Hello Book Bums families!
Happy Valentine's Day! 'Tis the season for sweet notes, poetry, and love stories, and this week in the newsletter we have all that and more. Read to the end for a special note about Book Bums holiday hours.
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Word of the Week
alluring (uh-lur-ing) adjective/describing word - having an attractive or enticing quality
Sam considered the alluring job offer that included a higher salary and more vacation time.
Literary Calendar
• February 18 is the birthday of American novelist Toni Morrison.
• This Ohio born author won a Pulitzer Prize for her novel Beloved.
• She also won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993.
• You can read more about her life and work in this article from the National Women's History Museum.
From our Bookshelves
XO, OX, A Love Story is about Ox who dearly admires and is, in fact, in love with Gazelle. Ox closes each letter he writes to his love with an XO and then he signs his name, OX. Gazelle writes back, but she’s coy and tries to convey to Ox that she has many admirers and has no time for the likes of him. No matter how she tries eschewing the obtuse Ox’s advances, Gazelle only becomes more alluring in his eyes until . . . the unthinkable happens!
Grab a copy of the book here (even if it’s no longer Valentine’s Day) and/or watch the video here. You’ll love these two crazy dudes who are sharing the book and enjoy how they’re absolutely having a ball with the story. It’s so much fu
Tips for Raising Readers and Writers
Reading Adam Rex’s XO, OX, A Love Story would be a grand (and cheeky) way to inspire some letter writing while also promoting the conventions of friendly letters (salutation/greeting, body, closing, and signature). At the end of the book, after lots of hilarious communications between Gazelle and Ox, there’s an unfinished letter. You can pose the following question: What do you think Gazelle is going to say in this letter? Then you can say: Pretend you’re Gazelle and write a letter to Ox.
Of course, kids could also write letters to people they love.
We’re including a printable form that your kids can use to write lots of letters. We’ve labeled the parts of a standard friendly letter to help support your young writers as they spread the love for Valentine’s Day and beyond.
Print a few copies and have them on hand for whenever an opportunity for letter writing pops up.
Pause for Poetry
Wild Nights
by Emily Dickinson
Wild nights - Wild nights!
Were I with thee
Wild nights should be
Our luxury!
Futile - the winds -
To a Heart in port -
Done with the Compass -
Done with the Chart!
Rowing in Eden -
Ah - the Sea!
Might I but moor - tonight -
In thee!
Tips for Families
Children feel the most vulnerable when they are hungry, angry, lonely, or tired. HALT is a mnemonic device for reminding adults that trying to teach kids when they are struggling with any of these four circumstances can be difficult. Children simply cannot learn from us when they’re trying to get basic needs met.
This means that it can be helpful, when you note an undesired behavior from a child, to avoid kneejerk, emotional responses in the moment. Check in with the child. Even adults can lose their composures when feeling hungry, angry, lonely, or tired. Can we agree that punishing or even coaching a child who’s experiencing these temporary conditions/emotions should be avoided?
That’s not to say we provide an excuse to or for the child.
When kids behave badly and we say, “Oh. He’s just tired,” or “She’s just hungry,” —even if it’s true— it feels as if we’re excusing the behavior. We’re not. We’re just deciding that we’re going to teach into that poor behavior when the child can best receive the coaching and/or correction.
When dealing with difficult behavior from children, it’s important to remember to talk with them often, and to consistently note, aloud, all the things they’re doing well—the things you’d like to see repeated. Embracing a calm, thoughtful demeanor and shining light upon the positives is often sufficient for moving kids from misbehaving to behaving.
When poorly behaving kids are feeling hungry, angry, lonely, or tired, you might want to save your instruction for another time.
Tips for Teachers
Every elementary reading teacher should, on a regular basis, hear his or her students reading aloud from grade level appropriate texts. I simply could not feel confident talking about my students’ reading skills if I have not been listening to them read.
Far too many really bright kids have “faked” their way—making their teachers believe they are skilled readers when they lack the foundational skills needed to successfully navigate grade level texts.
TIP: When kids continually choose to read books that are “easy readers” or graphic novels, it is likely that those students are leaning upon pictures and context clues to guess what words say instead of using grapheme-phoneme correspondences to decode words.
When kids guess too many words in a text incorrectly, and there are no pictures to guide them back on track, their comprehension suffers.
Once students have been sufficiently equipped to decode most every word on the pages of grade level texts, the time once spent teaching phonics should be devoted to teaching kids how to navigate more and more demanding texts. Your students should be doing a lot of reading, and you should be sitting alongside them, listening and offering the coaching they need to move forward.
Note: Your students should be doing almost all the reading. Do not “share” the reading. No I read a page, you read a page situations. If your students can skillfully read a full page of a book, they should be reading ALL the pages. Readers need to be coached to read for longer and longer stretches at a time. This is why, at Book Bums, we teach quite a few short phonics lessons (featuring less frequently occurring letter combinations) while reading a chapter book. As the lessons grow shorter, our readers should be sufficiently equipped to read from their chapter books for longer and longer stretches of time.
Practical Grammar
The short e and short i sounds can be tricky to differentiate, so the words resend and rescind can sound a lot alike. Resend means to send again and rescind means to revoke, take back, cancel, or repeal an agreement.
Not long ago, I needed to rescind a contract proposal. It struck me how these words that sound so much alike are nearly opposites.
News from Book Bums
Book Bums will be open on President’s Day! Even though it’s a long weekend for most of our students, families are in the back-to-school routines by Monday evenings anyway; and with all the Mondays we’ve missed, we feel it’s important to be open.
Just for Fun
I snapped this photo while I was at Barnes and Noble a few months ago. It made me laugh out loud. Of course, I had to look through the titles on the table, and I noted just how many of those books they’d displayed that I had read. Quite a few, actually. Then I tried to decide if there were any books I’ve pretended to have read but really haven’t. I was feeling pretty cocky until I remembered high school. Yeah. I’m not feeling so good about myself anymore.
Here are a few quick links if you'd like to read a book you've only pretended to have read before.
The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
Ulysses by James Joyce
The Alchemist by Paul Coelho
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