talk focused on encouraging educators to go beyond the tried-and-true literature they currently use, and to try out some of the excellent nonfiction resources that are now available. For instance, if you’re teaching the classic Grapes of Wrath, why not add some outstanding nonfiction titles to your lessons, such as The Worst Hard Time (Mariner, 2006), The Dust Bowl Through the Lens (Walker, 2009), and the free verse Out of the Dust (Scholastic, 1999)? And if you’re looking for articles to spice up a literature unit, check out Lapham’s Quarterly, a magazine of history and ideas that’s overseen by Harper’s editor emeritus, Lewis Lapham. The theme of embracing nonfiction was certainly evident throughout the conference, and publishers in the exhibit hall evidently have heard the call as well.

English Teachers Igniting Literacy for Incarcerated Students: Inspiring Writing in the Inside to Connect to the Outside

This very compelling session, chaired by the University of San Francisco’s Peter Williamson, featured speakers Sean Neil and Constance Walker, who both teach at Woodside Learning Center, Juvenile Hall, in San Francisco, and Carleton’s Applebaum. Since we know that literacy can help end recidivism (which currently hovers at 86 percent for juveniles), reading and writing can be some of the most powerful tools that you can give incarcerated kids. Neil and Walker described the programs they’ve offered to their teens, with the full support of the Juvenile Hall Library, which is run by the San Francisco Public Library. A project that involved writing letters to ancestors on reflective mylar was mounted at the Alcatraz Prison Museum, and a blog created by students, Songs of the Caged Birds: Caged Bodies, Free Minds, provides an ongoing outlet for their writings. Key readings in class, offered so that teens can understand the prison system better, are The Real Costs of Prison (PM Press, 2008), Are Prisons Obsolete? (Open Media, 2003), and The Politics of Injustice (Sage, 2003).

Applebaum works with adults at the Minnesota Correctional Facility, a high security prison in Stillwater, MN. As a teaching volunteer, she has been able to introduce and nurture creative writing skills in her students, many of whom are serving life sentences. Using liberatory pedagogy, which is a pedagogy of liberation centered around the principles for social change and transformation through education based on consciousness raising and engagement with oppressive forces, Applebaum has seen her students’ intelligence and creativity surface in many ways. From the Inside Out: Letters to Young Men and Other Writing (Creative Space, 2009) is one result of the classes. This anthology features letters, short stories, and poems from incarcerated authors from her facility.

Watch for two articles to appear in the March 2013 issue of English Journal on writing and the incarcerated—“Traveling in the Dark: The Promise and Pedagogy of Writing in Prison” (Applebaum), and “Songs of the Caged Birds: Literacy and Learning with Incarcerated Youth” (Williamson, Mercurio, Walker).

Fae-Tal Attraction: The Timeless International Appeal of Faerie Folk in Young Adult Literature

Young adult fantasies about faerie folk are more popular than ever, and as this panel proved, no two faeries are exactly alike! Authors Janni Lee Simner, Aprilynne Pike, Janette Rallison, and R. J. Anderson captivated the audience with their discussion of the origin of their faerie mythos, the rabid fans that attend FaerieCon (“Do not go dressed up as Tinkerbell!” warned Pike), and the ongoing interest in faerie titles for teen readers. All of the panelists cited An Encyclopedia of Fairies: Hobgoblins, Brownies, Bogies, & Other Supernatural Creatures (Pantheon, 1978) as the go-to reference for all things faerie. A sampling of contemporary faerie novels can be found in the NCTE 2012 program listings.

“I really wanted to make all of our curriculum and resources tailored to teachers, so one of the first things I did was to revamp the lesson plans and curriculum,” says Chris Angotti, director of the Young Writers Program. “I aligned them all to the Common Core, which really makes it easy for teachers to take stuff right out of the box and bring it into their classrooms.”

The Young Writers Program recommends a sliding scale for students’ word-count goals, ranging from 20 to 200 words for kindergartners, to 25,000 to 50,000 for12th graders. The lesson plans provide guidance from prewriting to publishing. Supplements include downloadable workbooks for students and classroom kits with goodies like stickers and buttons.

This is the fourth year that Jackie Keith, a librarian at Riverbend High School in Virginia, has organized an after-school NaNoWriMo program. This year she offered September prep lessons, following the lesson plans to get kids on track—and stay there. “We want to increase the number of kids who actually reach that goal, which is why we implemented the lead-up classes,” she says, adding that the lessons also increased teachers’ enthusiasm for the program.

In past years, Keith had around 25 participants, between five and 10 of whom reached their goal (or “won,” in NaNoWriMo lingo). As of October 27, she already had 55 signed up.

Keith is somewhat of an evangelist for NaNoWriMo among librarians, touting the program’s flexibility for students and those leading them: “That’s part of the selling-point of this for me, that they can do this however it works for them—and for us.” But the program’s main appeal is the sense of accomplishment participants feel. Kids who go through it “definitely see themselves as authors,” says Keith.

In videos made to promote the program, one of Keith’s students’ says she’s participated all three years—and it’s made writing easier for her in general. Another enthusiastically encourages teachers elsewhere to start NaNoWriMo groups of their own.

Keith has tried to write her own novels along her students, but has yet to finish one. “I’m the eternal beginner,” she jokes. She gives high praise to Jacalyn Stanley, a multi-year NaNoWriMo “winner” and Riverbend volunteer who “talked to the kids, encouraged them, and gave them a taste of what the bigger NaNoWriMo community is like.” Keith recommends that librarians who haven’t completed the program seek an experienced community member to help out.

Emily Remer, a librarian at Michael E. Smith Middle School in Massachusetts, decided to bring NaNoWriMo to her school this year after participating herself. During October, her group practiced writing and discussed issues like character development and plot. They also registered on the Young Writers Program website “which they’re totally psyched about,” she says.

Fun is a major motivating factor: “Mostly I want the kids to have had a good time,” says Remer. “I’m hoping they’ll achieve their goals so it’ll be a boost for them. And give them enough enthusiasm that they want to do it again next year.”

Since librarians often lack regular scheduled time with students, it can be a struggle to provide kids with the support they need for the intense program. Supplementing students’ weekly after-school meetings, Remer has reserved a table in the library where students can work during lunch.

Librarian Kelly Benning is also implementing a NaNoWriMo program for the first time at Chaminade College Prep High School. “The main reason I’m doing NaNoWriMo is that it breaks my heart that students equate writing with pain,” says Benning. “As librarians, we say, ‘The right book for the right person at the right time.’…It’s the same with writing. You have to get the right ideas and the right environment and the right structure so that the student can find it enjoyable.”

Benning condensed key sections from the Young Writers Program materials into brief introductions for her weekly student meetings, honing in on this: “getting rid of your inner editor”–particularly important for students who are used to their writing being constantly graded and criticized.

Benning is also excited to offer “the NaNoWriMo Lounge,” a comfortable—and popular—seating area in her often-packed library. It’s reserved for novel writers, “so they’ll know they’ll always have a place to come and write.

Challenging students to expand how they think about writing, national literacy and educational groups are asking teachers, librarians, writers, children and creators of all kinds to share what they write on Twitter and other social media channels on Friday, October 19.

Under the hashtag, #WhatIWrite, the National Writing Project (NWP), National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) and the New York Times Learning Network, among other groups (School Library Journal is a participant), are exploring the myriad forms that writing can take—from a list to a Facebook post, a podcast to a video piece.

“Our effort is to draw attention to the critical role of writing in our lives,” says Paul Oh, senior program associate with NWP. “I think we’re at this moment in education defining what it means to be literate.”

Encouraging students to find their literary voice and empowering them to craft pieces is more important than ever, particularly with the emphasis on writing in the Common Core, says Oh. As paper and pen yield to pixels and screens, students may need help understanding that the blog piece they craft, or the podcast they record, is adding to their literacy skills—and should be celebrated.

The online gathering is geared toward students, but everyone is encouraged to get involved. The digital event takes place the day before the Fourth Annual National Day of Writing—with the hope that children will tweet about what they’re composing at school and at home. The Twittersphere was already chirping with posts from excited participants, from learning coach Aaron Svoboda (@Mr_Svoboda) suggesting people tweet in haiku to sixth grade teacher Kevin Hodgson (@dogtrax), linking to a multimedia project he’s creating to celebrate the National Day of Writing.

Oh hopes more people will participate through blog pieces and social media posts using the hashtag. He wants to hear from school librarians in particular: he sees them as a core group thinking broadly about media and literacy, and a community linked to students of all ages. “Librarians have helped me see that video and audio composing is part of being literate today,” he says. “They’re often the ones helping us to expand our definition of writing.”

Regina Mason talks to our teens about her great-great-great-grandfather’s
self-published memoir, Life of William Grimes, the Runway Slave.
Photographs by Michael Lucia

Ten teens, ages 16 to 17, dressed in tan pull-on pants and dark blue sweatshirts with “Alameda County Juvenile Hall” stamped across their chests, are in my library, crowding around me and talking all at once.

“He said he was hit with an electrical cord, but in the book he says it was a snakeskin belt,” says one boy, pouncing on a disparity between what an author told us when he recently visited and what he wrote in his memoir.

“Yeah, and he said he was wearing a black cap, but in the book, he’s wearing an A’s cap,” says another. “There’s like a million things he said that aren’t the same in the book.”

“Liar!” explodes one teen. “Poser,” adds another.

The teens are talking about Street Life, a self-published title by Victor Rios that charts his former life as a gang member in East Oakland, CA. I’m listening to what they’re saying with a serious look on my face and a big grin inside. One of the kids practically listed the page numbers of all of the inconsistencies he found.

“I’m impressed,” I tell them. “You guys are amazing readers. You could be editors! Let’s call him up and see what he says.” They’re stunned as I pick up the phone and reach Rios’s voice mail. “Victor, I have some young men here who have a lot to say.” I share the boys’ concerns and promise them that I’ll let them know when I hear back from him.

The next day they’re playing basketball, when I come in with my cell phone and Rios’s enthusiastic response on my voice mail. About five of them immediately come over when they see me. It’s not lost on me that this conversation is more interesting to them than being out of their cells and shooting hoops.

“What did he say?” asks one of the kids. “She here to tell us what Poser say,” says another, and he calls over someone who’s still playing basketball. Rios’s message explains how difficult it is to remember life’s specifics, especially after a significant amount of time has passed, and how sometimes details in a book may differ from those in an unscripted conversation. He also explains that as a self-published author, he didn’t have the benefit of working with agents, publishers, and editors. I’m not sure if my kids completely buy the explanation, but we have a satisfying discussion about memoirs, memory, trauma, and writing.

The right stuff

I’m always looking for books that my reluctant—and picky—readers will want to read. Since the most common requests are for books about gangs, killings, violence, and sex—and since I work in partnership with both California’s Alameda County Probation and Alameda County Office of Education—it’s a challenge. When Rios’s self-published memoir came across my desk, I ordered 30 copies and set a date for the author, who’s now a sociologist and associate professor of sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, to speak to about half of my 250 African-American and Latino teens.

Frankly, I’m thrilled that they listened to his presentation so attentively and read his book so carefully. I’m also grateful that my teens, who on average read at a fourth-grade level, are engaged, reading, thinking critically, and discussing books. After Rios’s visit, they even talked about tackling his latest book, Punished: Policing the Lives of Black and Latino Boys (New York University Press, 2011), a three-year study of the juvenile justice system.

It’s no secret that street lit is hot, especially books by K’wan, JaQuaris, and Woods. But the vast majority of it is geared toward adults, and it’s too explicit. The teens in Juvenile Hall are state wards, and those of us who work here serve in loco parentis, so I can’t justify or defend those types of books in my library. There are a growing number of street-lit titles for teens, including series such as “Babygirl Daniels” and “Wahida Clark Presents YA,” that I carry and that my teens devour. Because kids can sometimes be in and out of the system for much of their teenage years (due to the system’s massive failures), they eventually start to read while they’re here. And when they do, they read a lot! And then they complain that they’ve read everything in the library. While that’s not exactly true, they have read everything in their narrow, picky zone of what they like to read, as well as what I’ve been able to get them to “give a chance” or “read for me because I want your opinion.”

I feel it’s my responsibility to find more for them.

What kids want

There’s a huge market for autobiographies and biographies of African-American and Latino people who have experienced the streets and the criminal (in)justice system. My teens read biographies by Jimmy Santiago, Luis Rodriguez, Chef Jeff Henderson, Cupcake Brown, and Ishmael Beah, all of whom they’ve also met, and other adult authors. There’s also definitely a demand for self-published memoirs among reluctant readers—teens as well as adults, incarcerated or not. (For some great suggestions, see “Recommended reading,” on the opposite page.) People are reluctant to read for many reasons: some because they’ve never seen themselves reflected in a book and, therefore, don’t connect with the characters; others because they only want to read a certain type of book, such as a “true story.” The genre or type of book is more important to them than skillful editing, perfect pacing, positive reviews, correct spelling, and the rest.

More than 300,000 titles were self-published in 2011, according to R. R. Bowker, so finding self-published memoirs that work isn’t a straightforward process, at least for me. It’s a combination of researching leaders and speakers in the field, finding out if they have a book, searching on Amazon, asking someone who knows someone, authors sending me their books, getting a tip from someone who’s sitting next to me on the bus or at a local bookstore—there are seemingly infinite ways.

My first priority is to find books for my marginalized and, frankly, ostracized community that they can relate to, that inspire them, that reflect their experience in our society. Most important is that the story gets told and heard. I do have standards that, in general, relate to the story and the ability of the author to have some form of reflection. I don’t care as much about how a story is told, or—shocking to many—about grammar, spelling, or lack of editing. Those are details that are extremely important in our white, middle-class publishing community, which places a high value on the written word. Other cultures and communities have an oral tradition and care more about story and communication than precision.

One of the most heated debates on the Young Adult Library Services Association’s Quick Picks Committee in 2009 was over the book Teenage Bluez III (Life Changing Books, 2009). While it contains fantastic stories not found elsewhere and was definitely a “Quick Pick” for my teens and other young people across the country, it didn’t make the list. The primary reason? Misspellings and grammatical problems.

Having worked for many years with teens and adults who haven’t learned the “proper” way to communicate, I’ve had to combat massive amounts of trauma from those who’ve given up and are afraid to write even a sentence for fear of having their poor grammar and spelling judged. Editing has its place after the story is told, I always tell my teens, in hopes that they won’t censor themselves because of a lack of confidence in spelling. It’s the same for books. The basic point of a book—and, indeed, of the written word—is to communicate. Yes, I personally loved reading Lynne Truss’s Eats, Shoots & Leaves (Gotham, 2006), but in this case, the comma really doesn’t matter because even without it almost all of my students would read the title as if the comma were there: that’s their experience. People read books to garner meaning, not to have a grammatical experience. (OK, most people, you word phreaks!)

While the amount of time spent browsing and the payoff of coming across a perfect or even good book isn’t high, you never know when you might find a gem. I came across Jerry McGill’s Dear Marcus: Speaking to the Man Who Shot Me (iUniverse, 2009) and was intrigued before Lorrie Moore wrote about it in May 2011 in the New York Times Book Review, before Spiegel & Grau picked it up, and before I gave it a starred review in SLJ (http://ow.ly/dOlHd).

One of the main downsides to self-published books is that professional journals tend not to review them. Publishers Weekly has a column that reviews 25 such books each quarter (it began in August 2010), but charges a $149 fee for reviews. Other sources that review these books include Kirkus Indie, which charges $400 to $550 to review, and Blue Ink Review, which charges $395 to $495. None of them guarantees a positive review. David Streitfeld just wrote a terrific article about paid reviews in the New York Times: “The Best Books Money Can Buy”. Don’t miss the comments section.

Clearly, traditional publishers do sometimes pick up self-published titles. Dear Marcus is the most lovely example. And in what might be one of the first self-published memoirs, Life of William Grimes, the Runaway Slave, picked up by Oxford University Press and edited by William Andrews and Regina Mason, Mason’s ancestor wrote about his experience as a fugitive slave in 1825—before Frederick Douglass.

Librarians are in a unique position, and it’s up to us to encourage our administrators to purchase books through nontraditional distribution channels. Take a chance on an author whom your patrons might love to meet and who they feel inspired by. Librarians are the ultimate in terms of our capacity for unbiased professional reviews. I do believe it’s up to us to research and provide books for the public—and not just the middle-class, mainstream public.

Amy Cheney is a librarian at the Alameda County Juvenile Hall in San Leandro, CA.

Illustration by Janet Hamlin

Over the past five years, I’ve returned to the New York neighborhood in which I met the children whom I first described in Savage Inequalities, Amazing Grace, and other books I published in the 1990s. The neighborhood is called Mott Haven. It’s the poorest section in all of the South Bronx, which is the poorest Congressional district in America.

I wanted to answer the questions many readers ask: What happened to these children? How many were unable to prevail against the obstacles they faced? How many have survived? And, among the ones who did survive, what were the ingredients of character—and what were the opportunities provided by their schools—that made it possible for them to win some glorious and unexpected victories?

Not surprisingly, easy access to good books—and, more to the point, a plentitude of books to satisfy the curiosities and stir the latent interests of the very wide variety of children that I met—turned out to be decisive. And this, of course, is where libraries come in.

In my new book, Fire in the Ashes, I catch up with all those kids, many of whom I came to know when they were only six or eight years old. They talked to me about the struggles they went through, which were often hardest in their adolescent years. Most are in their twenties now. As they look back on their formative years, they speak repeatedly of books that first awakened their appetite for reading—by which I mean real books, books that children read for pleasure, as opposed to the mind-dulling textbooks and those dreadful pit-pat phonics books, “aligned,” as the experts compulsively remind us, with state examinations. Most of the kids found those books immaculately boring.

No matter their level of education, the most successful of these children had, I think, much better taste than those adults who set the rigid standards that have been imposed upon our public schools (and with the most severity, upon our inner-city schools)—standards that require emotionless and robotic modes of learning but don’t open children’s minds to our culture’s treasures.

These kids instinctively rebelled against the narrow test-prep regimen that, even before No Child Left Behind, had started crowding out a love of learning for its own sake. Few of them did well on state-imposed exams, but many read voraciously, and became proficient writers as a consequence; the books they loved, however, weren’t the ones mandated by the number crunchers who were caught up in the labyrinth of the testing mania.

In their early years, many tell me, they were drawn into a love of reading by the soft and tender writings and lovely drawings, so much like pastel tapestries, of one of the greatest and most subtle children’s authors of our time, Eric Carle. (They weren’t attracted to Dr. Seuss. Their preference was for beauty over cleverness.) Before long, those kids who were the most exploratory started reading charmingly enticing books like Kevin Henkes’s Lilly’s Purple Plastic Purse and, a few years after that, Lois Lowry’s beautifully transcendent works, including Gathering Blue, which remains a favorite among many of those children to this day.

One of the kids who captured my attention from the start, to whom I’ve given the pseudonym of Jeremy in my latest book, told me he was writing his “first novel” at 13, and that he was “circling” Charles Dickens, but wasn’t certain he was “ready for him yet.” I thought he was. So he made a deal with me. He would read A Tale of Two Cities if I would read Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula. We both kept our promises. He conceded later that he got the best part of that bargain.

His favorite author at that age was Edgar Allan Poe. He loved the narrative poem “The Raven” and quoted from it whimsically and playfully. When a large bird flew above our heads one day, he pretended to be frightened. “Quoth the Raven, ‘Nevermore,’” he solemnly intoned. He also liked Poe’s stories. He told me the plot of “The Tell-tale Heart” and was astonished to hear I’d never read it.

Where did Jeremy find these books? I wish I could say he found them in his middle school’s library, but this, alas, was not the case. His middle school, underfunded as many inner-city schools are, had nothing that a good suburban school would consider a real library. (This governmental parsimony at the cost of libraries is even more the case today, in the wake of two recessions, when one of the first steps taken by our cash-strapped inner-city schools is to lay off school librarians.)

Jeremy found the books he loved, not in a school library, but—he was blessed in this respect—in the private library of a neighborhood poet, who recognized his special gifts and let him dig into the books that filled his living-room shelves, from floor to ceiling. The poet tempted Jeremy, moreover, to go beyond what his school, on the basis of his test results alone, regarded as his “modest reading level” by introducing him to snippets of the poet’s favorite writers, which included British authors as imposing as John Milton.

Most of the other kids weren’t so lucky. A few of them attended schools that had decent libraries and full-time librarians. Others were fortunate enough, after slogging through the literary wastelands of their mediocre middle schools, to win scholarships to good New England boarding schools in their later secondary years. These were schools where rich and ample libraries were viewed as indispensable and were also pleasant and inviting places with soft lighting, comfortable chairs, and little nooks and crannies where a student might curl up at one end of a sofa and delve into a book he liked for hours.

Jeremy was one of those who got into this kind of school in his 10th-grade year. The first close friend he made there, a talented woman with a gift for reaching out to adolescents, was the school librarian. Before long, he was working part time as one of her assistants.

By this point, he was reading works by John Keats and William Wordsworth, Robert Browning, Christopher Marlowe, John Donne, and the 17th-century metaphysical poets. In the following years, he read the plays of Strindberg, Ibsen, and O’Neill, after having read O’Neill’s great predecessors in the Greek tragedians. In his senior year, he galloped through Shakespeare’s plays, and he questioned me a lot and teased me when he came upon a character I’d forgotten.

“You wrote your college thesis about Shakespeare, and you don’t remember Bolingbroke?”—or Falstaff, or whomever it might be.

He went on to a first-rate college, not the kind that has now replaced the arts and letters with “practical” job training, which is too often deemed to be appropriate for youngsters who have grown up in the ghetto. He immersed himself, not in the utilitarian, but in what he loved the most. Literature and the modern theater was his field of concentration.

This was a boy who hated tests in public school and managed to fail most of them. A neighborhood poet and a school librarian and, later, the Barnes & Noble in New York’s Union Square, which he liked to frequent, were Jeremy’s salvation.

What does this story and the others in my new book tell us about libraries and, in particular, those within our public schools?

First of all, no matter what the economic ups and downs may be at any given moment, public school libraries in destitute communities need not just sufficient but extravagant funding. If there’s a single thing our state and federal governments could do to stir up a love of learning in our poorest children, it would be to take a good big chunk of the massive sum of money that’s now being wasted on the testing industry and use it, instead, to flood our students’ lives with the joys and mysteries of authentic culture—and not only Western culture but, in the case of, for instance, Hispanic children, their culture, too.

I don’t mean to suggest that history or science should be shortchanged, or books of practicality, or writings that are simply fun for kids to read even if they have no literary value. But if we care about the children of the poor as much as our own children, we ought to emphasize the highest possible aesthetics. Kids who live in grim and dreary neighborhoods have an even greater need for all that can endow their minds with grandeur than children who are privileged enough to live in grand and lovely places. Exalt their minds. Don’t cheat them with banalities that simply “keep them reading.” I can hear a lot of little girls in fifth grade screaming at me when I say this, but I still feel a pang of sadness about kids who grew up on “The Baby-Sitters Club” series but to whom no one ever introduced The Secret Garden.

This brings me to librarians again. If I had the power, I’d redirect another big chunk of the money that’s now enriching testing corporations and make certain that every inner-city school has its own full-time librarian, and one whose passion about books is contagiously exciting to young people. Jeremy shouldn’t have had to go to an affluent school to find a sensitive librarian who was paid enough and given the resources to spend hours of her time leading him to books, and tempting him with others, that didn’t simply give him data for his assignments, but expanded his horizons by nourishing his literary yearnings. School librarians like that woman would be celebrated in a wise society, and no myopic politician with a fiscal knife in hand would dare say they’re extraneous to learning.

Finally, I think school libraries ought to be delightful and congenial places. I wish that we could get rid of those plastic chairs and overhead fluorescent lights that make too many of these rooms in low-funded schools about as intimate as Walmart. School libraries for wealthy children frequently resemble living rooms. When I walk into the libraries of inner-city schools and see a group of children filing in beside me, I often get the sense of something “dutiful” about it all instead of something joyful and exalting. I wish the kids could sit at maple tables with reading lamps that have lampshades made from handsome fabrics. I wish the space were beautiful. If we think of libraries as places where we give our kids a feast of learning, the place we serve that feast should be worthy of our offerings.

I’ve said this before to school librarians, and recently to a convocation of school architects: aesthetics count. Beautiful surroundings refine the tastes of children. Flat and mechanistic settings bleach out their mentalities.

“Well, of course,” the bureaucrats will say (they’ve said this of me many times before), “Jonathan’s a dreamer. He thinks that poor kids ought to get what the sons of presidents and daughters of important business leaders get when they go to private schools like Andover and Exeter. He thinks that inner-city kids deserve that kind of money. He thinks that they’ll be grateful for those maple tables. He thinks they’ll dig into those books and be excited by the opportunity to read them.”

It’s true. That’s exactly what I feel. I don’t think this nation plans to give that kind of opportunity to more than a handful of the children of poor people at any time in the near future. It would take a sweeping change of attitude about potential, and too easily unobserved precocity, among the children who are viewed today as outcasts of American society. It’s just a dream, and I frankly doubt that I will see it realized in my lifetime. Still, I like to fantasize that someday we will turn that dream into reality.

Jonathan Kozol’s new book , Fire in the Ashes: Twenty-Five Years Among the Poorest Children in America, will be published by Crown on August 28 .