Literacy Now

I am sitting next to Meg Cabot eating chicken. The conversation is going well. I’m totally playing it cool, like I have no idea she’s a bestselling author. I even get a little piece of parsley stuck between my teeth, you know, to solidify my “we are just two regular chicks chatting over chicken” routine. She says something about her books, and I say, “Oh, are you a writer?”

She smiles graciously. “Yes, I am.”

“Cool, what do you write about?” I ask, throwing back a swig of tea.

“Oh, princesses,” she says.

“That’s awesome,” I say without missing a beat. “Are they published?”

“Yes,” she says.

“I should totally look those up,” I say and move on to my potatoes.

I could chock my wonderful performance up to the fact that I’m a trained actress, but that would be dishonest. My spot-on “I don’t know you are rich and famous” performance actually comes from the fact that I don’t know she is rich and famous. I guess I should have put two and two together. A man in a tuxedo led me to this reserved table at the front of the banquet hall. I am at the ILA 2015 Conference to receive the ILA Children’s and Young Adults’ Book Award for Young Adult Fiction for Beauty of the Broken, and Meg Cabot is scheduled to speak at this luncheon. So when this beautiful, poised, funny woman sitting beside me introduced herself to me as Meg, I should have said, ”A-ha! This is Meg Cabot, writer of the gazillion dollar-earning Princess Diaries.” But I didn’t. I didn’t because this whole weekend has been overwhelmingly hard to believe, so I seem to be coping by subconsciously deciding not to believe it. I feel like Dorothy transported to Oz, muttering, “We’re not in Kansas anymore, Toto,” ad nauseam. I think I may be suffering from a mild shock.

It all started when I arrived at the Four Seasons in St. Louis after a two-day road trip from Minneapolis. My publisher, Simon & Schuster, had offered to fly me in for the event, but I wanted to bring my friend Polyxeni, you know, for moral support, so I wouldn’t make an idiot of myself in front of Meg Cabot or anything. Polyxeni is a book buyer for the St. Paul Library System, and from the minute I found out I won the ILA award, she told me it was a big deal. A huge deal. A life-changing deal. So did Simon & Schuster. So did my agent, Andy Ross. I didn’t believe any of them.

“Last year’s winner was Rainbow Rowell,” Polyxeni said slowly over coffee. “Do you get that? Rainbow Rowell?”

I nodded. Sure, I knew who Rainbow Rowell was. Who didn’t? What did that have to do with me?

“Her book is being made into a Pixar movie now! This award changes the career trajectory of everyone who wins it!” Polyxeni enthused.

I wondered why she was being so pushy. And why was she using big words like “trajectory”? Did she think I was a scientist or something? Show off. Suffice it to say, out of self-preservation, I decided to miss the point. I think it was because I had been a struggling artist for so many decades, the thought of all that changing seemed impossible to me. I didn’t want to get my hopes up only to find them dashed. It was easier not to believe.

We arrived in St. Louis looking just about like people who have been driving and eating Pringles for two days should look, which is to say, dead shmexy. I knew Simon & Schuster was going to be putting me up at the Four Seasons, but I didn’t know what that meant. I guessed Four Seasons was sort of like Holiday Inn—nice, clean, probably no roaches in the showers. When we walked through the doors, I thought four things:

1. Now I know what the phrase “smells like money” means.
2. Maybe I should have put on a fresh T-shirt, one without the Jaws emblem.
3. Is everything here made out of actual marble, or is that pen faux marble?
4. I hope that minivan-sized chandelier doesn’t fall on my head.

After checking in, Polyxeni and I stepped onto the elevator. “Why do you have to put your key in?” she whispered.
“To keep the riffraff out,” I said. “Which is weird, because until now, I was the riffraff.”
We laughed and rode the elevator to the 15th floor where a beautiful woman was waiting for us with our luggage (a very stained polka-dotted roll-along and an army green duffel bag). She showed us around our room, making sure to point out the television hidden in the bathroom mirror, just in case we wanted to watch Seinfeld reruns while we were freshening up, after which she offered to bring up bath salts and bubble bath, should we decide to take advantage of the amenities. She pointed at the marble encased tub, as if we could miss it. The bathtub was roughly the size of the Aegean Sea. I suddenly understood why rich people so often drowned in their bathtubs. I asked Polyxeni if she had brought our life jackets. She hadn’t. We decided to take our chances with the drowning and said yes to the bath salts.

After the woman left, Polyxeni and I glanced around our room in awe, commenting on the St. Louis Arch glinting in the sun just outside our window. Then we flopped on the giant bed at its center.

“It feels like a cloud!” Polyxeni giggled. She was right. It did. I was pretty sure we’d been transported to heaven. We bumbled around for a bit, smelling shampoos and tasting pillow mints and acting like a scene from The Beverly Hillbillies.

That night, Polyxeni and I went to the hotel restaurant for a celebratory dinner. Our waitress was a lovely girl. She seemed to know who I was. As she poured my champagne, she called me Ms. Waters with a sort of reverence I am not used to. Sometimes, my community college students would say my name that way at the end of a semester, when they deserved an “F” and wanted a “C”. But this felt sincere. During the course of dinner, every waiter in the restaurant came to meet me. They brought me a little dessert plate that had “Congratulations” written on it in chocolate. Polyxeni assured me that she hadn’t told them about my award. That’s when I started to think that maybe, just maybe, Polyxeni and Simon & Schuster and my agent hadn’t been lying when they said this award was a big deal.

The next day’s events were even more surreal. I had a signing at 1 pm. Beauty of the Broken was released almost a year ago. I have pretty much been on book tour since then. I am not new to signings. I have signed books all over the USA, in coffee shops and bookstores and libraries and schools. What I have learned about book signings is that they are very unpredictable things. Sometimes, 50 people show up (if you are signing in your hometown). Sometimes, two people show up, and you take them out for wine and Chinese food because you are embarrassed they bothered to show up when no one else did. So I warned Polyxeni at lunch. “Don’t expect much from the signing. I’m not sure people will show up.”

“Oh, they’ll show up. Trust me,” she said. Poor Polyxeni. She just didn’t understand the nuances of the publishing business.

Or maybe she did. The second I sat down to sign, a line formed. A long line. It stretched out of sight. People gushed as I signed their books.

“You’re my daughter’s favorite author. I can’t believe I get to meet you!”

“Make it out to my wife! She’s your biggest fan!”

“Can I get a picture with you?”

I handled all of this with the grace and dignity of a seasoned author, which is to say, I didn’t throw up on anyone. After 20 minutes, we had to end the signing, not because the line had dwindled, but because we ran out of books. I don’t know how many books we had to start with, but I can tell you we had bunches. Bunches and bunches. I walked away dazed. Again, it occurred to me that this award might actually mean something. Could it be that my career was really going to change?

That night, Simon & Schuster hosted a “family dinner,” which meant that they brought a handful of really cool marketing people and authors together in a posh restaurant and fed them amazing food. (Full disclosure: I had never been invited to a Simon & Schuster family dinner before.) It was beautiful. I ordered steak and three glasses of champagne because I could. (I noticed another author ordered four neat whiskeys, so I figured I was OK.) After we were well into the main course, Candice, the extraordinary library and marketing person who had organized the event, suggested we go around the table and introduce ourselves. We did. Everyone said his or her name, the title of his or her latest book, and the name of his or her editor. When my turn came, I said just those things. Candice looked at me expectantly. “Don’t you have something else to tell them?” she asked. What was she talking about? I looked at her blankly.

“Your award?” she prodded. “I think we can tell them even though it’s a secret. No one will say anything.”

My award? It was a big enough deal that I could say it to this room full of important people and expect them to be impressed? “Well, Beauty of the Broken won the ILA Book Award for Young Adult Fiction,” I said, feeling almost sheepish, expecting everyone to nod politely and go back to nibbling cheeses. I probably will never forget that moment as long as I live. The expressions on the faces at the table changed. They were impressed. Amazed, even. Everyone clapped and congratulated me.

“Thank you,” I said, learning to love the attention.

And then, a bunch of naked guys rode by the window on bikes and stole my thunder. No, I’m not making this up. There was a nude bike rally in St. Louis that night, and it happened to pass the restaurant where we were eating. Everyone forgot my award, ran to the window, and started shrieking, “Oh, my god! Did you see his—?” (Side note: If you ever want to be cured of the demon of lust, watch a naked bike rally.) Which made me go, “Ok, now I get it! This is a dream!” But it wasn’t a dream. I don’t think. Maybe it was. Maybe I just hadn’t woken up yet.

The next day, I accepted my award shortly after I realized who Meg Cabot was. “Oh, my god! You’re that Meg!” I said, looking at the giant screen behind us, onto which was projected a God-sized picture of Meg, along with photos of her zillion best-selling novels.

“Yes,” she laughed.

“I’m so sorry,” I said. “I feel so dumb.”

“Don’t worry,” she said. “I get tired of that other stuff anyway.”

I don’t know if I will ever be Meg Cabot. I don’t know if I will ever get enough of this “other stuff” to get tired of it. Right now, two days after coming home from the ILA Conference, I’m still blown away that any of that “other stuff” is coming my way at all. Already, people care about Beauty of the Broken in a way they never have. People I don’t know are tweeting about me. I’ve already been asked to speak at a major conference. Facebook, the litmus test of all that is good and likable in this world, tells me that people like me way more than they did two weeks ago. And this is just the beginning.

After the banquet, I attended a panel where a brilliant professor taught people how to teach Beauty of the Broken in the classroom. I looked down at the worksheet she handed me, taking in phrases like “feminist critique” and “Marxist analysis” in relation to my characters. Stay with me here: Those weird little figments of my imagination are now going to be used to torture high school and college students everywhere. Someday, a few months from now, a year from now, some poor NYU freshman will be popping NoDoz, analyzing the socioeconomic implications of Iggy’s quilt. “Why do you think the author used Iggy’s quilt so often in the text?” some well-meaning teacher will ask, and the student will write an essay about this, a terrible essay, an essay that mixes up “you’re” and “your” and postulates that Iggy’s quilt is a symbol of the various facets of bourgeois oppression in the 21st century.

And I will be sitting at home saying, “Ha, suckers! The author used Iggy’s quilt so much because she knew she needed to write a few physical details to help readers visualize the scene, and she was way too hopped up on caffeine to think of anything fresh, so she referenced the dumb blanket again!”

Maybe I shouldn’t write that down. Maybe I should just pretend I meant all the profound things students will someday say I meant. Thanks to ILA, I am a serious writer. But the transition is hard.

After all, up until now, I was the riffraff.

Tawni Waters won the ILA 2015 Children’s and Young Adults’ Book Award for Young Adult Fiction for Beauty of the Broken. This was reposted with permission from the Andy Ross Literary Agency’s blog.

Want to stop a room in its tracks?

When the conversation slows, say this: “When I was in middle school, I read one entire wall of our library. The fiction wall. A to Z.”

Mouths will drop open. Faces will register both suspicion and respectful awe. Skeptical voices will ask, “But how big was the library?”

I always think, “Does it matter?”

There were eight fiction bookcases, floor to ceiling. I remember the exact position of the green bindings of the Nancy Drew books—about halfway across the wall, filling the bottom three shelves. Beverly Cleary’s books were near the door; one entire shelf was devoted to her work, and sometimes it spilled over onto the next. I remember convincing our librarian that I needed to check out more than my allotted three books at a time on the weekends. (She agreed to bend the rules.)

I brought a book with me everywhere. Family gatherings, car rides, dinners out. My parents were alternately annoyed and proud.

Yet, inexplicably, when my seventh-grade English teacher asked us to write a book report each quarter, I was annoyed. One lousy book report? Only one? My biggest problem was how to choose my favorite. It was like trying to choose between my children. How could I possible pick just one?

So, unable to choose, I did what I knew was the right thing to do. I invented a book. I wrote two pages in response to my imaginary book, front and back, entirely in the required and proper format. Title. Author. Plot summary. Main character descriptions. Theme.

When the day came to turn them in, I passed my work—neatly stapled, with the fuzzy notebook edges cut off —forward in the stack with the others. I held my breath.

Then I waited.

I dreamed of two scenarios:

One, the teacher wouldn’t notice at all, proving I was a genius at writing fiction. She would ask me to bring her this book so she could read it herself, without even knowing she had been duped. When I explained, she would gasp, clutch her heart and tell me I needed to write this book. I owed it to readers everywhere.

Two, she would immediately recognize the book as a fake, but encourage me to take my place among the great fiction writers of the day. Surely this book, once finished, belonged on the shelf next to Blume and Cleary.

Ah, but my work went unnoticed. I’m sure it was placed in the “completed and formatted correctly” pile, graded accordingly, and passed back with a scratch-and-sniff sticker attached.

Meanwhile, we completed grammar workbook pages and diagrammed sentences. We memorized the list of prepositions.

But never once did we talk in class about what we read. Reading was a quiet, isolated activity.

That was then, this is now. (Yes, that reference is intentional.)

I’m so thankful that my own middle-schooler now lives in the world of real reading. The authentic reading world we learn of from the likes of Donalyn Miller, Kelly Gallagher, Doug Fisher, and Teri Lesesne. Talking about what we read is expected, especially during class. Nonfiction reading is encouraged and celebrated. Reading is meant to inspire. 

Although my students and my own children may not ever read an entire wall of a library, I know they read widely and voraciously. They compare and contrast book characters and genres. They debate authors’ plot choices.

Authors have become their heroes—and rightly so.

Julie Scullen is a former president of the Minnesota Reading Association and Minnesota Secondary Reading Interest Council and is a current member of the International Literacy Association Board of Directors. 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, as well as reading assessment and evaluation.

I have long been a lover of children's books, particularly picture books. A wise man, Mr. Mimi, learned quickly that I cannot be trusted with a debit card and long stretches of free time in Barnes & Noble. I am not alone. One of my favorite things to bring when I visit schools is a new and exciting title. If I have come to understand anything about teachers in my role as a literacy consultant, it is that all teachers love new books. (I have found that teachers' love of new books is second only to their love of fantastic pens and book lists. These are primary reasons why I am proud to call myself a teacher.)

I thought I had reached the peak of my love for picture books—and then. Oh, and then! I was asked to write a unit of study focused on the reading of wordless texts or texts whose stories are told primarily through pictures. Friends, I kid you not when I say I fell harder and more in love with picture books over those few weeks. Not only are they beautiful, but also their rich images (with or without words to accompany them) allow an even broader range of students to engage with and access text. Even as I type those words, I know they don’t make sense logically on the page, but they came to life for me when I shared a few pages of Kate DiCamillo's Flora and Ulysses: The Illuminated Adventures, a graphic novel, with a group of third graders. For many, the text was quantitatively too difficult. However, as we dug into the images on the page, these kids blew my mind with their insights into the story. And it wasn't just the ideas they shared, it was the confidence with which they shared them that truly took me by surprise.

There are a number of books that I hold dear to my heart and that I want to share with children. They include titles that make me laugh, make me think, or just make me happy. If I'm honest, most, if not all, of these stories are told primarily through words. Many could be considered traditional in their format. These books represent what I love, but not what every student loves. Perhaps graphic novels get some students excited about reading, for others it is biography, and others still prefer informational articles.

I spend a lot of time talking with teachers. I also spend a lot of time listening to teachers. Frequently, I hear the same titles mentioned over and over. I hear the same conversation pooh-poohing trendy humorous series and condemning graphic novels as "frivolous." I am not here to slam teachers. I am here to gently nudge you outside of your comfort zone and to suggest that maybe, just maybe, we should focus more on what makes students excited to read instead of what we think they should be reading.

Mrs. Mimi, aka Jennifer Scoggin, is a teacher who taught both first and second grades at a public elementary school in New York City. She's the author of Be Fabulous: The Reading Teacher's Guide to Reclaiming Your Happiness in the Classroom and It's Not All Flowers and Sausages: My Adventures in Second Grade, which sprung from her popular blog of the same name. Mimi also has her doctorate in education from Teachers College, Columbia University.

As teachers, if we can motivate our students to read, we have won half the battle. If we can turn them into lifelong readers, victory is ours! In the arena of motivating readers, comic books have a noticeable advantage over other forms of text.

Comic books as motivators

Kids find comic books interesting. For starters, the visual appeal grabs the attention of young readers. Enticing covers plastered with colorful artwork are enough to make anyone look twice. Then there are the characters. Most students are very familiar with the characters whose faces are depicted on the covers of comic books. Students already have connections to these characters and storylines through televisions shows, movies, and video games. Why not meet children where they are? If we want them to fall in love with reading, we need to start with what is familiar to them and build upon it.

Comic books for budding readers

Emerging readers are intimidated by a great deal of text. The task of reading a chapter book can seem too daunting for their consideration. Comic books, on the other hand, do not pose such a threat. The pages of a comic book are peppered with small chunks of text. Comic books serve as great stepping-stones to longer, more complex texts. In a comic book, readers are provided with details without the use of a lot of words.

Comic books as a comprehension aid

Comic book illustrations are not only motivating to the reluctant reader, but also instrumental in promoting comprehension. The sequential artwork is helpful for readers and nonreaders alike. I have used comic strips when teaching sequencing by cutting apart the panels and asking students to arrange them in sequential order. This is a fun activity for students, and it requires several high-level thinking skills. In a comic book, the illustrations are just as important to comprehension as the words. Students must use the details in the text and illustrations to arrange the comic panels in sequence.

When reading a comic book, students must read between the lines. This is a wonderful manner in which to teach students to draw inferences and synthesize information. Inferencing can be an abstract skill for young students. Comic books can give meaning to the use of this cognitive strategy. When students understand the purpose behind a strategy, they have more motivation to use the strategy independently in a variety of text situations. 

Comic books require readers to visualize. The action-packed writing styles of many comic writers cause readers to create vivid story-pictures in their mind. Class discussions about the art of visualization may stem from comic book text. Comic books cause readers to visualize without realizing they are using a cognitive strategy.

When reading a comic book, students must interact with both text and images, and they do so out of authentic interest in the text, not because the teacher is necessitating the process. This application of cognitive strategies is true reading. Students are self-motivated to comprehend text.

Comic books as a writing aid

Comic books contain basic story elements such as setting, characters, rising action, climax, falling action, and resolution. Each panel in comic book writing represents a paragraph. Narrative sentences are representative of topic sentences. The details appear in both the words of the characters and the pictures. Students may use these guidelines to create comic panels of their own. With the addition of details, these panels may be turned into detailed narrative paragraphs.

Why not use comic books to teach students how to use quotations marks? Each speech bubble represents a character’s dialogue, so students can be taught to use quotation marks correctly by rewriting the dialogue in story format. That beats a worksheet any day of the week!

Comic books and content area reading

A variety of comic books is now readily available. Comics are not limited to the traditional superhero characters that generally come to mind. Many classics have been rewritten in a comic book format. Several authors have taken historical and other content-rich information and reworked it into a comic book format that is as instructionally sound as it is appealing to children.

Comic books and vocabulary

Members of the general public do not consider comic books to be tools for vocabulary development. I beg to differ. My husband has a working vocabulary that has always amazed me. When I encounter a new word, I most assuredly can turn to him for a definition. What’s his secret? He attributes his expansive vocabulary to comic books. He grew up on them! Comic books offer vocabulary instruction in a high-interest context. Students learn new terms through word usage in addition to illustrative support.

Comic books may be the underdog of the literacy world, but a lot of instructional value can be gleaned from these short, powerful texts. The motivational quality of comic books constitutes an enticing appeal to reluctant readers that may serve to hook them on reading. If we can get students to read and enjoy reading, strategy instruction will become both meaningful and effective.

Melissa Barbee is a new ILA member, having joined in the spring of 2015. She has 17 years of classroom experience. She has taught at Piedmont Elementary School in Dandridge, TN, for the entire stint of her career, and she has experience in both first and third grades. She is currently a doctoral student at Carson-Newman University pursuing a degree in Curriculum and Instruction Leadership.

A teacher—particularly one in early education—is teaching more than reading, writing, arithmetic. We know it is simply human nature that we are born selfish, self-centered, and egocentric individuals, and it is a teacher’s job to gently guide students from believing that they are the center of all things and to put others’ interests before their own.

One might think that all a teacher has to do is get the students to say please, thank you, and excuse me, and they will be on their way to becoming model citizens. One would be wrong. It goes far deeper than parroting those simple, yet magical, words. Having a genuine feeling of concern for another’s well-being is at the heart of having manners. To be caring, loving, and kind individuals for society’s benefit as well as their own. One has to care about what other people think and feel. This requires building a caring classroom community.

Putting another’s interests before one’s own, sharing, and waiting one’s turn is extremely hard for most pre-K students. Children need to see a purpose or reason to do these unnatural acts of kindness. This can and must be taught in pre-K, as it lays the foundation for all subsequent grades that follow.

Model good manners

As a pre-K teacher, I model respect for others. On the first day and every day through to the end of the year, I use please, thank you, and excuse me when talking to my students. I tell them when you say these words, you are using good manners and showing others that they are important to you. When I speak to my aide, I always say “yes ma’am” or “no ma’am” because it shows I have respect for her, and I make note of that for my class. I cannot emphasize enough the importance of modeling good manners for students every second of every day. Students imitate what they see, and this is how they make the learning their own.

Manners matter in Room 2

Because my students and I have discussed the magic words from the first day of school, I can show them how important using good manners really is in our room. Every time I hear polite words or see kind deeds, that student places a pom-pom in a cup—The Kindness Cup. The small, soft balls can be found at any craft store in sizes from very small up to three inches across. We refer to the pom-poms as our “warm fuzzies” because of how good it feels inside to do something nice for a friend. The best part is that when the cup has 10 warm fuzzies, the whole class wins a sticker. The children love being the ones responsible for earning rewards for their friends. I usually read the picture book Warm Fuzzies by Cathie Brown when I introduce the idea, and then we make a warm fuzzy to give to someone we care about.

Maria and Tito

The first week of school, Maria and Tito visit our room. Maria is my look-alike puppet, and I tell the students she is my sister, but she doesn’t know she is a sock. Tito is her best friend and cousin. The puppets interact with funny skits about rules, being nice, and what it takes to be a good friend. Maria often uses catchphrases the children can remember and use themselves, including, “I’m always happy to help,” “It feels so nice to be nice,” and “When a friend is in need, be a friend indeed.” At the end of the minilesson, I encourage the students to ask Maria and Tito questions, which opens up a discussion.

The red paper heart

At the beginning of the year, I cut a large red heart out of construction paper. I tell students it is my heart and that when they are kind to one another and listen to me, my heart is so happy it dances. But when they say unkind things to each other, it hurts my heart and it tears a little (I tear the paper). I go on, explaining that mean words said in anger to a friend crushes my heart—“Words hurt!” (I crumple the paper). Then I try to smooth it out. I ask the students, “Can those words be unsaid? Can this paper ever be the same?” After that, I cut the heart in two and I give each student a colored bandage to help put the heart back together. I tell them you can use words to help your friends feel better, but when you do, say “I’m sorry” and really mean it. I tell students to be careful of the words they use when speaking to friends. I refer to the heart often throughout the year.

Any part of character education must include teaching students self-control. Stating expectations from the first day of school is imperative for my students to be successful. I avoid any frustration on my part, or for my students, when I show them what they need to do for each activity of the day. Immediately before we go to centers or sit on the carpet, I go over what is expected of students. I simply say that this is what successful students do to learn. My aide and I then proceed to model polite talk and good manners in a funny skit in front of the class. Before talking about rules, I always read No, David! and David Goes to School by David Shannon.

Parent communication

Bringing the parents on board to help reinforce what the students learn at school is essential for success. Parents need to see why character education is important. Many parents tell me their children don’t listen to them at home, and the children do whatever they want. Reinforcing my lessons with their child at home will benefit both the parent and child. To stress how important this is to me, I use a section in my weekly newsletter to state what we are working on, with a note to parents: “Please help at home.”

In my pre-K class, I want children to go beyond just saying polite words. I want them to sincerely mean them. Basically, I am teaching each student to be a good person, I hope these strategies help you do the same.

Mary Van Bibber is a pre-K teacher at Heritage Elementary School in San Antonio, TX.