Hello Book Bums families!
If you're local, we hope you are enjoying the sunshine and cooler fall weather we've experienced of late. At Book Bums we're ready to learn no matter the season, and this week we're sharing more seasonal activities for families and readers.
In this edition of the newsletter you'll find a fun skeleton activity for the whole family, book and video recommendations to take you on a journey to Mars, a writing contest, and more. Read on!
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Word of the Week
wane (wayn) verb/action word - to decrease in size or become less powerful, to dwindle
As the moon wanes each month, the nights get darker.
Literary Calendar
• October 21 is the birthday of poet and literary critic Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
• Coleridge was an English poet and a Romantic.
• This movement in literature focuses on nature and emotion as valuable ways of knowing the world.
• Some of his most famous works are narrative, or storytelling, poems like "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" and "Kubla Khan."
• Notice the rich description in the beginning of "Kubla Khan," shared here.
Kubla Khan, the first lines
by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round;
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.
From our Bookshelves
A Rover’s Story, by Jasmine Warga, is about a NASA rover created to explore the surface of Mars. Though he’s not designed for familial bonds, Res (short for Resilience) develops a sincere caring for both his human and non-human companions. Resilience’s heart will absolutely captivate you and the young readers you adore.
A Rover’s Story is considered a middle-grade STEM book because it features science themes in space exploration (jet propulsion, collection of soil samples, planet Mars) however it also explores fundamental life issues (family, what makes us human, home).
The book spans 20 years and is told by Res himself and through letters written to him by a girl named Sophie.
Reading the fictional story of Resilience may be the impetus for an investigation of the real-life Mars exploration rover named Perseverance.
That’s actually what inspired Warga to write A Rover’s Story.
I’m including a couple of links to get you started down the rabbit hole—just in case.
Check out this page from NASA.
This video can help kids to understand how rock samples can reveal information about a place.
Cool Fact: Though Jasmine Warga currently lives in Chicago, she is from Cincinnati, Ohio. She’s a Bengals fan and loves all things Fiona.
Tips for Families
While out and about in your neighborhoods, your kids might be noticing some skeletons—some funny and some spooky. Though I don’t get into Halloween décor, I’m happy to use holiday themes to complement my literacy instruction and to grow my students’ background knowledge. To help you do the same, I’m sharing an activity that might just be a lot of fun for your family.
First, use the PDF shared below to print and cut apart the names of some major bones in the human body.
Next, present your kids with printed copy of a diagram of the human skeleton, also shared in PDF form below.
Watch this YouTube video to help your students learn where many of the bones are located.
Ask a child to lie down, supine, on the floor. Read each label, showing it and noticing the spellings, and then place it on the floor next to the child’s corresponding bone.
Take a picture of your labeled child so s/he can use it to help label you.
Finally, you lie down on the floor and encourage your child to label your bones. Provide tips and tricks for remembering which bone is where.
You can also play “Simon Says” using these more sophisticated bone names. Instead of saying “Simon says touch your knee,” try saying, “Simon says touch your patella,” instead. You’ll be reinforcing the bone names as you do the motions along with your kids.
Kids can and should learn to use advanced vocabulary. I’ve never met a young child who didn’t enjoy knowing cool things.
Tips for Raising Readers and Writers
Inspire your students to write by inviting them to enter a contest where they could win $20 or even $50!
Though MLK Day won’t be celebrated until the 3rd Monday of January, I wanted to let you know that the 2025 MLK Day student writing and fine arts contest, organized by Live the Dream: Our Declaration of Unity, is open to all students, grades K-12, who reside within the Lakota Local School District boundaries. The deadline for entering is Tuesday, November 26th, 2024, at 4:00 p.m., so you have just over a month for your children to enter the contest.
Most everyone is familiar with MLK’s “I Have a Dream” speech, however, for this contest, students must choose another of MLK’s speeches, sermons, or written messages and share what it would look like if they took his words to heart and lived them out. Use this link to learn more and to access the submission form.
Winners will be chosen for each category in lower elementary, upper elementary, junior high, and high school students, and they’ll present their work to the public as part of a community celebration to be held on January 20, 2025. Every student who submits work will receive a Certificate of Participation.
Tips for Teachers
We all do it, don’t we?
There are quite a few reasons we might find ourselves reading the same text again and again without gaining anything substantive for our effort.
There are some physical issues that can make it difficult for readers to maintain focus. Difficulties with eyes tracking, ADHD, and even the simple act of aging can make focusing and gleaning information from text challenging. Anxiety, stress, and depression, too, can take our focus away from the text. That’s normal. It can happen to anyone.
But there are ways we can explicitly teach kids to help them maintain focus as they’re reading.
First, we must explicitly share what “bulldozer reading” looks like. Bulldozer reading is when we just plow through text without giving the ideas expressed a moment’s thought. Kids need to understand that we all do that sometimes, but they also need to learn how to focus themselves when it happens to them. They need to learn how to get back on track.
What do you do?
Here are five main strategies I use to get my reading back on track.
First, I subvocalize when I’m reading. I know that I pay attention better when I can audibly hear the words I’m reading. I call this “whisper reading.” It doesn’t have to be loud enough for anyone else to hear. In fact, just moving my lips as I read the words (lip reading?) helps me quite a bit. I teach my students to do this when they take standardized tests.
Second, I point my finger to the words as I’m reading. This highlighting of the words helps me to attend better to the text on the page. I coach my students to use a finger on the page or screen to keep themselves zeroed in on the text.
Third, I pose questions to myself to ensure I am taking away what I need from the text. Asking a few of the question words (Who? What? When? Where? Why? Which? and/or How?) can help me to recognize whether I’m sufficiently engaged or not. Another way to do this is to see if I can summarize what I’ve read. A good summary addresses those question words. At Book Bums we say, “Give me five,” and the kids point to their fingers, one at a time, as they answer the first five question words.
Fourth, I try to be active while I’m reading. If it says something about someone smiling, I smile. If it says the scientists were baffled, or angry, or amazed, my facial expressions match that mood. I encourage my students to practice “active reading” when I read aloud to them.
Finally, I try to eliminate possible distractions. When what I’m reading is important, I set myself up for good reading by choosing a space where I can focus well. Sometimes that means I leave my house because there’s always something there for me to do. If I can get myself somewhere with fewer distractions, I’m more likely to attend to what I’m reading. We can teach kids to make wise choices about their environment when they’re trying to read.
There are other things folks suggest for staying focused such as taking notes while reading, adjusting reading speed, and taking breaks.
What do you do when you find your attention is waning while reading?
Practical Grammar
In the book A Rover’s Story, in one paragraph it says, “Guardian is often silent. But sometimes she unexpectedly interrupts me and Fly’s conversation.”
Ouch.
First, in speech and in writing, it is considered polite to put the other person, not yourself, first in the sentence. When Resilience was talking, he should have placed Fly’s name first, like this:
But sometimes she unexpectedly interrupts Fly’s and me’s conversation.
Better. But it’s definitely not right yet.
The pronoun me was used in the original sentence, but in this case, it should say my conversation since it’s showing ownership.
So, the sentence should say,
But sometimes she unexpectedly interrupts Fly’s and my conversation.
News from Book Bums
Presently, we have six openings for tutoring at Book Bums. Six. That’s it. On some evenings, Book Bums is so busy we could not fit even one more student. Please accept our many, many thanks for sending so many wonderful families our way! You’re sharing about us so well that we can barely keep up with the demand coming from word of mouth alone! Thank you! Thank you!
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