Reading and Writing

• Differentiating reading instruction through children's literature, by Elizateth Knowles (Libraires Unlimited, 2009, 151 p., $______, ISBN: 9781591587873)

  I have been looking for a great differentiated reading book that links the classroom and the library. Thus, one comes with high expectations to this title. However, this is not it. The book begins with brief essays about various topics in reading research and differentiation that are minimally effective. Then, one is presented with pages and pages of tables, one book per table. The idea is that the recommended books would be “taught” to the class and minimal suggestions are given for questions to ask followed by innocuous phrases of how to differentiate the book. Disappointing. Bottom line: Pass this one by.

   

• Read me a rhyme in Spanish and English = Léame una rima en español e ingles, by Rose Zertuche Treviño (ALA, 2009, 155p., $_____, ISBN: 9780838909829)

  Are there any Spanish speakers in your school? If so, this book is a must purchase. Read the title of it a bit broader than rhyme because this book is a handy guide to programming for family involvement and children from birth through elementary school. And, think about having teens help create programming for after school programs or for culture classes. The rhymes and songs here are authentic. No Mother Goose…but lots of recommendations. And, if you don’t know the music, there is a discography to help you learn it. This is not only an idea book but a handily arranged one for getting ideas. We need more of this type of professional helps to work with a widening cultural community. Yes, this one is targeted at the public librarian, but it is oh so helpful in schools also.

• Quick and popular reads for teens, edited by Pam Spencer Holley (ALA, 2009, 228 p., $_____, ISBN: 9780838935774)

  For years, YALSA has been publishing Quick Picks for reluctant Readers and  Popular Paperbacks for Young Adults lists. This book collects all those lists into one place. But there is more. Holley has assembled four major essays, two about the history of the lists and two about working with reluctant teen readers. Trying to approach the list from the perspective of either a teacher librarian or a teen reader, I was very puzzled by the arrangement of the lists. Holley has built one single alphabetical annotated list of all the titles. Following this list, she includes a topical list under such headings as cartooning and drawing, dating, friendship, GLBTQ, school life, and short stories. Only titles are listed under the topical headings. Thus, if I want to build my collection by topic or, I am creating a list of titles for teens and want annotations, or, if I am a teen wanting to read a few books by topic, I have to flip back and forth from the topical list to the alphabetical list to get the description of titles. Even if I use the web assist that takes me to a few topical lists on line, I only get titles with no descriptions. I found this very tedious. Collection developers are not likely to want to check every title in the entire list. And, if I am preparing a bibliography, it would take a major investment of time. So, while I appreciate the effort here, the work as a whole does not, in my mind, fit the uses intended for it. With this major caveat, let the buyer decide whether the cumulative alphabetical list meets their needs.

   

• The tech-savvy booktalker : a guide for 21st-century educators by Nancy J. Keane and Terence W. Cavanaugh (Libraries Unlimited, 2009, 159 p., $_____, ISBN: 9781591586371)

  I like this book and I don’t like this book. I like this book because it moves adults past the sterotype of a booktalker who stands in front of a group and delivers polished presentations. It wants us to expand the world of booktalking into all the web 2.0 applications at our dispostal: blogs, wikis, videos, podcasts, etc. And, I particularly like it because it encourages us to have the kids and teens themselves doing booktalks. But how about doing promotial talks about great websites, web 2.0 tools, movies, literary events or any other of the vast world of both entertainment and wonder? The book is written as if an introduction to adults who don’t understand all the technology at their disposal. If you are a beginner, then this is the book for you to open new doors. I would have preferred a collection of quick short one or two-page ideas with lots of links to stuff created by the kids and teens themselves as well as the adults. Library Thing and Good Reads are but two conversational web devices; there should be online book discussions complete with video and audio components thriving in every school – all connected through every device kids own such as iPhones, cell phones, Netbooks and any other medium including Facebook, My Space and any other social networking avenue. Let’s get book/media discussions into the world where the kids are. Bottom line: basic ideas here for beginners.

   

• Connecting Boys with Books 2: Closing the Reading Gap by Michael Sullivan (ALA, 2009, 119 p., $_____, ISBN: 0838909795)

  A popular speaker on boys and books, Sullivan continues his essays, often the topics of his speeches defending the idea that boys are quite different than  girls in a number of ways and in particular, what they will and will not read and how to influence them  to read more. Sullivan is talking to adults about the various approaches and techniques that work and in doing so supplies us with some recommendation for specific titles, but mostly treats the kinds of genres to promote to this group. His essays spur the idea that conversation with our own patrons is the best way to find out interests and invite them to help us as adults explore the topics of interest to them. Do we have book discussion groups with boys or girls only? If we have a number of digital discussion groups going all the time, then as we read the various reactions, we discover what works and what doesn’t work. Sullivan’s book is a quick read. I’d suggest cutting the book up in chapters; passing it around at a teacher  or teacher librarian group and then charting the various approaches with additions of our own. It would certainly be a way of pushing everyone to try something and report back. This is a book to talk about. Talk about the issues with boys. Then switch the conversation to girls or gang members or geeks, or Christian readers, or whatever groups seem to be reading or ignoring that they would love if they just knew about it. Recommended as a discussion starter. Oh, don’t forget to talk to the kids about all this – not just decide as adults what we want them to read.

   

• Reid's Read-Alouds: Selections for Children and Teens by Rob Reid ALA, 2009, 121 p., $_____, ISBN: 0838909809)

  There is always room for another recommended list of read-alouds. Yes, reading aloud is still just as important as always and will ever be. Folks who don’t think so are… well, you add the adjective. I have a few of my own and mommy said…This one, creadted by this popular author covers a wide variety of titles, grade levels, and interests. The main part of the book gives you a summary of the title and there are indexes galore to help you find just the right title within the collection. Highly recommended.

   

• The readers' advisory guide to genre fiction by Joyce G. Staricks (ALA, 2009, 387p., $_____, ISBN: 9780838909898)

  For older teens involved in book clubs or online discussion groups, the teacher librarian is often unfamiliar with every single genre the teens are (unless you are the author of this book). You want to act intelligent when you have read one or two title of a particular genre or worse, none at all! Cheat. Folks before you have defined the genre, talked about the kinds of plots to expect, and best of all, suggest a variety of authors and title to consume. So, have several of these genre books on your hidden shelf and pump up your knowledge to quickly respond like any teacher librarian who has read every title on the shelf and on her Kindle. Of course you could help a read cheat, but do you want to let out all your secrets? This book covers adrenaline grabbers, emotions genres, intellect genres, and landscape genres as umbrellas for more specific topics such as westerns, historical fiction, fantasy, science fiction, psychological suspense, mysteries, literary fiction, women’s lives and relationships, romance, horror, thrillers, suspense, romantic suspense, and adventure. Ah, heck. Share this with your voracious readers and have a discussion about what the author recommends and whether she really got the genre right. Voracious readers make good collection developers! Hint: Older readers also equates with faculty members who are readers!

   

• 100 literacy lifesavers : a survival guide for librarians and teachers K-12, by Pamela S. Bacon and Tammy K. Bacon (Libraries Unlimited, 2009, 363p. $_____, ISBN: 1591586690)

  Let us say that you are having a conversation or planning session with reading coaches and classroom teachers about the various gaps in reading scores. As a team, you are committed to do something to strengthen the reading program. You decide on a list of reading skills that are going to be emphasized by everyone who is working with kids at a certain grade level or with a particular teacher. Then you need ideas of actually what you are going to do separately and collaboratively. You need ideas. This book provides a wide variety of ideas that the adults can try if you lack them or need some refreshing ones. That is the value here. But be careful. Begin not with unique ideas but with best practice ideas before adopting these strategies. Evaluate each idea. What is it likely to contribute? How much time is it going to take? For teacher librarians, will it promote the love of reading as it focuses on skills? Is it busy work or purposeful? There are so many things and ideas to do that do take up time. And, time is very very precious. As we look at the various ideas presented here, just be careful and as adults be honest about whether ideas you try actually contribute. Bottom line: every adult has to have a bag of tricks and these days, those tricks must be built on solid best practice and research plus the learners have to be engaged, interested, and wanting more rather than just pile one them one more thing to do. Perhaps time to read and a plethora of available books might work  rather than an activity  (ala Krashen). This one gets an additional purchase rating if you are in desperate need of idea starters.

   

• Critical approaches to young adult literature by Kathy Latrobe and Judy Drury (Neil Schuman, 2009, 310 p., $_____, ISBN: 9781555705640)

  It is fun to hold informal book club discussions with young adults and the literature they are enjoying letting them lead the discussion wherever, but Latrobe and Drury take us to a different level where we are challenging young adults on a much higher level of metacognition and pushing them as substantive critics of what they read. The librarians of the past mostly came from languae arts backgrounds, so they were steeped in literary criticism from their undergraduate years. However, we have a new crop of teacher librarians who come from a variety of fields and for whom literary criticism is not a focal point. This volume could well be used as a text in advanced course of young adult literature, but it is also an excellent read for teacher librarians who want to insert in book discussions those kinds of questions that stimulate thinking while at the same time keeping the popular enjoyment front and center. We will leave it to language arts teachers the dissection of literature. We can push enjoyment but slyly introduce those thinking probes. The excellent chapters of this book provide a structure for probing in four key areas: the text itself, the author,  context/milieu, and the readers themselves. After reading this book, you should have gained a variety of sound strategies for pushing up thinking about YA Lit. Highly recommended for pushing thinking in literature just like we do so in every one of the other academic disciplines teens are thinking through.

   

• Good choice! : supporting independent reading and response, K-6 by Tony Stead (Stenhouse, 2009, 237 p., $_____, ISBN: 9781571107329) There is nothing wrong with this book that collaboration with a teacher librarian couln’t improve on. Independent reading – a novel idea in today’s skill, kill, and drill reading curriculum. Stead has a plethora of ideas for the classroom teacher on how to manage a classroom library, how to get kids reading independently and how to get them to respond to what they are reading. We encounter tubs of books all labeled with various genre signs and these tubs of  books are to provide everything the young folks want to read. It’s magical how so few books can cover the wide range of reading interests and levels for an entire school year. Then the magic word appears in the chapter on where to get materials. It is buried to be sure. It is only mentioned in one place. The source mentioned is: the LIBRY. Stead does not mention if this refers to the central school library or the public library, but there it is. I am waiting for the consultant such as Stead who teams up with a teacher librarian to write a really good book on independent reading. Is there anyone out there who could do the world a favor? Is there a publisher out there who would publish such a work? Is there an acquisition editor for a major publishing company out there who would recognize the winning team and winning strategy of rotating classroom collections and major classroom/library initiatives? I’m still waiting. In the meantime, pass this book by.