Schoolwide Blog

Teach Students to ASK

 

 

 

At the end of story time, just before we check out library books, my kindergartners and first graders clap their hands and sing with me.  . (song available on www.jacquelinejules.com)

It’s a ditty I made up with the expressed purpose of creating an ear worm—a repetitive phrase to loop in my kids’ heads and share with their parents. Many of the students I teach come from low-income families. Reading at bedtime may be something the adults in their lives haven’t even considered, with all the demands of making a living wage. More...

Listening To Students In The Information Age

 

 

I am without access to email this morning as something mysterious is going on with my school’s server.  At least, it’s a mystery to me since I have not received any email since last night.  That’s unusual and worrisome as I’m always waiting for a response from someone about something.  It’s an example of the fast-paced lives we lead. 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...

Should we censure "non-essential" reading material like Harry Potter?

 Let Them Read!

Confidence comes before good reading. If we censure the reading material that we allow a child to read we may be cutting off their joy of reading, possibly for life. I had a teacher ask me last year if he should let a non reader-a student who didn’t like to read-do a book report using the child’s choice of books -  “Captain Underpants.” I resoundingly said yes. 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...

How do you get boys reading?

By Greg Neri, Author of Chess Rumble

“They want to be what they see. A boy doesn’t want to be a woman. He wants to do what a man does. And if he doesn’t see a man reading, he won’t read.” (From Gail Giles’ “Wanted, Male Models: There’s a good reason why boys don’t read.” School Library Journal, December 2008.)

One of the reasons I write for boys is because there are so few men writing from the male teenage perspective. So when I write, I’m thinking about the boy I was, the one who didn’t like reading. My breakthrough as a reader came when I found a book that changed the notion in my head of what a book could be. It took me by surprise and I probably thought, I didn’t know you could do that in a book! 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...

Richard Peck On The Schoolwide Blog

This month we're thrilled to announce that Newberry Medalist and National Book Award Finalist Richard Peck will be participating in our blog community.   

Last month I had the privilege of sitting down with Richard in his Upper East Side apartment to discuss not only his esteemed work but also his experience as a teacher for thirty years.  Informed, insightful, and always interesting Richard and I discussed a myriad of topics as they pertain to reading, literacy, and the education system today.  I have begun transcribing More...