Who's in your books? And what are they doing?

Maybe you've heard about the We Need Diverse Books movement that is making waves on Tumblr, Twitter and Facebook? It was triggered in part by a report from the Cooperative Children's Book Center on the consistent lack of ethnic diversity in fiction for young people.

Much has been written on why it's important that all children be able to see themselves - and others - reflected in books. I particularly like Christopher Myers' take on books as maps that are supposed to open up worlds of "boundless imagination" and yet, "children of color remain outside the boundaries of imagination...at best background characters, and more often than not absent."

When was the last time you read a book for young people in which a child of color entered a fantasy world or solved a mystery? A book in which ethnic differences - specifically problems relating to them - weren't the primary reason for minority characters' existence?

Every year from the first week of school until winter break we focus in-depth on one cultural group during our K-3 storytimes. Instead of a scattershot approach, this focus gives students a deeper understanding of the region or culture. Frequently referring to maps, we cover folklore, nonfiction and fiction. In the past we have covered the Celtic countries, Latin America and Korea, among other locations.

A major goal of this unit is also to challenge stereotypes. For example, one year we focused on contemporary Native Americans - since so many children's books write as if Native peoples existed only in the distant past - and read books recommended in A Broken Flute: The Native Experience in Books for Children for not being exoticizing or exploitative.

This year we are looking at African American heritage - from cherished folktales to stories of modern families who are recent immigrants. Although the history of slavery and the Civil Rights movement is very important, an overwhelming percentage of picture books about African Americans portray victims of oppression or focus heavily on a few well-known heroes. What kind of mirror does this hold up to young readers? And what map does it set down before them? 

I deliberately chose books that portray regular, happy families doing what regular, happy families do. We also read some set during the past in which ordinary African Americans show a sense of agency, rather than being either great heroes or downtrodden victims.


My hope is that by shifting the balance of the content of the books we expose children to, we can also shift some of their internal images and expectations.

Want to learn more? Come to the Parent Association meeting on December 5th, where I'll be talking about my summer grant in which I overhauled the book sets we use at our school! I'll also talk about how you can consider the books you read with or give to your children (of all ages) and the messages they may be sending.

Music, memories & fun: a day with John McCutcheon

On October 9th we welcomed folk music legend, author and storyteller John McCutcheon to our school! To prepare for his visit we read his books and of course listened to his songs – in the library learning commons, art, PE and homerooms. In music, students learned to sing his classic Kindergarten Wall, as well as studying some of the more unusual instruments he plays, such as the autoharp and hammer dulcimer.

John exposed our students to traditional American music that was new to many of them. He also described the origins of the instruments he played - did you know that the banjo came from Africa?

Here is John showing K-2 students how to play the world's oldest instrument: your own body! Together they created a rainstorm!

And here he is performing "How Can I Keep from Singing?", a lovely Quaker hymn, with a talented group of 4th graders who rehearsed with our science teacher, Mr. Hollinger!

Another way we prepared for John's visit was by learning about historical connections to his music. Many classes heard Woody Guthrie: Poet of the People by Bonnie Christensen and John Henry by Julius Lester. They were then better prepared to appreciate John’s performances of “This Land Is Your Land” and “John Henry”!

I was impressed at how even as young as 2nd and 3rd grade, students were able to articulate why the story of John Henry would still resonate with us – how the drama (and anxiety) of human vs machine would feel as relevant in the computer age as it did when it was about steam drills. We also read other tall tales, exploring this uniquely American type of story and its place in US history.

In 4th grade we dove a little deeper into the mystery of John Henry – the subject of many folk songs, now proven by William & Mary historian Scott Reynolds Nelson to have been an actual person. I strongly recommend both his adult and young readers’ books that explain his groundbreaking research in a highly engaging way! They shed light on a forgotten group of people and their valuable contributions to the nation.

Before embarking on reading Ain’t Nothing but a Man, students wrote down what they know about how historians work and what they would like to know. We wrapped up our unit as they embarked on the mystery genre in Language Arts, so they were quick to draw parallels with the huge element of detective work in history, reflecting that, historians “have to look very closely at clues,” “keep on trying to find clues sometimes for years,” and that they “go places to find clues.” This last point was very surprising to many who imagined historians trapped among piles of dusty books. I am hopeful that this will plant in students a seed of love for the wonder that is history!

Thank you, John McCutcheon, for your beautiful performances and for inspiring such a rich range of wonderful related activities for us to explore!

Scientists in the Field - and in the Learning Commons!

The last project 4th graders did before summer vacation helped them practice several crucial skills they would need for middle school: cooperating in a group, comprehending nonfiction, and paraphrasing information in one's own words.

They took books from the fantastic Scientists in the Field series that shows the exciting work real-life scientists do, and adapted them for younger readers.

Working in groups of 3, 4th graders took on the roles of author, illustrator and editor. Together each group chose a book and read it, took notes, determined the most important facts to convey, coordinated text with illustrations, and produced lovely books that we spiral bound and gave to Mr. Hollinger to keep in the science room as a resource! 

Understanding nonfiction requires readers to notice details, make connections and exert sustained attention in a different way than fiction reading does. Sometimes avid fiction readers struggle with the transition to middle school-level nonfiction reading expectations. This new site, The Nonfiction Minute, is a fun and stimulating way to expose your student to more nonfiction, support their comprehension skills and whet their appetite for nonfiction reading.

One of the site's founders is David Schwartz, the math and science author who entertained us last year! Another is Roxie Munro, creator of many clever, interactive books and apps; her Ecomazes, very popular with our students, was a Smithsonian "Best Science Book" pick!

Here are some more samples of the great work our 4th graders produced:

Front cover

Back cover!

Summer reading lists!

Here are some great sites to get you started with summer reading!

***Remember that we have eBooks available through our catalog, as well as the free summer trial of the EBSCO K-8 eBook collection. Directions for accessing both are on the Activity Stream on MyOWS.***

KCLS Summer Learning site

A Diverse #SummerReading List For Kids

K-8 Summer Reading Lists from The Association for Library Service to Children (from last year, but still great!)

New York Public Library’s Summer Reading Lists for all ages

As always, Goodreads - a social networking site for readers - is a fantastic place to get reading suggestions. My own Goodreads page has over 1000 books sorted by genre, themes, recommended age, etc.

Looking forward to seeing you in September! Have a fun and safe summer filled with great books!

5th graders help make the web less biased!

During 5th grade information literacy classes, students learned about The Geographically Uneven Coverage of Wikipedia. As the Oxford University researchers wrote, after examining "44 language versions" of Wikipedia, they found that, "slightly more than half of the global total of 3,336,473 articles are about places, events and people... occupying only about 2.5% of the world’s land area."

They also read and discussed, Define Gender Gap? Look Up Wikipedia’s Contributor List, which described how "Wikipedia’s contributor base... was barely 13 percent women" and how "the gender disparity often shows up in terms of emphasis" with traditionally female topics getting far less attention.

I challenged students to explain why we should care and got some great answers. In their own words, a biased resource:

• lets people down when they need information because it's incomplete
• isn't good for the social environment (building respect between people from different groups)
• is unfair - we should have respect for the importance of all topics regardless of gender and geography
• is wrong because people's interests aren't limited by gender

The next step was that they had to come up with a topic that would help correct one or both biases - geographic and gender - for which there was no article or only a stub (something too short) in Simple English Wikipedia. This is the version of Wikipedia for younger readers and English language learners.

Next they researched their topic using high quality sources, wrote articles, and created proper citations. For our final class they got to read and comment on one another's work.

I hope you'll take the time to click on a few of the links below and appreciate all their hard work! They chose a great range of interesting subjects and have the satisfaction of knowing that they've helped to make Wikipedia a bit less biased.

Original articles by our 5th graders:
Charlie - Albert Pujols
Elina – Marjane Satrapi
Finn - Aztec mythology
Ishan – Wilma Rudolph
Katherine - Gracie Gold
Logan - Ruby Bridges
Lucy - Mikaela Shiffrin
Nate - Malagasy language
Quincy - Kazu Kibuishi
Sage – Alfredo Stroessner
Sofia – Sharon Creech
Stella - Misty May-Treanor
Thomas - Jean Fritz
Tyler – Iditarod

Articles our students added to:
Adam – Diego Maradona
Bram – David Ben-Gurion
Olivia - Eartha Kitt
Samantha - Barbara Ann Scott
Sena – Lionel Messi 
Sydney - Shel Silverstein

Get your poem into a bus!

Feel inspired to write a poem? If so, you can enter it in the Poetry on Buses competition sponsored by King County Metro and 4Culture. Some of our students' artwork will appear on local bus shelters - let's see if we can get some of our writing inside the buses as well!

Poems must be 50 words or less on the topic of "home." There is a special category for poets under 18. The deadline is June 30th!

Middle schoolers' six-word memoirs

Every month I run a fun online contest for middle school students. It's a way to keep older students - so busy with homework and extracurriculars - connected to the Library Learning Commons. During April and May, the challenge was to write a six-word memoir. Below are a few of the particularly striking ones that I submitted to SMITH magazine's six-word memoir site for schools. Don't we have some talented students?