It’s hard to be peppy and fun and sing with abandon when you’re exhausted.
The babies are arriving, and I’m trying really, really hard to get psyched up for their arrival. Wake up, Abby, wake up. Time to be perky! Time to lead a group of babies in raucous fun! Time to bang the drum and ring the bells and wave the scarves!
(and my little voice inside, underneath it all, says, “Time to take a nap. zzzzzzz.”)
Five minutes before closing yesterday, a young man (4th grade) came up to me and asked, “Do you have any recommendations for me for realistic fiction that’s not depressing? I really liked the last book you recommended to me, The Golly-Whopper Games [by Jody Feldman].”
I pulled the first Phineas MacGuire book for him, Phineas L. MacGuire Erupts!: The First Experiment by Frances O’Roark Dowell, told him that another boy his age had loved it, and sent him on his way.
And then this afternoon he came bouncing up to my desk, “You know that book you got for me? I’m almost done with it – can you get me the next book in the series?” And luckily we had the next two books on the shelf, and I sent him home with both.
Less than 24 hours, with a school day in the middle of those 24 hours, and he’s already almost finished the book and is ready for more. That’s incredibly satisfying to me, the children’s librarian: I managed to put the right book in this child’s hand at the right time. Really, truly, there’s no better feeling.
The cats and I observed the weirdest thing this morning:Â a chipmunk was sitting happily on one of the semi-rotted fence posts by our living room, just minding his own business, cleaning his face, being generally chipmunk-mellow.
And then the chickadee came along. This chickadee was enraged by the chipmunk’s presence, and kept dive-bombing the chipmunk, going directly for the head each time.
Finally the chipmunk had enough and ran away. And the chickadee disappeared, too. Weird.
Just when I’d gotten back into the blogging groove, I got slammed with a nasty cold that laid me out for a few days.
I’ll try to post an entry of substance tomorrow. There’s certainly plenty to share!
Storytime went ok – not great, just ok. The thing about being nervous is that it can wreak an otherwise great storytime: I’m not having as much fun, I’m doubting myself…and then everyone else doesn’t have as much fun, and they start to look at me a bit funny, as if they’re thinking, “She’s not all that. Hmmmm.”
And, there are the stupid errors. At the end of the storytime, I said, “Ok, let’s sing our closing song now!! The song we always sing at the end of storytime! [I inserted the name of the song here, and I’m honestly not sure whether I said “The More We Get Together” or “If You’re Happy and You Know It.”] Here we go!!” And then I started to sing “The More We Get Together,” which is our opening song, not our closing song. I caught myself halfway, finished the song, and admitted that it was the first storytime of the year and I’d made a mistake. And then we sang the correct song, “If You’re Happy and You Know It.” Sigh.
Let’s hope I’m not nervous again tomorrow morning, for my first Mother Goose on the Loose program in a while. Sigh. (And hopefully I’ll sleep tonight, too. That would be good.)
Storytimes start again today, and I’m ridiculously nervous.
I’ve done this particular storytime (Toddler ~ Babies) before; I know more than half of the kids and parents who will be attending; and I stayed a half hour late on Saturday and got to work a half hour early today (off the clock, of course) to do prep work. And, as usual, I did prep work yesterday (Sunday), and when one of the books I’d planned on using was sub-par, Jim drove me to the library at Patriots half time to pick up a different book.
There is absolutely NO reason for me to be nervous. But I am. Wish me luck!
…I started tutoring again last night.Â
It was great to see M. again (she’s my only student this year, with two lessons a week), and to have my ego pumped by finding out how much she disliked working with another tutor up at their summer home these past couple of months. (Let’s face it: we all like to have our ego pumped up. It’s part of being human.) And I’m happy to report that tutoring on Monday and Wednesday nights feels much more manageable and sane than last year’s Tuesday-Wednesday-Thursday schedule. It’s a good feeling to do my tutoring gigs at the beginning of the week, when I’m fresh – or at least fresher.
The interesting side of my lesson with M. last night was discovering that her Wilson tutor for the summer didn’t faithfully adhere to the Wilson lesson plan and techniques. A bit puzzling, considering that when I got certified in Wilson (in the summer of 2001), my trainer was extremely strict about following the structure of the Wilson Reading System to the letter (so to speak). No deviations were allowed. Period. If we trainees didn’t follow the system, we wouldn’t get certified.Â
And then I find out that M.’s summer tutor deviated in odd ways from the Wilson system. For example, this tutor wouldn’t let M. see the sound cards in the decoding Quick Drill; M. told me that the tutor “hid the cards” from M. and simply asked her “What are the keywords for ‘a’?” Wait a second – what about the sound/symbol connection, Ms. Summer Tutor? Don’t you realize that is a hugely important part of teaching a child with dyslexia??
Ms. Summer Tutor also didn’t have M. write down any sounds on her dictation pages – once again demonstrating a clear lack of understanding of how the WRS works. And Ms. Tutor didn’t have M. set up her own dictation pages, but instead used the pre-made dictation forms that can be downloaded from the Wilson website.  I feel the student’s setting up of her own dictation page is incredibly important, as it both builds a sense of being a partner in her own education, and also helps the student with transfering information from one page (the dictation template) to another (the actual dictation page) - a skill which comes into play when trying to copy information and assignments from the teacher’s whiteboard to the student’s notes.Â
Another deviation that Ms. Summer Tutor made was to completely and totally skip the Step 10 Posttest. This tutor simply moved M. on to Step 11 without confirming that M. had mastered the concepts of Step 10. Wait a second. The Wilson Reading System, as I was taught it, is all about achieving mastery and fluency. There are firm guidelines for grading the posttests to ensure that the student has mastered all of the taught concepts and is fully fluent in decoding and encoding words with those concepts. If the student fails the posttest, review of the step is required before moving on to the next step. Skipping the posttest isn’t an option. Most interestingly, Ms. Summer Tutor sent me an update saying that substep 10.5 had been introduced but not mastered, and that substep 11.1 also had been introduced. So it was a conscious shirking of the mastery and fluency rules. What’s up with that??
It’s disappointing to me that a parent looking for a Wilson tutor has to know how to ask all the right questions, and can’t simply depend upon the tutor having official Wilson certification. I take my role as a Wilson certified tutor very, very seriously, and I don’t invent things or change things. Barbara Wilson spent many years and much research developing this system, and it works. Don’t mess with it. In not messing with the WRS, I’ve had a great deal of success teaching students with dyslexia and other language based learning disabilities. Other Wilson certified tutors should have respect for Barbara Wilson’ s work, and not mess around with what she spent years perfecting.Â
Wow, I sound like some sort of cult member. But seriously, my many successful students prove my point, and justify this soap box moment of mine. And now I’ll step down from that soap box. Thanks for listening!!
Now that I’m about to start back up with the Toddler Storytimes (a week to go and counting…), I’ve been going back to the first lesson plans that I created last year. And, well, they’re substandard. That is to say, by the end of last year I’d worked out a nice system for these storytimes, and I’d gotten rather picky about the quality of my felt pieces for the feltboard stories. These early plans just don’t measure up to the standards that I had set once I got in the flow of the toddler storytimes. And thinking back, I didn’t even have a feltboard on which to tell feltboard stories at the very beginning of last year.
So I’m kind of starting all over with these early plans. Reselecting books to use and recommend (I’d made some lousy choices early last year), redoing felt pieces, rewriting the handouts that each child receives at the end of the storytime. Granted, I’m much more experienced with the whole system now, and thus am able to speed through the preparation process much more quickly, but…I had sort of thought I was done with this when school finished last June.Â
If I’m honest with myself, these toddler storytime lesson plans and handouts and materials will never really be finished. The more I do the storytimes, the better I’ll get at them, and I’ll have to tweak my resources to reflect my increased knowledge and experience. Which isn’t a bad thing: these storytimes will only be good if I’m truly engaged in them, and I won’t be engaged if I’m just regurgitating a plan I wrote two or five or ten years earlier. Not to forget that there are great new books being published each year that should be considered for use either as the books that I read to the group or for the quiet time reading between parents and children.Â
Just like any job, it’s tempting to get settled into a rut and not put forth the effort that one did at the very beginning. But that type of work ethic doesn’t do anything for the quality of your job performance, nor does it bring much personal satisfaction for a job well done. So I’ve come to peace with the reworking of these toddler storytimes. Actually, I might be enjoying the planning process more this second time around. And now I think it might be time to make those felt pieces for that first storytime of the year, the “Babies” storytime.
This summer (my third at the library, and the third summer with the hybrid summer reading program that I implemented), I noticed a definitive switch in thinking among the kids who participated in the reading program. Though I bought a large selection of high-quality, fun toys as prizes, more and more kids were focused on earning a bookplate and not on earning prizes. Many parents told me that their kids really wanted to earn a bookplate, and had set goals for themselves. Some kids just wanted to reach that thirty hour benchmark, while others wanted to exceed their hourly reading total from the previous summer. And a few others wanted to have the highest hourly total of all this summer’s bookplates.
Another trend this summer that I found fascinating was that many kids didn’t bother to come in to collect any prizes until the last two weeks of the summer reading program. These kids truly didn’t care about the toys that they could earn, but were concentrating their reading efforts on getting The Bookplate.   At the six week mark for summer reading, there were only about 3,500 hours logged on to our system; many of the kids who participated had not yet come in to have us enter their hours into the computer. Now, after the conclusion of all eight and a half weeks of the reading program, there are 6,905 hours logged in – a clear demonstration of how the focus in town has shifted from what you can “get” to taking pride in your reading achievements.Â
Most importantly, when kids have come in to select the book in which their bookplate will go, 98% of those kids have chosen a book that they have already read and love: a book that holds meaning for them. Yesterday I gave up on the book cart full of new books for kids to choose from, putting all of those new books out on the shelves, because only a handful of kids had wanted to consider a new book for their bookplate, let alone choose a new book.Â
What does this all mean? It means that the kids who participate in the summer reading program are now more excited about the act of reading and about the books they read than they are about what toys they can bring home with them. They are thinking long and hard about the legacy that they are leaving in the library when they choose the book that will hold their bookplate; when someone else checks out “their” book, they know that the unwritten subtext of their bookplate says something like, “I am John, and I loved this book. I recommend it to you.” And they are also leaving markers for themselves in the library. Many kids went to the stacks to look at their bookplate from last year, and smiled at the book that they had chosen a year ago.  As the years pass, they’ll be leaving a trail of books that show their growth as readers from one year to the next.
I remain deeply indebted the Massachusetts children’s librarian who so generously gave me this bookplate idea. Thank you, thank you, thank you – it’s the best part of our summer reading program.
[And, for the record, this year I decided that I should put a bookplate of my own into a book, since for three summers now I have also read the prerequisite thirty hours. I chose The Emerald City of Oz, and put into it a bookplate in honor of my mom, since she always bought Oz books for me from the teahouse in Wenham.]
I posted several entries in July about the letters that the 5th grade book group members and I wrote to Angie Sage, author of Magyk and its sequels. I told the girls in the book group to not get their hopes set on an answer from Ms. Sage, since she’s a bestselling author and lives in England, and because the letters had to be mailed to Ms. Sage c/o her publisher, since I couldn’t locate an address (either real mail or email) for her anywhere.
But Angie Sage rocks, let me tell you. Not only is she a great author, she’s also a kind and intelligent person who took the time to write three separate letters (one to me, one to G., and one to P.), each letter specifically addressing questions and comments made in the letters we sent to her. For example, in her letter to Ms. Sage, P. asked how Ms. Sage was doing, and added that she was probably busy writing. Ms. Sage answered P.’s question, saying yes indeed she was busy, thank you for asking, and then launched into a long description of the part of her new book (the next in the Septimus Heap series) that she’s currently writing. Wow.
So far only G. has come in to pick up her letter from Angie Sage, but she was completely and totally thrilled. Thrilled. The look on G.’s face as she read the letter – a combination of blissful happiness, awe, and hyper excitement – totally made my day, and I only wish that Angie Sage could have seen it, too. Thanks, Angie Sage!! You’re awesome!!