Literacy Now

I can clearly remember being in high school and dragging my inchworm-green, spotted-with-silver duct tape bean bag chair out the window of my bedroom and onto the roof of the front porch. Like a bird in a nest, I sat there, head tilted up to the stars, so full of yearning that I can still recall the sensation today.

What I longed for was far less specific than being an author—I simply wanted to be somebody. I wanted to matter in this world. I longed to make a difference. I ached to have an impact on others the same way my heroes had had on me. And I can still feel the sensation of running through a list in my head. What things might I be good at? What talents or traits did I have that would put me within shouting distance of my heroes—people like Anne Frank, Helen Keller, Annie Sullivan, Lois Lowry, Karen Carpenter, the POW's from Vietnam, Gandhi?

Thoughts flew through my mind and when I was done with the self-analysis, I crumbled like a saltine cracker in the fist of a toddler. I had nothing to offer the world that would ever fill the yearning that I felt inside. Right then I knew that I would never be somebody and that revelation defined me for almost the next twenty years of my life.

As you might suspect, two decades ago, I had only touched the surface of my own potential. But I didn't know that then.

Delving deeper has been a journey. The need to stretch and venture outside of my box has mostly been forced upon me by circumstance, but since I'm a better me than I was at seventeen, I'm going to cut myself some slack and give myself a little credit for finally deciding to grow. And I've discovered some amazing things along the way. All of my heroes were ordinary people just like me. What made them exceptional was their heart, their tenacity, their need to defy adversity, their desire to grow. They were not people immune to fear; they were people who acted bravely in spite of it.

It finally occurred to me that they did not wake up one morning, prepared to change the world, but rather they rose to their own occasion. In realizing this, a seed of hope was planted. Perhaps if I worked on myself hard enough—there really would be something inside of me to offer the world. Something amazing.

It also occurred to me that the things we push away and hide, because they make us feel different, are likely to be our biggest gifts when we decide it's time to honor who we are. It was this revelation that made me realize I have a voice, and if I continue to grow, someday that voice might be big enough to fill the spaces of my yearning.

I've discovered that two very powerful things happen when people speak their truth. Honest words have the ability to create amazingly intense connections between people, but they also have the power to illicit fear. Fortunately this is an exercise in intermittent reinforcement. Thank goodness for the highs that come with those wonderful connections—without them I don't know who would have the courage to keep putting their naked, vulnerable parts out in the world. I know that every time I run into someone who guts me with just a few sharp, well-placed words, it makes me want to curl up like an armadillo.

But here's the thing—I've had a taste of what it feels like to be somebody. I've had a little bit of practice at rising to my own occasion. I no longer crumble as easily as I used to. And I have it in my mind that the people I write for are staring at the same stars that I did. They are filled with the same longing to be somebody. And more important than anything else, I write the words that the seventeen-year-old me needed to hear. Yes, it’s too late to change her journey—but it just might make a difference for the company she keeps.

Kimberly Sabatini is a former Special Education Teacher who is now a stay-at-home mom and a part-time dance instructor for three and four year olds. She lives in New York’s Hudson Valley with her husband and three boys. Kimberly writes Young Adult fiction and is represented by Michelle Wolfson of Wolfson Literary Agency. Her debut novel, TOUCHING THE SURFACE (Simon Pulse, 2012), was released yesterday.



In Other Words: Sometimes, Reading Isn’t about Reading at All

In Other Words: Emily Jenkins (Invisible Inkling series) Finds Her Protagonist

This post originally appeared on the Engage/Teacher to Teacher blog in October 2011.

October has always had a certain charged energy for me. It’s a month of change and of hidden things. In a New England October, change is right in your face; we vault from shorts weather and a vivid re-greening after August’s heat to a riot of colored leaves, and from there to bare branches poking at a gray sky.

The beginning of October is summer; the end is nearly winter. It’s a condensed soup of seasons. There’s something which awakens you, makes you alert, the way the shift of wind before a thunderstorm does. Maybe this is the instinct of ancient humans who had better have plenty of food stored away by now, or be on their way to warmer places.

But for me, all through the month, October’s change and alertness are tuned to the holiday of hidden things: Halloween.

When I was a boy, we plotted our Halloween costumes for weeks—how do you build an extra set of arms that will move along with your real ones? Can I walk three miles on homemade stilts? Does this look scary? Friends competed to come up with the most creative costumes—ones that would completely erase their identities. Look—is that an old man? No, it’s Tom! The more wildly creative you were with your costume, the better.

Halloween night was the rustle of frost-crisped leaves underfoot in the dark, our faces damp with hot breath behind masks, and tiny eyeholes which limited our sight. It was a swinging, candy-heavy pillowcase—not a paper bag, because dew melted the bottoms of paper bags as we crossed dark yards to get to the next pool of light at the next front door. Then we’d have to fish around in cold, wet leaves for all of our fallen treasure, and we knew we’d miss some.

Halloween was the uneasy moment of meeting a group of strange and unearthly characters out on the road somewhere, away from the safety of our homes, with each group asking the other, “Who is that?” We’d laugh with relief when we found out: It’s just them.

Halloween seemed to be a kind of demarcation line between exciting things and dreary things. The Jack o’ Lantern morphed from a toasty-smelling fantasy one night to a slimy, sagging wreck the next.

After Halloween came November, gray November. As squirrels fabricated masses of leaves high in trees in which to over-winter; we went indoors. There was a feeling of settling in for the cold season, of digging in to our own burrows. Cold nights and heavy blankets. Indoors to me also meant burrowing farther into my own thoughts. It was a nesting time, a settling in time—and a settling in to what?

A good book, a good story to think about, and time to sketch and write.

Like most children, I liked finding places to hide: a makeshift fort built of couch cushions and sheets, a fantastic new structure, or the tight space under the bed. I burrowed in my bedroom closet, dug down deep into piles of pokey-cornered toys, stuffed animals and clothing. I often took a book with me. In these hiding places, nobody knew where I was. By myself alone, there were no distractions, no parents asking about my day, nobody trying to get me to do something. I was free to disappear between the covers of the book into the story and explore by myself. Hiding with a book is ownership of that book—my place, my book.

The siren calls of the computer, television, iPod, and iPhone has been discussed to death, and hiding away from them is hard. But how can you explore Narnia while car ads blare at you? Who can focus on learning Quidditch while the computer or cell phone bings to tell you a message has arrived? A trip into a book is usually a solitary journey, and having a solitary place to read seems to make the crossing over into another world that much easier.

So it behooves us to let kids read where they want to. Whether it’s on the floor, hanging over the side of the bed upside down, blood rushing to their faces, or curled up in a cardboard box with a book. My local elementary school library has fostered the hide-and-read urge by building a wall with nooks or cells in it, and students can climb inside to read. It’s a great way to encourage reluctant readers. You don’t get to go into the wall unless you take a book with you.

As adults, I think it’s still important to dedicate some space, away from life’s distracting things, only for reading. Just as when we were kids, a special reading place makes our transition into a story easier. We can slip lightly between two realities, and join the book’s characters as an invisible companion in their adventures. Nobody in that place knows who we are, or even that we’re there with them. It’s kind of like the freedom of running through the night with a bag of candy in your hand.

But unlike Halloween, reading’s charged magical energy can continue all year long.

Brian Lies is the award-winning author-illustrator of the New York Times bestsellers BATS AT THE BEACH, BATS AT THE LIBRARY, and BATS AT THE BALLGAME. In addition, he has written and illustrated more than twenty books for children. Visit him online at www.brianlies.com.

A few years back, I found myself in a small town in Illinois, visiting an elementary school in which every single student, from the kindergartners to the fifth-graders, had read my first novel, THE THING ABOUT GEORGIE. As the librarian shuttled me through the hallways early that morning to prepare for my first presentation, I noticed an amusing trend.

One after the other, the students I passed on their way to their classrooms—children who had clearly been told repeatedly that “The Author” would be visiting their school that very day—stared at me, the stranger in their school carrying her large cup of coffee, and whispered to one another about whether or not I might be Her. And without fail, one by one, each group of students decided that, nope, I wasn’t it. Couldn’t be. Even if I did sort of look like the lady on the back of the book.

Why, you wonder? How could hundreds of children independently come to the same faulty conclusion, based on pretty much zero evidence? Easy: Because Georgie, the main character in my novel, was a dwarf, and I (at 5’10’’ without heels) clearly was not.

This sort of thing happens nearly every time I visit a school to talk about THE THING ABOUT GEORGIE, and it never fails to make me laugh. Because, of course I don’t need to be a dwarf to write about someone (a boy, at that!) with dwarfism. I rely on things like research, and introspection, and my own imagination to make a character very different from myself come to life. As an author, that concept seems very clear.

But as a reader, well, I must admit I often find myself making the same assumptions about authors and their protagonists. Every time I reread THE GREAT GILLY HOPKINS, I want to believe that Katherine Paterson must have some of Gilly’s stubborn spark in her, because otherwise how could she write the character so brilliantly? And Gary D. Schmidt clearly had a bit of a troubled childhood, and found a teacher who helped turn him around, or how else could OKAY FOR NOW’s Doug Swieteck feel so real? And don’t even get me started on Harper Lee and Scout Finch…

Obviously, I’m aware that these are works of fiction, whose plots and settings and details have been carefully crafted for the sake of good storytelling. And I understand that even in autobiographical novels, such as TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD, no fictional character can be an exact representation of the author. Thoughts, feelings, events, and beliefs must all be tweaked and manipulated to work within the larger whole of a protagonist’s story.

But when I’m inside a delicious novel, none of these truths about crafting fiction seem to matter. When I’m reading a story—a really, really good one—and connecting deeply with a character, it feels like there’s absolutely no way the writer could have created someone so real, so affecting, if he didn’t know his subject, well, personally.

As readers, we develop meaningful bonds with our favorite protagonists. We read as the main character—we walk around in his shoes, see the world from her eyes, for those few hundred pages until the story ends. We cheer when our hero achieves a great victory, and swoon when the heroine finds her true love, and weep when our now dear friends receive some injustice. When a character with whom I feel a bond makes a decision that I know will ultimately spell disaster, I am quite literally angry with him. “How could you do that to yourself?” I want to shout through the pages—when perhaps what I really mean is: “How could you do that to me?” One need only poke a head inside the still-raging debate over the romantic choices of Bella Swan or Katniss Everdeen to understand that readers—passionate, vocal, occasionally crazed readers—tend not to form opinions about potential love interests based on which matches would be right for the character herself, but rather on their own personal ideals (for the record: Team Jacob, Team Gale, no contest).

As an author, however, I don’t write with that sort of fierce connection to my characters. Oh, I adore them. I find them at turns interesting, frustrating, and downright curious. But I don’t write as them. Even while working on my third novel, UMBRELLA SUMMER—my only book to date inspired by events in my childhood—I never once felt that the protagonist was a representation of me. In that novel, the main character, ten-year-old Annie Richards, has developed a rather extreme hypochondria, and worries in turn about everything from smallpox to gangrene to runaway zoo animals, and at one point even suggests that her best friend’s hamster might have seasonal affective disorder. To put it quite simply, Annie is a worrywart.

I, like Annie, was a bit of a hypochondriac when I was a child. And, like Annie, my hypochondria stemmed from a traumatic experience. When I was nine years old, my older brother suffered severe kidney failure, and spent about a month in the hospital, close to death, until he ultimately recovered. (At this point in the story I always feel the need to let people know that my brother, unlike Annie’s in the novel, survived his illness, and is now a healthy adult.) But my hypochondria took a very different form than Annie’s, as did my path to wellness. And while I was mostly a shy, straight-A type at that age, Annie’s character is much more boisterous, and impetuous than I could ever dream of being. (At one point in the novel, infuriated with her former best friend’s lack of understanding, Annie makes the curious decision to hose down her entire Junior Sunbird troop at their annual Fourth of July car wash fundraiser.) So really, despite our shared experiences, it feels like quite a stretch to say that the character of Annie and I are much of anything alike at all.

However, if a person’s life could be said to have themes, in the way a novel does, Annie and I would share a big one: The realization that grief and worry are no substitute for a life well lived. So in that regard we are extremely similar. So too do the themes of my other protagonists’ stories mesh with mine. Like Kansas and Francine (the dual protagonists of my most recent novel, DOUBLE DOG DARE, who simultaneously battle in a high-stakes dare war and attempt to cope with the divorces of their respective parents), I have struggled to make sense of an occasionally unfair hand I’ve been dealt. And even like Georgie, the ten-year-old dwarf from THE THING ABOUT GEORGIE, I have in my own way felt out of place in the world.

I once had a student ask me, during a school visit, if I ever felt guilty for putting my characters in bad situations. And my answer surprised even me a little: No, not in the slightest. In fact, I like putting my characters in bad situations, because conflict is the root of good story, and we can’t learn anything about a character at all if we don’t see what she’ll do when faced with real challenge. So I don’t need to write a character who would only do the things I would do, or who only holds beliefs I hold, because I already know how that character’s story would turn out (and quite frankly, it would be a fairly dull read). I enjoy exploring new characters, foreign ones, and seeing what they will do and say and think.

Really, it’s only after a story is finished—written, rewritten, edited, copyedited, and published—that I tend to see myself in it. At that point I begin to discern, bit by tiny bit, which aspects of the character were pulled from my own personality, and which struggles, hopes, and worries we share. Because, yes, there is quite a bit of me in every single character I write, good or bad. Girl or boy. Dwarf or hypochondriac. But perhaps the most important skill a writer can have is to blindfold herself to those similarities, and to write from imagination—even if what she is imagining turns out to be nothing more than a different version of herself.

Lisa Graff grew up in a small California ski resort town. She earned a degree at UCLA and went on to receive an MFA in writing for children from the New School in New York. She is the author of THE LIFE AND CRIMES OF BERNETTA WALLFLOWER and THE THING ABOUT GEORGIE, which was named to nine state reading lists. Her most recent novel is DOUBLE DOG DARE.



In Other Words: Emily Jenkins (Invisible Inkling series) Finds Her Protagonist

Beyond the Notebook: Interviewing Paul Bunyan with David L. Harrison

In September of 2011, Lesley Morrow wrote the following post that analyzes and asks questions about six primary covered by the Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts. The response was overwhelming; nearly 9,000 people worldwide not only read this past IRA president’s words, they talked back.

Last week, IRA issued its Literacy Implementation Guidance for the ELA Common Core State Standards. So, we thought it was the perfect time to give this post a second look. We hope you do, too.

The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) are an attempt to coordinate the education of the children the United States. So many families move from one place to another that we need continuity in the teaching of reading throughout the country. The CCSS raise questions of concern that deal with how to implement them and are their goals really the right goals for the children we teach.

One of the elements I like very much about these standards is that they are manageable. They don’t involve a list of hundreds of skills to acquire in one school year. The standards are like a spiral staircase. That is, a standard in third grade builds on the same one in second, first and kindergarten. You can see a definitive continuum. Skills and strategies are repeated but at a more complex level as one goes up the grades.

The ultimate goal of these standards is for students to become critical thinkers about what they read. Text becomes more complex and therefore the child is asked to engage in higher order thinking. The standards ask that the teacher expose children to varied types of text with equal emphasis on informational literature, and narrative literature. The standards guide children to read magazines, poetry, novels, newspapers, and more.

The CCSS are also intended to help children learn information and increase their vocabulary in many areas of the curriculum. To do this, the standards put an emphasis on integrating the use of literacy strategies into content areas such as social studies and science. Using themes for learning will help to achieve that goal. The standards also emphasize the need to be literate with technology.

Although there aren’t any Pre-K national standards just yet, I believe there will be. Many states have Pre-K standards for literacy already. Therefore, it is important to include Pre-K in the discussion of the CCSS. At this time, we can adjust them for four-year-olds.

Most importantly, the standards suggest that every teacher is a teacher of reading and writing. That is, every teacher is teaching reading and writing whether it is during language arts, science or social studies.

The standards discuss six areas which include (1) Narrative Literature and (2) Informational Literature. In each of these two standards there are anchor standards that are the same and they include: Key Ideas and Details, Crafted Structure, Integration of Knowledge and Ideas, Range of Reading, and Level of Text Complexity.

The next major heading is (3) Foundational Skills. The anchor standards in this area are Print Concepts, Phonological Awareness, Phonics, Word Recognition, and Fluency for Kindergarten through Grade 2. In Grades 3 to 5, they are Phonics, Word Recognition, and Fluency.

Writing is given a prominent spot in these standards. (4) Writing is thought about carefully and given the importance it should have. In Writing, the anchor standards are Text Types and Purposes, Production and Distribution of Writing, Research to Build and Present Knowledge, and Range of Writing.

The next standard is (5) Speaking and Listening; the anchor standards in this category are Comprehension and Collaboration, and Presentation of knowledge and Ideas.

The final standard is (6) Language, and the anchor standards are Conventions of Standard English, Knowledge of Language and Vocabulary Acquisition.

Based on what has been discussed so far, and the manner and order in which the standards are listed in the document, the skills in Narrative and Informational Literature, which focuses on comprehension, is emphasized. Foundational skills such as phonological awareness and phonics have been emphasized for early literacy as coming before comprehension in the past, but the opposite is listed here. This is not a bad thing but one hopes that the instruction needed in phonics will continue.

Writing is given a prominent spot in these standards and is finally getting the emphasis it should receive. The last two standards, Speaking and Listening and Language don’t seem to get the emphasis I think they should have. Oral language is an important skill our children need, and vocabulary is crucial to success in comprehension, yet it’s listed all the way at the end.

What many states are doing at this time is looking at their own standards and comparing them to the CCSS to see how they match. They are finding that their own state standards have many more required specific skills to learn, whereas the CCSS are more interested in depth rather than breadth. I am very much in favor of the fact that the CCSS are not as packed with an enormous numbers of skills that can’t be accomplished. Teachers and children are overwhelmed about what they need to teach and learn in a given year and most children aren’t given the time to really learn them all. The CCSS have a spiral effect and build on fewer skills but over a longer period. The same skill however requires more complex thinking as it goes up the grades. For example in writing under “Anchor Standard Research to Build and Present Knowledge,” one of the kindergarten skills is:

a. With guidance and support from adults, recall information from experiences or gather information from provided sources to answer a question.

The exact same skill is listed for first grade:

b. With guidance and support from adults, recall information from experiences or gather information from provided sources to answer a question.

In grade two this standard is to:

c. Recall information from experiences or gather information from provided sources to answer a question.

The only difference here is that it does not involve guidance and support from an adult. For third grade it is:

d. Recall information from experiences or gather information from print and digital sources; take brief notes on sources and sort evidence into provided categories.

For fourth grade:

e. Recall information from experiences or gather information from print and digital sources; take brief notes on sources; take notes and categorize information, and provide a list of sources.

For the fifth grade it is:

f. Recall information from experiences or gather information from print and digital sources; take brief notes on sources; summarize or paraphrase information in notes and finished work, and provide a list of sources.

You can see the continuity between grades and the addition of one more element that makes the task a bit more complex but with time to keep practicing the task.

There are suggestions for creating units of study in social studies and science that include the CCSS as well as the content in these areas. This is an important idea but one that will require teachers to be engaged in professional development to learn how to do it. If this is done then reading will be taught all day long in school, which is a necessity. Reading is a skill, not a content area. When we read we can learn information from other fields.

The question that arises in my mind is this: should the content such as social studies and science be a part of the language arts block when explicit literacy instruction takes place especially in the early childhood grades? When reading in small homogeneous groups for skill development, should there be little books about a science theme such as hurricanes or volcanoes, and different levels of little books be created for the different achievement groups? On one hand it would give a purpose for reading. On the other hand, one might argue that it will detract from the explicit instruction.

My other question has to do with complexity of text. How complex should we require texts for children to be so they are considered proficient and fluent readers? How complex should we require texts for children to be so they are considered ready for college or to pursue a career that doesn’t require college?

In the previous paragraphs, I ask questions to which I don’t know the answers. I do believe that we are dissecting reading into too many skills and we need to select the precious few we really need. Sometimes less is more. Being able to do fewer skills proficiently might be better than doing more but not doing them very well. I do feel strongly that reading and writing need to be emphasized all day long in school through content areas, as it is the only way our children will become critical readers.

Lesley Mandel Morrow holds the rank of Professor II at Rutgers University’s Graduate School of Education where she is coordinator of the literacy program. Her area of research deals with early literacy development, and the organization and management of Language Arts Programs. Dr. Morrow has more than 200 publications that appear as journal articles, chapters in books, monographs and books. She received Excellence in Research, Teaching and Service Awards from Rutgers University. Dr. Morrow was an elected member of the board of directors of International Reading Association (IRA) and served as President of the organization in 2003-2004. She was also the recipient of the IRA’s Outstanding Teacher Educator of Reading Award, as well as Fordham University’s Alumni Award for Outstanding Achievement.

I haven’t always been a children’s author. Previously, I was an advertising/marketing copywriter. I did this for about 15 years—even though I didn’t feel passionate about my craft. Don’t get me wrong. I knew I loved to write. I just didn’t love what I was writing.

My professional life shifted 11 years ago when my daughter, a second grader at the time, became the target of some bullying friends. It was one of those experiences that had a profound effect on both of us.

How do you explain to a 7-year-old…

… the complexity of friendships?
… why her best friends one day can become her worst enemies the next?
… how to gravitate to kids who can accept all the goodness she has to offer and give it back in kind?

I went into research mode to find out as much information as I could about relational aggression, a form of emotional bullying hidden within friendships that often goes below the radar of parents and teachers. I learned that relational aggression (i.e., gossiping, spreading rumors, intentional exclusion, the silent treatment, etc.) is evident as early as preschool and appears to peak in middle school. Researchers report that relational aggression is much more pervasive than physical aggression in our nation’s schools. Kids—both boys and girls—also find it more hurtful than physical aggression.

In my search for age-appropriate books to address the very real and rampant problem of social cruelty among peers, I came up empty-handed. Frustrated with this resource gap, I wrote MY SECRET BULLY (Riverwood Press, 2003) to help empower children to make healthier friendship choices. The outpour of positive reviews and heartfelt responses from young readers, parents, educators, and bullying prevention experts and organizations gave me the impetus to continue writing more books to help kids connect with their peers in helpful, rather than hurtful, ways.

Because the social world of today's children is very complex and difficult to navigate, I try to incorporate into my books the wisdom and insights of young readers who preview my stories, so that they resonate with the authenticity of real life experiences and views. I also collaborate with renowned experts in the field to ensure my messages of empowerment are on target with the latest bullying prevention research findings and practices. Equally important, I have the added pleasure of creatively tapping into my own inner child—letting her laugh, cry, and simply breathe. I've finally reached the point where I not only love to write, I truly love what I'm writing.

But writing stories is just one part of my job. I also spend a lot of time traveling throughout the US, presenting at conferences and in schools to provide children, educators, and parents with practical tips, tools, and resources to help them create safer, kinder school communities.

Turning Stories into Teachable Moments

Numerous studies have shown that literature—with proper adult guidance, supervision, and assistance—is an effective supplemental tool at home, in the classroom, and in the counseling practitioner’s office to build social-emotional learning (SEL) skills, teach empathy, and foster perspective in children.

In her book, TREATING CHILD AND ADOLESCENT AGGRESSION THROUGH BIBLIOTHERAPY (Springer, 2009), Dr. Zipora Shechtman states, “Through the imaginative process that reading involves, children have the opportunity to do what they often cannot do in real life—become thoroughly involved in the inner lives of others, better understand them, and eventually become more aware of themselves.” And the more competent children are in SEL skills, the more successful they will be in school and in life.

There is a wonderful Chinese proverb that I take to heart: “I listen and forget. I see and remember. I do and understand.”

When I present to children in elementary and middle schools, I don’t want the students to just listen to me as a guest speaker. I also want them to do activities with me to help them better connect with the characters in my books, with themselves and, most importantly, with each other. Some of my activities include:

• the use of paper dolls for younger audiences to show how our words and actions can break down or build up the human spirit (click here to download a detailed description of this activity);
• a bully web to show how bullying negatively affects the entire school community; and
• a role-playing activity with my “Empower Tools,” as described in my sixth book, CONFESSIONS OF A FORMER BULLY (Tricycle Press, 2010). In this activity, I provide kids with a starter set of communication tools that allow them to respond to hurtful comments in nonviolent ways and to help them get away as quickly and as safely as possible, with their dignity intact.

photo: edenpictures via photopin cc

Adult-guided activities help instill critical thinking skills in children, getting them to understand and engage with the stories they read and with each other in constructive, pro-social ways. Role-playing scenarios, introspective essays, creative drawing/writing projects, and discussion questions are a few ways to accomplish this goal.

I also encourage teachers to visit authors’ or publishers’ websites for ready-made lesson plans. To see an example, take a look at the guide I recently penned to accompany R.J. Palacio’s WONDER (click here to download “Teaching WONDER with Trudy Ludwig”). Another option is to do a Google search on the Internet by entering the title of the book chosen for a class reading, followed by the words “lessons,” “activities,” or even “Teacher’s Guide.”

What I’ve Learned from School Visits & My Hopes for the Future

I’ve presented to tens of thousands of school children over the years and I continue to walk away from every author visit feeling reassured that most kids are decent and caring people. But you don’t have to take my word for it. Numerous experts including technology journalist and Internet Safety advocate Larry Magid and researchers Dr. Justin Patchin and Dr. Sameer Hinduja report that most kids think it’s uncool to be cruel—online or offline.

The reality is that kids make mistakes. Our job as caring adults is to help ensure they don’t keep repeating those mistakes and move forward in their lives in more positive, healthy ways. We need to be better role models, not only “talking the talk,” but “walking the walk” in modeling how to deal with those we encounter in life.

Last and equally important, we also need to drive the vital message home that every person—regardless of age, gender, physical appearance, sexual orientation, political or religious beliefs, race or ethnicity—has value. While we all may not agree with one anothers’ opinions, while we all may not end up being friends, we all deserve to have our presence acknowledged and to be treated in a civil and respectful manner.

References:

Committee for Children (2012). Why Social-Emotional Learning? Retrieved from: http://www.cfchildren.org/advocacy/social-emotional-learning.aspx

Hinduja, S.and Patchin, J. (2012). School climate 2.0: Preventing cyberbullying and sexting one classroom at a time. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin.

Shechtman, Z. (2009). Treating child and adolescent aggression through bibliotherapy. New York: Springer: 26-37.

Trudy Ludwig is a member of Random House Speakers Bureau, a children’s advocate, and the bestselling author of seven books: MY SECRET BULLY, JUST KIDDING, SORRY!, TROUBLE TALK, TOO PERFECT, CONFESSIONS OF A FORMER BULLY, and BETTER THAN YOU. She is nationally recognized by educators, experts, organizations, and parents for her passion and compassion in addressing friendship, bullying, and cyberbullying issues. An active member of the International Bullying Prevention Association, Trudy collaborates with leading U.S. experts and organizations and has been profiled on national/regional television and radio and in newsprint. For more information, visit http://www.trudyludwig.com.