Schoolwide Blog

REMEMBER BOOKS? By S. Roy Stevenson

     
     

The media, it seems, has fallen in love with Kindles and hail these devices as cost effective alternatives to books.  Not surprisingly, school administrators are starting to consider large scale purchases of Kindles or one of the other brands that are now in the marketplace to replace aging text books, novels, and anthologies.

      It makes sense from a strictly economic viewpoint; in the long term they are cheaper than traditional books.  And think of the space you'll save on your bookshelves!?  More...

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...

What do you think about DEAR programs? By S. Roy Stevenson

 

 

I was sitting in the faculty room of one our buildings listening to colleagues discuss their summer reading.  One after another mentioned a “beach book” and spoke with guilty pleasure of having read something totally trivial, a mystery or romance novel, that was “fun,” “superficial,” and thoroughly “entertaining.”  It was as if they were describing some kind of an illicit act, something they would not ordinarily do, and admitting to their friends in the sanctity of the faculty room that what took place in Vegas, stayed in Vegas. More...

Back To School Assessment

 

I’ve just completed my first full week of school; we’ve been back for exactly seven days.  One of my assessment strategies is to listen in while my students are working and to document my observations as they engage with the choices and materials available to them.  For two days last week I observed my students during math as they explored eight different sets of math manipulatives.  Initially I talked to the children about different ways they could explore each manipulative, adding some ideas when they didn’t seem to have many to suggest, but they were free to experiment with the materials at their table.  As I watched, I learned that some manipulatives were being used in ways that prompted math discoveries while others weren’t perceived as such by the children.  The latter will need to be introduced more intentionally to the children so that their math learning is more effective later on.  Also, I noticed that some manipulatives are intrinsically more motivating than others.   More...

Parents – More than Classroom Volunteers

In previous years I have invited parents to observe the children and me during writing workshop time.  After each observation period I would lead parents in a brown bag lunch discussion.  This was always received with great success.  I made sure all parents - mom, dad or both - could attend and made accommodations in my schedule so that this could happen.  Occasionally, I would get a grandparent, as well.  More...

Why I love teachers and librarians. Greg Neri.

 

 

Once, at a reading festival before I was published, I saw a teacher stand up and, with tears in her eyes, practically beg a panel of middle grade authors to write for her urban hi-lo students. She pleaded that outside of Walter Dean Myers, there was no one who could get her boy students reading. I was moved because that’s exactly the audience I was writing for: urban teen boys who don’t read.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...

Parents, Children, and Reading: What’s the connection?

 

Many years ago, when I was a new teacher, popular teacher wisdom stated that if children were going to make progress in their reading then it was critical for parents to read to their children every day with a focus on correctness.  Parents who did were considered “good” parents and parents who didn’t were neglectful and unmindful of their children’s education.  Of course, no one actually said these things out loud but they were always in the background of teacher lounge conversations.More...

Teaching Arts & Sciences Together

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...