Breadcrumbs

Replete with allusions to the best in modern children's literature, while at-heart a retelling of the classic Hans Christian Anderson tale The Snow Queen, Breadcrumbs is a bookworm's dream come true. Meanwhile, it also captures a universal theme: the insecurity of the changing dynamics that beset tween boy/girl friendships, making it appealing to a wider audience. This, my second reading, was as a read aloud to my 6th graders, who were mesmerized. I'm more than a little in love with this book. It will live on a shelf with Cornelia Funke's Inkheart, Anna Quindlen's How Reading Changed My Life, and Jonathan Franzen's essay "How To Be Alone," and I will call the shelf, "Ode to the Reading Life."

Intellectual Character: What It Is, Why It Matters, and How to Get It

Intellectual Character: What It Is, Why It Matters, and How to Get It by Ron Ritchhart

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


More than any other, this book succeeded in defining the model of teaching to which I aspire. After defining Intellectual Character, Ritchhart challenges me to reflect on my practice, deeply and comprehensively, to examine how I interact with students, how I plan, how I structure my day, how I approach critical topics/content...and how those myriad choices enculturate intellectual character--or not. As the dozens of tape flags littering the pages testify, this book is my compass that I read and re-read repeatedly to help me regain my bearings when I sense I am off course in my practice. If you are looking for a "how-to" book on visible thinking, get Ritchhart's new book Making Thinking Visible. If, however, you are aching for serious reflection about the underlying "why" of visible thinking, Intellectual Character: What It Is, Why It Matter, and How to Get It is your book.



View all my reviews

The Magic Thief

I go back to school tomorrow after a three week break. (Love that year-round calendar!) My first reading focus lesson will be to share the list of more than 20 books I read while off-track. I’m proud of its diversity: tween fiction, adult fiction, professional, poetry, fantasy, biography, realistic fiction. I’m also looking forward to sharing my online reading: blogs, tweets, and RSS feeds.
The book I’m most excited to share is The Magic Thief by Sarah Prineas (2008). I first read about it on Educating Alice, one of the fabulous blogs I discovered during these three weeks. (A subject for a later post!) Educating Alice’s post linked to 2009 The E.B. White Read Aloud Awards page of The Association of Booksellers for Children. Thanks to “Alice’s” heads-up I got to read all but one of the books on this list, and The Magic Thief outshone them all.
As the award committee noted, The Magic Thief “...started “with a bang,” and just kept on going.” As a Harry Potter fan, I am hesitant to pick up anything having to do with wizards; I just can't believe anything else could measure up! I was thrilled to encounter a unique magical world here. As I read my thoughts did occasionally drift to Hogwarts, but I found there is room in my heart to love both worlds.

With an eye to instruction, I especially loved the text features Sarah Prineas included: the requisite fantasy map, and “A Guide to Wellmet’s People and Places,” which in addition to helpfully organizing the multiple characters and settings for transitional readers, also includes a runic alphabet key, and a few biscuit recipes. I also look forward to discussing the structure of the text, and how having access to two characters’ perspectives helped me have a more objective understanding of the events in the story. Yet, the perspectives both still had the limitations of being first person—so many mysteries remain.
I enjoyed it so much I will be lined up for the next book in this series, yet the HarperCollins website, with its slick interactive map and online games nearly put me off of the book altogether. I wandered across the website before reading. Then it all struck me as too packaged, too glossy, altogether ahead of itself. Shouldn’t the splash of the book come before the over-the-top publicity? It speaks well of the book that it was able to win me over in spite of the presumption of the publisher.

What Cures Your Teaching Blues?

The box finally arrived on the porch. Time slows to a crawl when I am awaiting new professional books! Although I have quite a collection, I love books about the craft of teaching. For me, professional books provide inspiration, gentle guidance, and companionship on what can often be a lonely journey as a classroom teacher.

In that vein, I cracked open Donalyn Miller’s The Book Whisperer last night. It was just the right antidote to a simmering bout of teaching melancholy. Donalyn is like the little sparrows in The Tale of Peter Rabbit who “…implored Peter to exert himself.” Here is a bit from her introduction:

“I believe that this corporate machinery of scripted programs, comprehension worksheets…computer-based incentive packages, and test-practice curricula facilitate a solid bottom line for the companies that sell them. These programs may deceive schools into believing they are using every available resource to teach reading, but ultimately, they are doomed to fail because they overlook what is most important. When you take a forklift and shovel off the programs, underneath it all is a child reading a book.”

There is so much I don’t know, so much I don’t have the energy for, so many things I never seem to be able to get done. But Donalyn urges me to take heart! I am doing something right: I never fail to be a model of passionate reading and I have a rich and growing classroom library.

Learning From My Own Reading Process, part one

I must credit Ellin Keene and Susan Zimmerman, and their brilliant Mosaic of Thought, for teaching me the power of reflecting closely on my own reading process to inform my reading instruction lo those many years ago. (The 2008 edition of Mosaic contains 70% new material and I highly recommend it also!) After Karen and Franki (in Learning to Read: Teaching Students in Grades 3-6) helped me to recognize book abandonment for the complex reading problem it is, I challenged myself to observe my own process in order to better help my students.

But I need to back up a little and set the stage. I am an avid reader. It is often difficult for my well-read book club to come up with titles I haven’t read. But in the past few years I have become increasingly impatient with fiction. When it comes to fiction, mama is a rollin’ stone. I have collected a stack of fiction titles, all with bookmarks permanently wedged somewhere before page 100. I am now in the habit of returning to the library bags full of the latest and greatest from the New York Times Bestseller list, overdue, but largely untouched. When I had this epiphany about my students’ abandonment issues, I was in the process of packing my bags yet again. The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery was my latest jilted lover.

Sure, everything started out all wine and roses. The Hedgehog was recommended to me by another avid reader, someone who is as close as they come to being my reading twin. Not only had she never steered me wrong before, she had recommended several books destined to become favorites. Recently, I ran into her at the grocery store and she couldn’t wait to tell me about this book I HAD to read. She insisted I would love it. I couldn’t wait to get to the bookstore. Full disclosure: I read an enticing review of the book long before running into my friend. I had picked it up, perused the accolades, and read the blurb several times already—without buying it. I just didn’t think it was for me. But after my friend’s recommendation, there was no hesitation. I trusted her that much, I simply had to read this book.

Once I got it home, my enthusiasm didn’t last long. There were two narrators, neither of which I cared about. Sure, I usually love gifted kids, but Paloma left me cold. And the other narrator was a stand-offish concierge in the girl’s exclusive French apartment building. I closed the book and set it aside, not having reached page 100. It was in that same week that I realized that observing myself as a reader at the edge of this precipice was a golden opportunity to better understand my students’ challenges.

My first step was to commit to reading it every day, at least a few pages. I knew that my attention would be even harder to engage if I didn’t keep the storyline fresh in my mind. It was hard enough without letting it get stale.

Step two was physically removing all other tempting fiction from my normal reading spots. I knew I could not fully engage with The Hedgehog while simultaneously reading some other tasty fiction morsel. With some books maybe I could have a little something on the side, but I just wasn’t that into this one. I had to be fictionally monogamous. (Of course I still clung to Still Learning to Read, but I had rationalized that in my own mind—it was helping me get through The Hedgehog, after all.)

Once The Hedgehog had my full and undivided fictional attention, I still wasn’t hooked. My attention wandered. I had to start mentally summarizing after each section to make sure I was getting it. It was painful. It took discipline.

True confessions: typically when I find myself in this quandary, I read the ending, and oh, was I tempted! Sure, that occasionally takes away any motivation I may have had to finish the book, but more often it re-energizes me. I’m no longer worried about who’s going to die and so I’m mentally free to step back and observe the author’s craft. (Thank you Katie Wood Ray for Wondrous Words!) But in this case I had more than myself to think of. What about the children?!

Reading the end is taboo. In my personal life I’m all too willing to violate social norms, but I’m usually careful not to model that in my role as a teacher. I feel an immense responsibility. I have learned that, even when I can’t see it, there are usually good, socially-important reasons for taboos. So if I read the ending I knew I would be opening up a whole can of worms. Alas, I was weak. I did it anyway… and it worked for me. So what now? Do I tell the kids? Do I tell the kids, but tell them it was wrong of me to do it, when I still don’t know if it is wrong? Do I lie? Help!

Learning from My Own Reading Process, pt. 2

Skimming ahead and reading the ending (and Karen & Franki) helped me understand that Muriel Barbery was setting up her story for the first 128 pages—the entire first section. By that point she has helped us come to know the narrators, our protagonists, quite well. Now we are ready for the rising action. Maybe now that I have a better understanding of this structure I will be able to break myself of this filthy habit?

With my temptation out of the way, I got hooked a little before the end of the first section, on page 110. I know I am hooked when there are passages I want to copy down into my notebook.

“Language and usage evolve over time: elements change, are forgotten or reborn, and while there are instances where transgression can become the source of an even greater wealth, this does not alter the fact that to be entitled to the liberties of playfulness or enlightened misusage when using language, one must first and foremost have sworn one’s total allegiance.”

What a lovely way of saying, “First you have to know the rules, then you can break them.” Soon after, on page 123, Barbery offers us this tribute to writing as thinking:

“…I witness the birth on paper of sentences that have eluded my will and appear in spite of me on the sheet, teaching me something that I neither knew nor thought I might want to know.”


And then, to fully set the hook, on page 164 there is a reference to the Japanese concept of Wabi, connecting this fine book synchronously to a string of others we have studied this school year: Love That Dog, Hate That Cat, A River of Words, and finally Wabi Sabi. Suddenly, I was in love! I read a hundred more pages that night, unable to quit until it fell out of my sleepy grasp at nearly 3:00am.

What lessons are there for my instruction?
• Trust recommendations given by people who know you well as a reader, especially if they have been right in the past.
• Read at least a little everyday to keep the story fresh in your mind.
• When a book is challenging, one at a time is more than enough! No books on the side!
• Pausing and reflecting is essential when you’re struggling. Writing about what is difficult is even better. When you are attempting to clarify your own thinking, the puzzle you’re trying to solve gives purpose to your reading.
• Know that long books often take the first 100 pages to “set up.” As Franki and Karen remind us, there are details in those pages essential to your understanding. Be patient and pay attention!
• Know what hooks you as a reader.

And what will I do differently next time as a reader?
• It might have helped if I had known how my friend knew I would love this book. When my enthusiasm began to wane, I could have focused on that as my purpose.
• Don’t be afraid to contact your recommending friend to ask for some coaching. Book lovers will gladly revisit a title they cared enough about to recommend!