Year End Thoughts on a Timeless Picture Book

      I read at least one picture book a day. As a kindergarten teacher, I steer away from picture books that blatantly try and teach my students “lessons.” Adults who impose their morality onto unsuspecting 4 and 5-year-olds usually don’t hold the student’s interest. I am particularly sensitive about books that aren’t respectful of young children, seeing them as blank slates and not the interesting, thinking humans that they are. 

     Children want to hear stories.  They don’t want to be preached to.  But find a good story where universal themes are woven into the characters and their relationships, and you will hold the rapt attention of an entire class.  I’m always on the hunt for these great stories that leave us hankering for a good discussion or leave us with a feel-good moment.  Lately they feel like they’re few and far between. 

     Don’t get me wrong. The books my fellow picture book authors are writing and that publishing companies are buying are beautifully written. But compared to the literature from earlier decades, many feel like they are leaning out of storytelling as we knew it and are more no-nonsense books with sparse wording or non-fiction subjects.  All have their merits and are well produced.  They just lack the storytelling of years gone by when the wordcount hovered well above and over the current 500-word norm and were not influenced by the Common Core Standards.

     In 2010 the Common Core Standards were adopted for education across the country.  It’s my understanding they were not developed by educators but rather came out of the business and political community.  Technically they came from The National Governor’s Association (a political organization founded in 1908) and The Council of Chief State School Officers.  At the time I remember noticing a huge shift away from reading and writing fiction and a move toward non-fiction literature only.

      As a kindergarten teacher, it didn’t make sense.  It was completely out of balance.  Literary learning shifted away from fantasy and toward nuts and bolts, cut and dry, no-nonsense reading and writing.  I worried about how it would affect young children and their desire to read and write. I worried that storytelling would be devalued.  I worried that the publishing industry would shift their product to meet the new demand.  I think I was on to something thirteen years ago.

     Social Emotional Learning has been a big buzz phrase, especially post pandemic lockdown.  I’m finding many of the “message” books aren’t delighting us with story but are beating us over the head with be kind, be brave, be happy, be you, be special…you get the idea.  So just the other day I reached back in time and pulled out what I consider to be an old classic, Stella Luna. 

    

     Stella Luna was written and illustrated by Janell Cannon and was published in 1993. I had forgotten how much I loved this picture book about the baby bat who gets separated from her mother and lands in a bird’s nest.  So many intricate ideas in this book to ponder like:  How we perceive each other, (The little bat is the loveable protagonist, although many people think of bats negatively. The birds are characterized in a less appealing way.  Plus, they eat bugs, yuck!), Ideas of value, (who has it and who doesn’t?)  Concepts of good and bad, (What constitutes good and what constitutes bad? What is good/acceptable behavior and what is bad/unacceptable behavior?) An exploration of right and wrong, (Who is right and who is wrong?)  Point of reference, (How important is point of reference and context?)  And then there’s judgement.  (Who judges whom and why?  What is normal and what is not? Who deserves love and who does not?)  All this wrapped up in this book about a little bat who’s lost its mother and the family of birds who take her in. This book is timeless.  None of these ideas have faded.  They are more relevant than ever.

     As a children’s book author, I like to think about…if I had written a particular book, what would I have written. Hands down, Stella Luna.  I remember reading it in the 90’s when I was “author-curious” and being drawn to the irony of the story.  This idea with all the above listed implications that turned my perception upside down in a delightful, intellectual way that didn’t insult young children.  I wanted to write stories like that.  I wanted to bring that twist that leaves you thinking about the story a little bit longer…that makes it linger in the edges of your mind.  

And so, when it was my turn to write my own story, Stella Luna was there in the recesses of my imagination cheering me on.  I found that delightful irony in my debut picture book, Hello, Little One: A Monarch Butterfly Story about a caterpillar and a butterfly who only have a two-week window to connect before they proceed through their separate life cycles. Youth longing for age and Age longing for youth.  Without Stella Luna, my story would have been flat, maybe even a lesson-filled tale of morality.  I am grateful that I came upon this book before I set out to write my own years ago and am so happy to have rediscovered it now with my new class of students. It’s storytelling at its best. It’s the book I wish I had written.  What book do you wish you had written?

By Zeena M. Pliska

Kindergarten Teacher by day (public school in Los Angeles)

Children's Book Author by night 

Hello, Little One:  A Monarch Butterfly Story (Page Street Kids)

Egyptian Lullaby (Roaring Brook Press)

It’s Not Just Reading Aloud—It’s a Performance

(Ignore the above byline. This post is by Mary Ann Rodman.)

No one ever read to me until was in the Third Grade. Since I taught myself to read well before kindergarten, my parents thought reading to me was a waste of their time. I’m sure they thought they were strengthening my skills.

Apparently that was a popular philosophy in early childhood education at the time. I do not remember a single teacher in grades K-2 having a “story time.” However the students were encouraged to read their favorite books to the class, which could be pretty excruciating. I dislike Winnie the Pooh to this day because of Margaret in second grade who read ALL the Winnie books to us. Badly.

How wonderful it was when my third-grade teacher, Mrs. O’Neill, announced that first day, “I like to read a little every day after lunch. Settles the stomach, you know?” Mrs. O’Neill read us ALL the Mary Poppins books. She made Mary P come to life exactly the way I imagined P.L. Travers saw her.  (Two years later, when I saw Julie Andrews dripping sweetness and light on the screen, all I could think was “This isn’t the way Mrs. O’Neill made her sound.”

I know there were other books that year, to “settle our stomachs after lunch,” but the one I remember best was A Dog on Barkham Street by Mary Stolz. There were an awful lot of nine-year-old boys who suddenly had “something in my eye” during the last pages. I was thrilled to learn on my next library trip there was a companion novel, The Bully of Barkham Street; the same story told from the POV of the first book’s antagonist.  That was the first time that the saying  “there are two sides to every story” made sense to me.

Fifth grade we moved to Mississippi. Miss Parnell seemed to be at least a hundred years old, and taught in the same school her entire career. She most definitely believed in LONG reading breaks after lunch.  I had to listen closely to decipher her thicker-than-sorghum accent. I’d check out whatever book she was currently reading at the public library so I could follow along. (A true Mississippi accent has a way of turning one-syllable words into three or four syllables.) I wasn’t terribly enamored with her book choices, which I suspect had never changed the whole time she taught.

However, Miss Parnell had a writer friend name Miss Welty who had lived on her street for years and years. Miss Welty gave Miss Parnell a copy of her new (and only children’s book) The Shoe Bird. I often nodded off in those warm afternoons in my un-air-conditioned classroom. As for Miss Welty’s book, I couldn’t make head nor tail of it. It was about a parrot who lived in a shoe store, and somehow birds from all over showed up for a free pair of shoes.  Even then I wasn’t a fan of “talking critter” books.

Fast forward a few years and I realized that “Miss Welty” was Eudora Welty who eventually won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book award. The Shoe Bird had only one printing. I believe Miss Parnell donated the book to the school library. Those first (and only) original editions must be worth a fortune. In fact-checking this post, I discovered that Welty wrote the book to fulfill a contractual obligation and because she “needed a new roof on house.” Such are the inspirations of a writer. (It also got pretty bad reviews, proving that a master of the American short story can sometimes hit a clunker.)

What are my own favorite read-alouds?  For the picture book crowd, my go-to is Bootsie Barker Bites by Barbara Bottner (say THAT fast three times!) The old drama major in me tends to act stories, rather than simply read them. This is a two character story, the bratty bully Bootsie who terrorizes the nameless main character.  The two girls are forever having “forced play dates” because their mothers are friends. I have a different voice for each girl. I love doing Bootsie, who sometimes pretends she has brought her pet dinosaur, Charlene with her. Of course, Charlene threatens to eat our main character. Love doing Charlene’s roar!

For the elementary ages, the age at which I most appreciated being read to, I like One Good Thing About America by Ruth Freeman. It’s an immigrant tale, told through the letters a little girl, Anais, writes to her grandmother who still lives in her village in an unnamed French-speaking African country. I can just hear Anais’ voice trying to explain the strange and sometimes troubling aspects of her new home in Boston.


And for the middle-schoolers, for whom a book can never be too gross or disgusting, I would share Get Well Soon: History’s Worst Plagues and the Heroes Who Fought Them by Jennifer Wright.  The title of this non-fiction pretty well sums up the book except for one thing; it’s funny! Wright knows she’s treading in some dangerous territory.  She takes the “Euww Factor” way down with her tongue-in-cheek descriptions of ancient remedies and “scientific” thought. I’ve had the flu for two weeks, and this was the only thing that made me laugh.

Well, there you have it folks . . .  my personal history of reading aloud. Bon appétit!

By Mary Ann Rodman

P.S. from Carmela: If you like judging a book by its cover, I invite you to vote in the Houston Bay Area RWA Judge A Book By Its Cover (JABBIC) Readers' Choice contest. You'll find the cover of my historical romance Playing by Heart in the Young Adult Category.

READING ALOUD TO MY DOG IN MY PJS

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Howdy, Campers, and Happy Poetry Friday!  (Can you tell I had no idea what to title this post?)

Guess what? February 1st was #WorldReadAloudDay, and we TeachingAuthors are celebrating all week long!

Carmela's post started us out, Esther reads poetry aloud to her grandson via Skype with glee, and now it's my turn!

This is going to be a quick post, as my To Do list is sky high (raise your hand if you can relate), so here's me with the book I'm currently
reading aloud to my dog Eli, in my favorite flannels:

photo by Gary Wayland

If you can't read the title, it's our very own Carmela Martino's marvelous historical novel, Playing By Heart. Her sumptuous descriptions of life in 18th century Milan have me right there, in teen composer Emilia Salvini's music room. 

Eli and I agree: her book's delicious!

I searched and searched my poem files for poems about reading aloud. I tried to write one, too, about a mama mountain lion reading aloud to her cubs. But it was too syrupy sweet and I don't think I want it wandering around as internet corn...I know you understand.  So here's one I wrote for an anthology in 2009 that hasn't come out yet (if it ever does):

BOOKTIME
by April Halprin Wayland

I stand on our couch
closing windows,
pulling down shades,
shutting out shouting streets.

Wheels, squeals and dust driven past
disappear.
Those constant distant drums outside
are gone.

Inside I sit close to Mom.
I lay my head against her.
Listen to her heart
Listen to the words.

Listen to the whisper
of each
turned
page.

poem (c) 2018 April Halprin Wayland all rights reserved.

(If you'd like another poem on listening, here's one I wrote for World Read Aloud Day in 2016--this one is about not listening to your inner critic as you write--click here).

Lots of love to Friday Poets, all!

Thank you, Donna, at MainelyWrite for hosting Poetry Friday!

posted by April Halprin Wayland, Eli, the eight or nine 10-cent goldfish (all grown-up), and the five red-eared slider turtles in her pond, all very fine listeners.

Gearing up for #WorldReadAloudDay!

I'm kicking off a new series in honor of World Read Aloud Day (WRAD), which will be celebrated next Thursday, February 1. (Can you believe it's almost February?) If you'd like to see ideas for how to celebrate at home or in the classroom, check out the official World Read Aloud Day website. 

Before I go on, I want to thank all of you who participated in our giveaway of the 2018 Children's Writer's & Illustrator's Market (CWIM). We appreciate your sharing your writing challenges and goals with us and we wish you the best in accomplishing them! Congratulations to our giveaway winner, Danielle H.

For today's post, I'm sharing a photo of me reading aloud. The following was taken at my first book signing for Rosa, Sola, at Anderson's Bookshop, back in 2005. 

I always enjoy hearing authors read from their own work, and I had plenty of opportunity to do so at the Vermont College residencies. In addition to readings by our excellent faculty, I was privileged to hear readings by such renowned authors as Richard Peck, Katherine Paterson, Karen Hesse, and Ashley Bryan. 

But long before I had a published book, I read aloud regularly to my son. One of my favorite memories is of him, as a two-year-old, sitting on the couch "reading aloud" an alphabet book. I'd read the book to him so many times that he'd memorized it, right down to the page-turns. As it says in this list of 7 Important Benefits of Reading Aloud, it's not only children who benefit when adults read aloud--adults do, too!

I hope you'll take time to celebrate #WorldReadAloudDay on Thursday. If you don't have anyone to read aloud to, you might consider celebrating as a listener at Poetry Out Loud.

In the meantime, don't forget to check out this week's Poetry Friday round up at Beyond LiteracyLink.

And remember to always Write with Joy!

Carmela

Reading Aloud as Revision Technique: What the Mouth and Ear Know

Are you ready to March Forth on this March 4th? If you don't know what I'm talking about, read this post by fellow TeachingAuthor JoAnn Early Macken. Today is also Poetry Friday. I don't exactly have a poem to share, but at the end of this post you'll find some advice from Mary Oliver that reads like poetry to me, along with a link to today's Poetry Friday roundup.

If you've been following our blog, you know our current topic is Reading Aloud, in honor of the recent celebrations of World Read Aloud Day and Read Across America. April kicked off the series with a discussion of reading aloud as it relates to poetry and picture books. Bobbi picked up where April left off, focusing on the relationship between listening and imagination. JoAnn then shared the titles of favorite picture books she read to her boys as well as advice from Mem Fox’s Reading Magic: Why Reading Aloud to Our Children Will Change Their Lives Forever (Harvest Books). And, most recently, Carla discussed how she often reads from her nonfiction books during school visits because in some cases "hearing the scene read aloud is more moving that reading it silently would be."

Today I'm going to look at the topic from a slightly different angle than my co-bloggers: that of a novelist revising a manuscript.

On Wednesday, I shared the results of my "30-Day Boost Your Writing Productivity Challenge," which was a great success. I finally finished a major revision of a middle-grade novel I've been working on for a LONG time. I'd originally written the novel in third-person-limited point of view, from the perspective of a ten-year-old boy. After having the opening pages critiqued by editors at several conferences, I realized the story didn't have a strong enough voice and decided to rewrite it in first person.

Interestingly, this isn't the first time I've rewritten a novel's point of view. The first draft of my middle-grade novel Rosa, Sola (Candlewick Press), which I wrote while I was in the Vermont College MFA program, was also in third-person-limited. I had a complete draft when one of my advisers encouraged me to rewrite it into first person. This task is harder than it may seem--it involves much more than simply changing "she" to "I." The first-person voice must sound true to the character in every respect, including her background, education, mood, way of seeing the world, etc. I resisted the change at first but eventually did as my adviser asked. She was pleased with the revision, but I wasn't. Rosa, Sola deals with a family tragedy, and, to me, the first-person narration sounded too mature and thoughtful to come from an average ten-year-old struggling with difficult emotions. So I rewrote the novel yet again, back to third-person-limited. That was the version that was eventually published. (You can read more about that revision process in this blog post.)

In the case of my current project, though, as soon as I'd rewritten the opening in first person the story felt much stronger and more engaging. I definitely prefer having a first-person narrator for this novel. But I needed to make sure the voice was consistent throughout, and for me, one of the best ways to do that is reading the manuscript aloud. Even though I've used reading aloud for this purpose before, I'm still amazed at the things I noticed/caught that I didn't when reading silently.

English professor Peter Elbow, author of Writing Without Teachers and Writing with Power, discusses this process when he talks about "what the mouth and ear know" in his most recent book, Vernacular Eloquence: What Speech Can Bring to Writing (Oxford University Press). Below is an excerpt from the chapter on "Revising by Reading Aloud.":

     "The mouth and ear tell us not only about individual sentences but also about longer passages. We might have worked on two individual sentences and made each one strong and clear, but when we read them one after another we hear something wrong at the joint. Perhaps there’s a slight contradiction, or they need a transition, or they need to be in a different sequence. Or perhaps each one has a lovely rhythm, but the two rhythms work against each other . . . .
     Reading aloud helps us hear problems in the larger organizational structures too. When we are revising, we do lots of stopping and starting; we often lose perspective on the whole as we follow the twists and turns of the micro organization and lose sight of the macro organization. We can’t see the forest for the trees. Even though logic seems much more a matter of mind than body, nevertheless we can often hear a lapse in logic. That is, we can hear when the train leaves the tracks, whether they are organizational tracks or logical tracks.
     Reading aloud can even help us feel a loss of energy or focus or presence. The mouth and ear can lead us to say, 'Okay, everything’s pretty strong and clear here, but you’re taking too long. Spit it out, get to the point quicker. You’re tiring me.' "     

I hope I'm not tiring you with this post, Readers, and I encourage you to read more of this chapter online here, especially if you're a classroom teacher. I think you'll be interested in Elbow's discussion of how he has his writing students read their work aloud, either to the class as a whole, or to a partner, as part of their revision process.

On to a different topic: with National Poetry Month just around the corner, I've been thinking about delving into poetry again, something I haven't done in ages. I pulled out my poetry journal and found an entry where I'd re-written a paragraph from Mary Oliver's A Poetry Handbook as a free-verse poem. I called it "Getting Ready," because that's the title of the chapter it's taken from. Here are Oliver's exact words, with only one phrase cut from the original text, as I wrote them in my journal:

          Getting Ready

     The part of the psyche

     that works

     in concert with consciousness

     to supply

     a necessary part of the poem

     exists in a mysterious,

     unmapped zone:

     not unconscious,

     not subconscious,

     but cautious.

     It learns quickly

     what sort of courtship

     it is going to be.

     Say you promise

     to be at your desk 

     in the evenings,

     from seven to nine.

     It waits,

     it watches.

     If you are reliably there,

     it begins to show itself--

     soon it begins to arrive

     when you do.

     But if you are only there

     sometimes

     and are frequently late

     or inattentive,

     it will appear fleetingly,

     or it will not appear at all. 

excerpt from A Poetry Handbook © Mary Oliver

Oliver's words reminded of why my "30-Day Boost Your Writing Productivity Challenge" was successful: because I committed to setting aside regular time to work on my manuscript. If I truly want to write poetry again, I'll need to do the same. I hope that's a commitment I'll be able to make.

Meanwhile, I plan to at least read more poetry, starting with the poems in today's Poetry Friday roundup over at Linda B's wonderful TeacherDance blog.

Happy writing!
Carmela

Reading Aloud: Magic for Readers and Listeners

Mem Fox’s Reading Magic: Why Reading Aloud to Our Children Will Change Their Lives Forever explains the importance of reading aloud to children to help them develop their own reading skills. She describes some of the benefits:

“Children who realize in their first few weeks and months of life that listening to stories is the purest heaven; who understand that books are filled with delights, facts, fun, and food for thought; who fall in love with their parents, and their parents with them, while stories are being shared; and who are read aloud to for ten minutes a day in their first five years, usually learn to read quickly, happily, and easily. And a whole lot of goodness follows for the entire community.”

Fox details the simple techniques she recommends for reading aloud to children, the benefits they reap in speaking skills, and the three secrets that help readers “get the message.”

I have such fond memories of reading with our kids that some of their favorite books are still on my bookshelves today. After all these years, I could probably recite long passages by heart from gems like these:

Jamberry 

 Can’t You Sleep, Little Bear

Grandfather Twilight 

 The Salamander Room 

Oh, the Places You’ll Go  

 John Henry

Reading with our two sons was a magical experience for me, too. Thinking of them, I’m posting a favorite poem from a collection I remember enjoying together, The Llama Who Had No Pajama: 100 Favorite Poems by Mary Ann Hoberman.

  

Brother

I had a little brother
And I brought him to my mother
And I said I want another
Little brother for a change.

But she said don’t be a bother
So I took him to my father...

Read the rest of the poem (and others) on the Poetry Foundation site.

April began this Teaching Authors series with a post about the joys of listening. Bobbi’s contribution focused on imagination. Be sure to check them out, too, if you haven’t yet. Also be sure to Like our Teaching Authors Facebook page.

Elizabeth Steinglass is hosting today’s Poetry Friday Roundup. Enjoy!

JoAnn Early Macken