Hello Book Bums families!
This week in the newsletter we enjoy some word nerdiness, share great books, and learn fun facts about history and Dolly Parton! There's truly something for everyone. Read on and enjoy.
"Books are a uniquely portable magic."
-Stephen King
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Word of the Week
buoyant (boy-ent) adjective/describing word - able to float
Because the beach ball is full of air, it is buoyant and sits on the surface of the pool instead of sinking.
Literary Calendar
- Stephen King was born on September 21, 1947.
- This prolific American author is well-known for his fantastical and scary novels including The Shining, Carrie, The Stand, and Misery.
- Several of Stephen King's short stories have also been adapted into memorable films such as The Shawshank Redemption, Stand By Me, and most recently, The Life of Chuck.
"If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot."
-Stephen King
From our Bookshelves
Wish, by Barbara O’Connor, is a chapter book for kids ages 8-12, and I found it to be a true treasure! If you love Because of Winn Dixie, I believe you’ll really enjoy this one too.
Charlie, short for Charlemagne, is a fourth grader who was removed from her house by children’s protective services and placed with an aunt and uncle she barely knows who live hours away in the Blue Ridge Mountains.
Each day, Charlie watches for things to make wishes on such as blowing stray eyelashes, seeing 11:11 on the clock, and observing the first star in the night sky. In truth, she could use some luck. Her mom is in a deep state of depression, her father is in a correctional institute, and her high-school-age sister is nearly off on her own and is living her own wonderful life. Charlie wishes her mom could get her feet on the ground and her father would be “corrected” so she can go home.
While Charlie is way off in North Carolina, things don’t start well. She has no friends, she lives with people who are trying—but they don’t seem to understand girls her age, and she feels a little out of place with these “hillbilly” mountain folks. Though she endures some trials, it doesn’t take long for Charlie to discover the friends and family she’s been longing for are right where she least expected to find them.
Tips for Families
If you walk outdoors this time of year, keep your eyes open to see if you can spot some milkweed. I loved finding these magical pockets of goodness while I explored the woods as a child. Just recently, I learned that during World War II, that silky stuff from the seeds was used in sailors’ life jackets.
It turns out that the fiber from the kapok tree was sourced from the East Indies, but Japan had cut off access during wartime, so folks began gathering milkweed floss. It’s lightweight, has insulation properties, is six times more buoyant than cork, and can keep a 150-pound person afloat for 40 hours.
The U.S. government launched a milkweed collection drive, and school children were recruited to collect ripe milkweed pods in the fall. Millions of pounds of pods were collected and 1.2 million lifejackets were produced for sailors and airmen.
Today, we’re back to using kapok supplies for life vests, and that’s a good thing for monarch butterflies. The milkweed plant is the solitary food source for monarch caterpillars.
Tips for Raising Readers and Writers
Have you heard of wordnesia? It’s a word describing the feeling when a familiar, correctly spelled word doesn’t look right to you. I know I’ve experienced this. I ask my husband, “How do you spell ___?” and he tells me. I say, “Hm. I wrote that, but it doesn’t look right to me.”
The name fits, right?
There’s a similar word-related sensation called orthographic satiation. This is when you observe a word for so long that it begins to look strange to you. It’s the length of time spent looking at the word that causes them to look strange. I experienced this when I was a cheerleader painting large signs and banners. After a while the words stopped looking like they were spelled correctly, and I had to continually check my spelling.
Additionally, there’s semantic satiation. This happens when you say a word so many times in a row that the word stops sounding like a word you recognize. When I was a young woman working in retail, I had to do an inventory event at a clothing store. I said, “nineteen ninety-nine, nineteen ninety-nine, nineteen ninety-nine. . . so many times that it began to sound like gibberish and was difficult to say.
Have you experienced any of these?
Though it’s fun when these things happen by chance, I wonder if you can try to create some of these sensations with some kids you love.
For younger kids, challenge them to experience sematic satiation by repeating an everyday word like dog, football, or books over and over again. See how many they can say before they feel like they’re no longer saying the same word. Weird!
Try teaching older kids the word satiety which means well sated or well satisfied (which is related to the word satiation as used in “semantic satiation.” Repeat one of those bolded words again and again and again until it no longer sounds like a word. You’ll surely create a memorable moment with a new word, and that will help them to remember it.
For me, each of those words started sounding wonky by about the 10th time I said it. How about you?
Wordology Workshop
- The Latin root satis means enough or sufficient.
- You find it in the words satisfy and satisfaction.
- Satis drops its s and lends its meaning to the words satiate and insatiable as well.
Practical Grammar
- Apostrophe Misuse, its and it’s
It’s = it is / it has
Its = possessive
Error: The dog lost it’s collar
Fix: The dog lost its collar
News from Book Bums
I love this quote. I DO want people to look to me for hope when they feel unsure about what they can accomplish. Mostly, though, I want to inspire teachers to inspire their students. I want our teachers’ students to look at them and say, “Because of you, I didn’t give up.”
Tips for Teachers
I was listening to a podcast the other day, and the featured guest was saying that children do not need to be able to verbalize how words work, they simply need to recognize word patterns. That’s wrong. Kids don’t need only to recognize patterns. They need to know how words work.
In the image above, one of my students was doing a word sort. He was looking at words with -igh saying /eye/ while also acknowledging that words with -eigh say /ay/. Actually, the e-i says /ay/ (It’s that weird flip flop sound) and the g-h says “absolutely nothing.”
Sure. I-g-h says /eye/ in many words like high, sigh, and flight, but not if there’s an e before it like in eight. For kids to become skilled readers and accurate spellers, phonics rules must be explicitly taught. Kids should be equipped to decode most every word on the pages they read—and that means they know how words work. They don’t simply recognize patters in words.
As I was writing my reaction to this comment, I thought, I wonder what AI would say about this? So, I inquired, and the I am happy to report that AI correctly stated that it’s important for kids to learn phonics rules and that relying solely on pattern recognition was an insufficient method for reading and spelling.
Just for Fun
While on set making the movie 9 to 5 with her co-stars Lily Tomlin and Jane Fonda, Dolly was observing what was happening around her and began writing the music and lyrics to the theme song “Nine to Five.” She didn’t have her guitar with her, so she played the rhythm out on her acrylic fingernails! Listen to her share about it and demonstrate how she did it here.
Though I was never a big fan of her movies or music, she is among my heroes when it comes to promoting literacy with children. Through her Imagination Library, Dolly Parton has already provided 287,502,435 books to kids, and she’s still going strong!
Dolly said, “The seeds of dreams are often found in books, and the seeds you help plant in your community can grow across the world.” The world is certainly a better place because Dolly Parton’s in it.
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