Schoolwide Blog

Reading aloud to bring the family together in the information age. By Richard Peck


The goal of my career is to write the book that brings the whole family together. I like to think I’m writing for people of ages ten until death. I try and put people of all generations in my stories because they are family stories. I think a book unites what the computer divides. More...

How do you teach history through literature?

 

I’m a writer because my seventh and eighth grade students made a writer out of me.  They were the people I new the best and liked the best, and from our first mornings together, I knew things about them their parents dared never know. Never. And after all, all fiction is about secrets anyway.  One of the things I noticed from the young, one of the things they taught me, was they wanted a story. I loved history. I loved non-fiction. I loved biography. That’s what I read, but they wanted a story. More...

How can teachers distinguish between essential and nonessential books?

When I entered this field of writing, the buzzword of the era was “bibliotherapy”: that you would match the problem in the kid’s life with the problem in the book. And we did have books on every problem, every issue—and we still do—good ones, great ones. But it turned out that it didn’t quite work that way. The kid who had the greatest problem was probably not going to read the book on that subject. Kids read for other reasons. They read mainly for escape. Harry Potter and vampire stories outsell all the rest of us. More...

Why do students need better role models?

We all need role models—writers or not. And all the best role models are dead and all the worst role models are a year ahead of you in school. I found my role model in 4th grade: Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. He could make rough music out of real speech and that became the goal of my life. He was writing in the past, of course. He was a nineteenth-century writer and I was a twentieth-century kid. But he was speaking in the same voice as the old men who hung out at my dad’s filling station—men whose lives had overlapped with Mark Twain’s. More...

Why is summer reading important? What author would you recommend this summer?

I write novels of family life. I write novels for upper grades and middle schoolers. I’d like to have high school students reading, but I’m not sure high school students are doing much reading now, or that their teachers looking for our titles?

But I read very widely in my field. I have to—to stay in it. I need to know what I am inspired by—what other people are writing. Nobody but a reader ever became a writer, More...

Why has literacy dropped so dramatically over the years? What’s gone wrong in our schools?

 

When I entered junior high school in the fall of 1946, everybody who had come from the sixth grade in our school was literate. We weren’t all equally literate, and we weren’t all equally in love with books. I was, but my best friend wasn’t. But we were all literate. Why was that? None of us were on Ritalin. None of us were in a remedial class, because there wasn’t one, and there were 40 people in the sixth-grade class with one teacher. How did they do it? More...

What’s the difference between young readers and nonreaders?

 

 

After you’ve written 38 books you begin to discern some of your themes. I don’t think I did that at the beginning. I think I do now, because for one thing, in all of my novels for young people there is an elderly person reaching across a lifetime to touch a young hand. It’s an unsentimental portrait because sentimentality is the enemy of what we do. Even 100 years ago Beatrix Potter knew that childhood was a jungle, not a garden. But an elderly person has toughed it out and paid his or her dues. And indeed my most popular character, the one who has changed my career, is a woman named Grandma Dowdel More...

Does author study enhance student reading and writing skills?

 

I am a writer because I never had a teacher who said, “Write what you know.” If I had been limited to writing what I knew I would have produced in these 38 years one unpublishable haiku. I don’t write what I know. I write what I can find out. Fiction is based on research. If Ernest Hemingway really had fought all those wars and bulls, if he really had climbed all those mountains and caught all those fish, if he really had loved all of those women More...