Literacy Now

I teach in a school system that’s home to a wide socioeconomic disparity. The median household income is $145,083, and approximately 20% of the township’s more than 22,000 residents work in finance and real estate. However, those numbers hide the 6.5% of the population who lives below the poverty line—a significant minority of working-class immigrants for whom English is not their first language.

This disparity is evident at our school’s annual Halloween assembly, where parents are invited to attend grade-level skit performances, followed by a classroom party. One year, I saw five parents working hard in my classroom to create a festive party, yet outside the classroom door lingered four more immigrant parents who were reluctant to enter. I wanted all my families to feel welcomed and connected, but I didn’t know how.

A solution crystallized when I heard professor David Schwarzer of Montclair State University speak on culture, language, and curricular choices at the ILA 2015 Conference & Exhibits, in St. Louis, MO. I left with a plan to make all families feel welcomed.

Introducing Family Friday

Each year, as students step into a new grade and classroom, teachers should ask, “What stories do our students carry? How can we evoke them?”

In my third-grade classroom, these questions led to the creation of Family Friday.

It can feel overwhelming for teachers to add anything new to the schedule. In my classroom, however, a feasible solution was to reserve just 15 minutes each week to open our doors to honor our students’ families, creating the opportunity for personal storytelling and conversation. Through our new Family Friday tradition, students explore cultural experiences perhaps vastly different from their own.

Family Friday comes from the belief that all students should be given the opportunity to share their own experiences and listen to those of others. The goal in our classroom is to involve families and help students learn about other cultures, traditions, and global experiences. There is no specific format; family members can partner with their children, bring a translator, or ask the teacher to arrange for a translator. They can share photographs, slides, or video of a special place or festival; present cultural symbols and artifacts; read a bilingual book; or tell a story.

Encouraging participation 

I teamed up with our school’s bilingual parent liaison to reach out to and encourage our families to participate in Family Friday. Our liaison was extremely successful by following these simple steps:

• Make personal contact with each family
• Provide each family with suggestions on what to bring
• Work alongside each family, as needed, to translate any aspect of the presentation
• Offer encouragement and emotional support
• Translate all letters sent home

Every family she contacted visited our classroom. The best part was watching my students’ faces light up when their parents and siblings were the teachers and storytellers.

Having meaningful conversations

Students were delighted to see their classmate’s father translate their names into Mandarin and hear an explanation of their names’ meanings. They heard the story of a student’s family’s struggle to escape from war-torn Honduras, watched a video of a classmate splashing in his favorite watering hole when visiting his grandparents in Mexico, and laughed at the concept of Armenian egg jousting.

During each Family Friday gathering, we broke into small groups to allow students to ask questions and share ideas. Some jotted ideas into their notebooks while others asked thoughtful questions about the immigrant experience, such as “What was it like to come to a new and strange country? How did you adapt?” 

Building a community

Through Family Friday, we are building a culture of kindness, empathy, and respect. As students share their treasured stories to a respectful audience, they feel valued.

At the end of year, we gathered highlights from each family’s presentation. As a class project, students in the classroom or at home created three slides to represent their family’s contribution. We combined them into a single slideshow with a student-composed soundtrack made with GarageBand.

We held a celebration where we invited all our families to celebrate “Who We Are.” I looked around my room to see people from Armenia, Bangladesh, Belize, Brazil, Costa Rica, Honduras, Ireland, Israel, Mexico, Romania, and the United States. Each student’s story represented a patch on a quilt, stitched together by our classroom community.

Staci Kaplan, an ILA member since 2014, is a literacy coach for Summit Public Schools in New Jersey.


This piece originally appeared in the November/December 2017 issue of Literacy Today, ILA's member magazine.

In an effort to find out firsthand what kinds of books today’s teens and tweens are reading, I went to the experts. I asked teachers to give me some quality time with their most voracious readers.

It was quite an education. I was reminded that today’s middle grade and young adult readers are savvier, more worldly, and more informed than those of my own generation. These remarkable readers let me know with certainty we need to catch up with their reading needs and interests, or at least get out of their way.

Keep in mind, I’m a child of the 1970s and 1980s. I came of age in a conservative school district in the era of Blubber, Ramona the Pest, A Summer to Die, and Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.  In my high school, “diversity” was about what kind of fertilizer your dad spread on his fields last season. Girl protagonists in our libraries were worried about whether they would get their period before their friends did, and if they would ever be kissed. Relationships with schoolmates created the most significant conflicts, siblings and parents were a close second. Adults were always there to save the day.

Reading, even at its most controversial, was pretty tame. In today’s world, lame.

I sat down with ten groups of seventh- and eighth-grade students to talk about trends in middle grade and young adult literature, and their thoughts were insightful, honest, and telling. I asked them what kinds of books we need more of in our libraries.

I learned that today, book characters are still worried their siblings or parents might embarrass them, and that stories are still set at school or home. But we no longer live in the world of passive girls waiting for things to happen to them, or brave boys surviving in the woods, and our book recommendations need to reflect this new reality.

What I heard loud and clear is that our teens are irritated by books that imply that this is all there is.

Our students shared with me that while these topics, characters and settings are still prevalent, they are interlaced with issues of race, LGBTQ, violence, and mental illness: all deeper, controversial issues schools are often afraid to put on the shelves.

“We need more mature books. Those that are up to date, that are popular. Not just books that were popular ‘back then,’” Greg, a seventh grader, said with a smile. He referred, of course, to the books we often recommend to students that were our favorites when we were in middle school.

“Back then?” I asked.

Eighth grader Sarah explained, “You know, back then. Most of the books [in our library] are from the 1900s.”

In fact, kids are savvier than we think. Brandon, an eighth grader who admitted he only reads in school, said this about books being written for middle graders: “It’s some 60-year-old person, you know? It’s a middle-aged man trying to write as a high schooler.” Nods all around. His classmate Ariella added, “Yeah, like they write about these high school stereotypes, and everything, and it’s not even true.”

As a group, they said they are tired of the stereotypical characters they see portrayed in middle grade novels: the ditzy girl, the brain who fails embarrassingly at romantic relationships, the bully, the jock.

Sam, a self-proclaimed voracious reader, said, “So, I usually read fantasy books, and inevitably [the main characters] are boys, and they are either really weird and different and want to be normal, or really really ordinary and dull and want to be special, and…. then they get magical powers.” The room erupted in laughter and knowing smiles.

Seventh grader Natalie admitted she reads more than an hour each day. Her response was that we need “more books that don’t try to baby us.” She added, “schools put books on the shelves that aren’t going to offend people. None of these books have any bad words or any REAL things that are actually happening.”

Elena, another student from her class added, “yes, we need mature books. Right now [authors] put a lot more modern issues in their new books. Issues like race, gender, sexuality, those kinds of things. More than just the basics. We need more of those in our library.”

This response prompted me to ask if they felt represented in the books they were reading now. Do you see characters that look like you? Think like you? Act like you?

Brandon is a seventh-grade student of color. “Am I represented? Not the [books] I’ve been reading. I read books my teachers recommended…and the one character closest to me is a cat from the Warriors series.” His peers laughed and nodded.

Another avid reader and student of color, Fatima, was thoughtful in her response. “Yes and no, because I read a lot of books with male leads and female leads, and they won’t look like me, not particularly…they are a different race. Books aren’t that diverse, and [characters] won’t look like me.”

Alexa pointed out that diversity is needed. “Sometimes it’s nice when they [characters] are different from you so that you get to see a new perspective.” She added, “there are sometimes books with characters that have kind of the same personality [as you], but like if it’s not, it’s still good to read them, because it helps to grow YOUR personality.”

My favorite response about characters came from Harry, an eighth grader with very strong opinions about young adult literature. He said, “Whenever there is a character that is really weird, but also a genius, that’s me.”

These students have provided me with amazing insights into what I as a literacy leader will recommend to students, teachers, and media specialists.

If we’re going to inspire a new generation of readers, we need to listen to these insightful and remarkable teens. If we want to convince them to get off their devices and into books, we need to find characters and plots they can relate to.

Julie Scullen is a former member of the ILA Board of Directors and also served as president of the Minnesota Reading Association and Minnesota Secondary Reading Interest Council. She taught most of her career in secondary reading intervention classrooms and now serves as Teaching and Learning Specialist for Secondary Reading in Anoka-Hennepin schools in Minnesota, working with teachers of all content areas to foster literacy achievement. She teaches graduate courses at Hamline University in St. Paul in literacy leadership and coaching, disciplinary literacy, critical literacy, and reading assessment and evaluation.

Research presented by the National Center for Education Statistics has proven that family engagement is one of the most important factors of literacy development, and that children enter kindergarten at a higher reading level when they have a positive learning environment at home. When literary success is highly encouraged and supported by the family, children are more likely to want to read, enjoy reading, and excel in all areas of academics. Below are a few ways to foster family literacy in and out of the classroom.

Resources for educators

• Invite students’ parents and family members into the classroom to read their favorite childhood book aloud.
• Provide a collection of books for students to take home to read with their families.
• Introduce students and their families to websites such as ReadWriteThink and Reading Rockets and encourage them to engage in these learning games and activities together at home.
• Assign interactive literacy homework such as group vocabulary exercises or discussion prompts.
• Create “reading kits” for students to take home. The kits can contain worksheets, vocabulary words, and comprehension questions for families to go over together.

Resources for parents

• Write a short story with your child using the day’s events or their imagination.
• Call Dial-A-Story (416.395.5400) to listen to a story with your child anytime! The service is available in 16 different languages.
• Involve distant family members in the enjoyment of reading by sharing a book together through video chat apps such as Skype.
• Make puppets of your child’s favorite literary characters. Use these puppets to act out a scene from the book or to reimagine a scene in a different way.
• Help your child write to a pen pal. Whether it’s a distant friend or family member, consistently writing to a pen pal fosters important writing and storytelling skills.

For more ideas, check out the National Center for Families Learning’s 30 Days of Families Learning Together.

Samantha Stinchcomb is an intern at the International Literacy Association.           

If you’re scrambling for creative ways to celebrate Halloween in your classroom, it’s not too late! The spooky storytelling games, bewitching books, and haunting history lessons on this list require little to no preparation and will guarantee a ghoulishly good time for all learners.

• Scholastic’s Halloween Activity Set includes festive book recommendations and spooky writing ideas.
• The National Education Association’s list of resources for grades 6–8 offers history lessons, read-aloud, poetry, and more.
• The International Literacy Association's Children's Literature and Reading Special Interest Group (CL/R SIG) weekly book review column includes suspenseful and chilling tales.
• Sadlier’s “spooktacular” resource roundup features reading comprehension worksheets, graphic organizers, and interactive read-aloud guides.
• Education World offers storytelling and adlib exercises, writing prompts, discussion webs, and more.
• Halloween coincides with the Mexican holiday, Dia de los Muertos, or Day of the Dead. Introduce the holiday’s history, tradition, and symbols with TeacherVision’s educational videos and related activities.
• The Mexic-Arte Museum’s Day of the Dead Educational Activity Guide challenges students to complete a Mesoamerican World crossword puzzle, write a calavera poem, and reflect on their own rituals and observances.

Alina O’Donnell is the editor of Literacy Daily.

As educators, we need to create classrooms that will maximize the success of all students, and will accommodate a diverse range of skills, needs, and interests. The following teaching tools and strategies prepare educators to support all students in reaching their full learning potential.  

• The National Joint Committee on Learning Disabilities (NJCLD)'s report on “Learning Disabilities and Achieving High Quality Education Standards” documents five areas of focus necessary for students with learning disabilities to achieve high-quality education standards.
• “Using Technology to Assist With Learning Differences,” a Literacy Daily post, provides a list of digital tools that help improve word recognition, fluency, and comprehension in students with severe reading difficulties.
• The IRIS Center at Vanderbilt University released a module that examines the three principles of Universal Design for Learning (UDL) and discusses how to apply these principles to curricular goals, instructional materials, instructional methods, and assessments.
• Common Sense Media’s “Learning Differences & Special Needs Guide” recommends teacher- and parent-tested apps and sites for children with learning difficulties.
• The titles in “Books About Embracing Disabilities and Differences,” an installment of ILA’s Children’s Literature and Reading Special Interest Group (CL/R SIG) weekly book reviews, help to promote an atmosphere of acceptance and sensitivity in the classroom.
• Edutopia’s “Apps to Support Diverse Learners in the Classroom” offers “effective, tried-and-true apps that can make a tremendous difference in the lives of diverse learners.”
• LD OnLine’s resource roundup includes instructional strategies, books, top articles, blogs, and more for “Teaching Kids With LD."

Alina O’Donnell is the editor of Literacy Daily.