…changing the world, one reader at a time.
One of my summer classes this session is an online book club for 7th and 8th grade readers. While I’m eager for the chance to connect with middle schoolers after a spring semester of mostly focusing on my K-4 readers, I’ve never done an online book club before. I was excited, but worried it would […]
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As adults and teachers, we spend a lot of time trying to convince our students why reading is meaningful, exciting, and worth their time. And if we’re not careful, we end up doing more talking than we do listening. Last year, we heard from 14-year-old Jack about why reading is meaningful in his life. Today, 15-year-old […]
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I did not expect to be hosting our New Kid Faculty and Staff Book Club from my dining room, in my slippers. If I’m being honest, once our school closed, I wasn’t expecting to host this book club at all. While we were all thrilled when more than 50 members of our faculty and staff […]
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The average Supplemental Nutrition Benefit Assistance Program (SNAP) benefit per meal in the US is $1.86 (source). For the final experiment in our How Can We Help Solve the Hunger Crisis? Quest, we did an experiment to find out what its like to prepare a nutritious, delicious meal for our “Quest family” on that budget. […]
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Finding windows and mirrors in your reading can be really tricky if you’re still developing and strengthening your empathy muscles. And if you’re in middle school, when your development is screaming at you to focus on other things. Sixth grade readers put together this list of sentence starters today, to help give readers a push […]
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All of our 3rd, 4th, and 5th graders have been learning about the amazing work of Vashti Harrison in preparation for her visit through the Virginia Festival of the Book next month. They’ve been talking about her nonstop, and we’ve been studying her work in many of my classes. And last week, in a meeting about […]
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After posting Finding our Color Words Using Honeysmoke last week, readers asked me to share a list of the picture books that we used and loved for our skin tone picture book walk. I pulled these books thoughtfully and with my human skin tone palettes in hand, hoping to include as many shades as possible. […]
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Since our schoolwide conversation about Black History Month, the kids have been curious and open about discussing race and differences. Here’s a lesson, inspired by middle schoolers, that I shared with my K-4 students last week, if you’d like to see. Last week, I was talking to my middle schoolers about what they […]
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How do you best prepare your students for discussions about race, ability, and other human differences in your classroom? The conversations in the library since our community Black History Month discussion have really been remarkable. I’ve been so impressed with the way that students have opened up and asked questions out loud that they’ve previously […]
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[This message was originally shared in front of a live group at Lower School Chapel on Tuesday, February 11, 2020. Miss Smith is a kindergarten teacher who identifies as a Black woman, and I am a teacher librarian who identifies as a White woman. We collaborated on this chapel to help answer some of the […]
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