Hello Book Bums families!
It's cold outside again here in Cincinnati, so it's the perfect time to share a book about hibernation and learn about sleep words We're also thinking about libraries and building our own reading lists. We hope you're staying warm and enjoying this week's newsletter!
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Word of the Week
lugubrious (loo-goo-bree-us) adjective/describing word - appearing sad or dismal
After her break-up, the girl just wanted to sit in her room and play lugubrious music to match her feelings.
Literary Calendar
- On January 20, 1961, Robert Frost spoke at the inauguration of President John F. Kenney.
- He shared a poem called "The Gift Outright."
- Frost had written a special poem for the occasion, but because of the sun he couldn't see the words. So he recited one he knew by heart instead.
- If you have a poetry lover or American history fan in your life, have them read Frost's poem alongside two other presidential inauguration poems: Maya Angelou's "On the Pulse of Morning" and Amanda Gorman's "The Hill We Climb."
The Gift Outright
by Robert Frost
The land was ours before we were the land’s
She was our land more than a hundred years
Before we were her people. She was ours
In Massachusetts, in Virginia,
But we were England’s, still colonials,
Possessing what we still were unpossessed by,
Possessed by what we now no more possessed.
Something we were withholding made us weak
Until we found out that it was ourselves
We were withholding from our land of living,
And forthwith found salvation in surrender.
Such as we were we gave ourselves outright
(The deed of gift was many deeds of war)
To the land vaguely realizing westward,
But still unstoried, artless, unenhanced,
Such as she was, such as she will become.
From our Bookshelves
Time to Sleep by Denise Fleming is a beautiful bedtime book to share with your young readers this time of year. It’s informative in that it features animals that take a long time of rest during the wintertime, and it tells where and how they might do so.
If you choose to read this book to your kids, you may want to know that:
- Snails enter a state of deep and continuous deep sleep known as hibernation.
- Skunks do not hibernate. They do enter a state of light sleep called torpor. They can wake on warmer days to eat or even to find a mate.
- Turtles do hibernate, but the official term describing what they do is brumation. Brumation is used to describe the long winter sleep of reptiles and amphibians.
- Woodchucks are true hibernators.
- Ladybugs enter a state of sleep known as diapause (for insects) during the winter months.
- Bears also enter a state of torpor, so they might wake up to defend themselves.
Did you know that some animals can tuck themselves away in a state of dormancy during the winter and during the summer?
Hibernation: Winter dormancy due to cold and food scarcity.
Estivation: Summer dormancy due to heat and drought.
Kids effortlessly soak up language and information about the world around them with peak brain development happening throughout their first six years of life. This is a crucial time for building lifelong foundations for learning. Reading lots and lots of books during these years is certainly recommended, but book reading benefits everyone—no matter the age.
Wordology Workshop
- The root torp comes from the Latin word torpere meaning numb or sluggish.
- We use it in the English words torpid and torpor.
- Torp is also the root in the word torpedo.
- Now a torpedo may appear anything but sluggish, but the meaning comes from the effect of the missile. A torpedo hit shocks and incapacitates its target.
Tips for Families
I hate to admit this, but I’m not a library person. I believe I have been to the NY public libraries more than I’ve been to any of our local public libraries in Cincinnati. Because I am a teacher and business owner who strives to promote literacy in our community, I’ve always purchased books to grow my own libraries so I could, then, share books with others. But I am certainly a library proponent.
If you’re not already visiting your local library, I highly recommend you do so. My grandchildren all love their visits to select books and participate in story times—and there’s so much more that’s offered now. When the time came to renew my passport, I signed up to have someone walk me through everything I needed at the library, and a librarian helped me ensure I’d done everything correctly for free. I was amazed at all the library offers if only we take the time to visit.
It’s a new year, and I hope that you’ll begin taking advantage of the vast resources provided to our community members, beginning this week.
Speaking of the library, I saw the list of the New York Public Library’s most borrowed books of 2025, and I checked to see what I’d already enjoyed and which books I just might be purchasing soon!
There are a couple that were already on my list, but I’ve found a few others to add. I loved the book Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese, and I hadn’t even heard of The Covenant of Water. That’s going into my cart. I’ve heard lots of talk about The Dream Hotel being a good book. Into my cart it goes. God of the Woods is going in as well. Will you add any of these to your TBR stack?
Tips for Raising Readers and Writers
We just celebrated a birthday with my oldest granddaughter. She turned eleven years old today. I’d gotten her a couple of books for gifts (of course), but when I saw how many books she got as gifts from others, I was astounded. Her momma had gotten her the cake topper shown above, and she’d had the girls all make gorgeous bookmarks for a party treat. It was just so abundantly clear that we have a reader on our hands, and I am beyond thrilled that I’ve gotten to be a part of that.
I’m working on a podcast episode right now called, “Dear Hannah.” You see, a friend asked me to teach her everything I know about how to raise a young reader who loves all things books. I’ll be sharing that in the next few weeks.
What I’m realizing is that kids can love having books read to them—most kids do, but they cannot love reading if they don’t have the skills to access the words on the page.
If you want your kids to be readers, you simply must ensure they’re equipped to decode the words on the pages.
With my grandchildren, I simply began, one lesson at a time, to teach them how words work. It turns out that when you make the lessons fun, they look forward to the next lesson. And after lots of fun-filled play dates with a focus on phonics, lo and behold . . . they’re reading.
Practical Grammar
I used the phrase beck and call the other day, and I wondered if there really was a word beck or if it was just the shortening of the word beckon. It turns out, some folks mistakenly do say beckon call. It’s one of those eggcorns—words that are commonly mistaken for other similarly sounding words. In fact, the proper phrase is beck and call. Beck, it turns out, is a gesture used to signal, summon, or direct someone. Beck can also be used to mean brook.
News from Book Bums
We need a substitute teacher to help us out for a couple of weeks on Tuesdays at Shawnee ECS and Thursdays at Heritage ECS from 3:30-5:30. The dates are January 20, 22, 27, and 29th. You do not need to be a certified teacher, but teaching experience is preferred. The rate of pay is $33 per hour. If you’re interested, please email Dr. Christy at christy@bookbums.com.
Tips for Teachers
I was listening to a podcast last week, and I heard Chris Williamson say, “Learning is repeated recall not repeated exposure.” Dr. Andrew Huberman agreed and shared that reading a passage, even five times, is not as effective as reading one time while employing self-testing (actively recalling what the passage said). Here's a link to watch a clip of the conversation. You can see the whole conversation here.
How can we teachers (and parents) create powerful student retrieval/recall practice regarding what we’ve taught our students?
Some ideas might include:
- Encourage your kids do brain dumps where they share everything they know about a given topic.
- Provide mini quizzes—even if they’re not going to be graded. The act of pulling something from memory deepens the pathways to access to that memory more easily the next time.
- Invite students to share what they’ve learned with others even if it’s just a quick “turn ‘n’ talk” with an academic partner.
- Use exit tickets but ensure that the exit tickets reflect lessons from long ago, too, not just the most recent ones.
- Spiral content so kids see information again and again.
At Book Bums, we use review binders that have letters on each page so we can recall the phonics rules we’ve been learning. We use binders that have a word on each page, in the same progression as the lessons we teach, so kids decode the word AND name the phonics rules at play. We use dictated sentences that require our students to recall previous lessons. We use word lists, sent through weekly emails (when applicable), to encourage parents to help their kids review what they’ve been taught. We’re doing all we can to remind our students, again and again, of all we’ve been learning.
Just for Fun
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