Even before the webinar started, attendees were suggesting their favorite sci-fi novels and talking about subgenres in the chat (which continued throughout the webinar - I copied and pasted the chat into a Word document to save it and it was 33 pages).
This first webinar in the series was on Science Fiction and I found it very engaging and helpful. We got an overview of the development of the genre from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein to what's new and trending today. The slides had TONS of suggestions for books along the way. I could tell that they paid attention to being inclusive with many female authors and authors from different cultures and ethnicities represented.
After the overview of the genre presented by a member of the LibraryReads team, a NoveList team member spoke about appeal factors in the genre and how to use NoveList to search for books for sci-fi readers and narrow the searches down to find a great match. I think you'd get the most out of it if you're a NoveList subscriber, but even if you're not, there were still tons of information about the appeal factors in the genre and book suggestions that would are useful.
This webinar was a bit like my Reader's Advisory class in grad school boiled down to one hour. I LOVED that class, so I was definitely nerding out. If you are unfamiliar with genre fiction or just want a refresher or if you're not confident about searching NoveList or if you have staff that aren't using NoveList because they don't know how, this is a FANTASTIC RESOURCE.
The webinars are centered on adult reading, though there were definitely YA titles that I spotted throughout. If you work with teens or adults, it's well worth watching.
Last month for Reading Wildly, my staff and I tackled manga. This is a genre that is SO popular, especially with our teens, and it's a genre that none of us naturally gravitate towards. That makes it a perfect genre to include in our Reading Wildly meetings!
We talked a little bit about why manga might be so popular with teens - it's often funny or wacky or strange, so something a little different than typical American books. Even the format feels like a rebellion or like something that many adults wouldn't understand or like or bother with. Emotions are often depicted as over the top (which can be exactly how something FEELS when it's happening to you). Manga series can last tens or hundreds of volumes, which gives readers plenty of fuel to keep going and engaging with the characters or plots they are enjoying.
Here, our teens know what they love and what they want in manga and anime. Most often they are the ones making suggestions to us on what to buy, rather than our staff giving them reader's advisory. But even if our RA skills aren't called for very often with this genre, it's great to pick up books, series, and genres that our teens and kids love so that they know that we honor what they value and we're willing to give it a chance.
I don't know that anyone in our group necessarily discovered a newfound love for manga, but I appreciate that they were all willing to give it a try! Here are the series we read from:
For our March Reading Wildly meeting, we read romance. This was a genre suggested by one of my staff members and once we put it on the schedule, I started noticing how often I was getting requests for romance, too, particularly at our teen desk.
Next month, we're reading manga, which is outside the comfort zone of many of us (if not all of us!). We've reached out to our Teen Anime Club to suggest some series that we should check out, but if you have any manga recommendations, I'd love to hear what you suggest!
This month for Reading Wildly, my staff and I read #OwnVoices titles. #OwnVoices is a snappy name for "books with diverse characters that are written by people who share those identities" says Kayla Whaley in her post #OwnVoices: Why We Need Diverse Authors in Children's Literature. We all read that post before our book discussion.
We have been trying to focus on diverse books for several years now, keeping track and aiming to include diverse titles in our storytimes and booktalking programs as much as possible. But this month, we specified that books read should be written by diverse authors. There were lots of great observations by my staff as we were sharing our booktalks. People felt that knowing that they were reading #OwnVoices authors helped them connect with characters and made the characters feel authentic.
Why does reading #OwnVoices titles matter for reader's advisory? Because we should be putting these books into our patrons hands. As gatekeepers, it's our job to seek out and champion these books. The books shared at our meeting are from a wide variety of genres - contemporary realistic, fantasy, science fiction, horror - and have myriad possibilities for suggesting during reader's advisory transactions. We need to keep diverse books and especially #OwnVoices titles at the forefront of our minds so that we're not forgetting them as we suggest books, put together book lists, and choose titles for displays.
Here's what we read this month:
Allegedly by Tiffany Jackson (#OwnVoices: author is African American)
As Brave as You by Jason Reynolds (#OwnVoices: author is African American)
Flying Lessons and Other Stories, edited by Ellen Oh (#OwnVoices: many (all) of the authors in this collection of diverse stories are #OwnVoices authors)
George by Alex Gino (#OwnVoices: author is transgender)
Hoodoo by Ronald Smith (#OwnVoices: author is African American)
Kinda Like Brothers by Coe Booth (#OwnVoices: author is African-American from the Bronx)
I asked my folks how they chose their #OwnVoices title(s) and many of them chose to read something off the list of possibilities that one of my librarians created. Finding #OwnVoices titles can be a little more involved than finding a book in a certain genre. It may be difficult to tell by the author's name alone (although you might think you can).
My first step is locating books with diverse content, since that tends to be a little easier. And then I do a little research on the author to find out about their background and experiences. One of my librarians also suggested utilizing award-winners such as the Coretta Scott King Award and the Pura Belpre Award, which are awarded to African American authors/illustrators and Latinx author/illustrators respectively.
Next month, we're reading romance novels, which some are very excited about and some are NOT excited about. ;)
I think we've got plenty of ideas for teen romance, but would you suggest any love stories (crushes, etc.) for middle-graders or chapter book readers?
**I just realized that I never posted this roundup from our Reading Wildly Fantasy discussion in December! Better late than never?**
My team met again for Reading Wildly and this month we discussed fantasy books. We have some lovers of fantasy and some for whom fantasy is a chore. One thing we discussed is that even books we pick up, read a little bit of, and put down can still be helpful for reader's advisory. When Becky Spratford (RA for All) visited us to present our staff day, we practiced speed reading and learned that you don't have to read an entire book to get enough information for reader's advisory.
One of my staff members mentioned that she tried several books that she just couldn't get into before she finally fell back on a favorite author for our book discussion. Well, if you are familiarizing yourself with your collection and reading parts of books, that can be helpful, too. When that fantasy fan comes up to the desk, you'll be familiar with a few more books than you were before! We're not all going to love every book we pick up for Reading Wildly because the purpose is to stretch ourselves beyond what we normally gravitate to reading.
We also spent some time brainstorming and deciding on genres and topics for next year. I tried to give us a good blend of genres that were real stretches (the ones everyone groaned at) and genres that my staff didn't mind so much. We've got manga on the list for next year, which will be a stretch for all of us, I think. I'm also very excited to read and share #OwnVoices titles one month.
January will be a Reader's Choice month to ease us into the new year and I hope to have a 2017 schedule up soon.
In 2017, we're doing something a little new: we're partnering with GreenBean TeenQueen Sarah Bean-Thompson of the Springfield-Greene County Library District in Missouri to share our book discussions each month. Sarah and I will both be blogging about it along the way and I'm excited to expand our network of librarians and share even more titles!
We kicked off a new year of Reading Wildly this week with our Reader's Choice book discussion. I like to keep things low key for our first meeting of the year, but it's still great to get together and talk about books! Here's what we read:
Next month, we're back into our genres and topics and our topic for February is #OwnVoices. I've asked everyone to read Kayla Whaley's excellent post #OwnVoices: Why We Need Diverse Authors in Children’s Literature to help with our discussion of these titles.
This month for Reading Wildly, my staff and I read gentle reads. What do I mean by gentle reads? We classified this month in three ways:
Teen books that do not contain mature language and situations
Books for young readers who are reading way above their grade level
Christian fiction
I believe the genre originally suggested for this month was Christian fiction and I expanded it a little bit to include some more options. We ended up sharing books from all three areas that we considered gentle fiction. Of course, you can never guarantee to anyone that a book is going to be absolutely free of anything that might offend - it's impossible to know every thing that could potentially offend someone.
One thing I was proud of this month is that when we went to make our suggestion list for each other last month, we had a lot of ideas for children's books and very few ideas for teen books. Most of the books we all ended up sharing at this meeting were teen books. Without my asking them, staff gravitated towards the area where we had less experience. That's exactly the idea behind this program!
I'm going to post two separate lists here: one for teens and one for children reading above grade level. These lists contain not only the books we read, but also books that were suggested by my staff last month. I included all of these titles in our Evernote lists and I've encouraged staff to add to the lists as they read gentle fiction throughout the year.
In previous years, we've been able to visit our local schools frequently for booktalks, but since our staffing level was cut we've had to rethink our approach. For the past several months, my staff members have been hard at work on creating video booktalks and we were able to send out links to our first batch this week!
Here's the full playlist if you want to check them out:
We decided to make separate videos for each age group that we would typically booktalk to. So for this first round, we have videos for 2nd grade, 3rd grade, 4th grade, 5th/6th grade, and 7th/8th grade. We made five videos total, each under 15 minutes long. Each video features five great books that kids and teachers can check out from our library. This is patterned after our monthly class visits where we would spend about 15 minutes per group and feature 5-6 titles each time.
We started getting organized several weeks before we planned to send them out. I asked my staff to sign up with titles that they would like to booktalk for whichever grades. Once everyone had a chance to submit titles, I went through and narrowed each list down to five titles, making sure to keep a balance between formats, genres, and to include diverse titles.
Then we all recorded the videos for our assigned books. We used our flip camera propped up on a book truck and the microphone on the flip camera was sufficient. I asked everyone to record a brief intro, which we showed at the very beginning of each video, and I recorded a brief ending message to encourage kids to stop by and check out these books from the library.
We recorded each booktalk as a separate video and then two of my staff members edited them together, so we were able to repeat some of the books for multiple videos without a whole lot of extra work. For example, Funny Bones appears in both our second grade video and our third grade video. This is helpful, too, if we ever wanted to put together booktalk videos on a certain genre. We could edit all our our scary booktalks into one video, for example.
To edit the videos, my staff members used Filmora, a video editing software that we purchased. The music in the intro comes from Filmora's library of music. The software allowed us to insert images and the titles of the books. There's a lot more it can do; we're excited to play around with it more.
Once the videos were edited, we uploaded them to our library's YouTube channel and sent out the link to our teachers. I sent the videos to each of the teachers we had been visiting with regular booktalks and gave them first shot at sharing the videos and requesting the books. Then a couple of days later, I sent out the video links to staff at each of our elementary and middle schools and asked our Marketing person to put them on our website and Facebook page, as well.
We're still waiting to see what the overall response will be, but so far they've each been viewed a couple dozen times. The real test will be to see if the books get checked out!
We're planning on sending out another round of booktalk videos before Winter Break and there are a few things we'll do differently:
1. After speaking with our Marketing person, he volunteered to film the next round with the library's HD camera, which may provide a better and more consistent quality of video. We also may look at purchasing an external microphone for better and more consistent sound.
2. We recorded this round in our teen office with the blank wood wall background, but I'd love to look into recording videos in our teen and children's rooms so that kids can see the areas of the library they'd be using.
3. We talked about making our presentations a little more uniform - each starting the same way, maybe making our intros more consistent.
4. We talked about adding a title screen with the season and grade on it to differentiate once we have a more extensive library of videos.
I'm not sure if it will be possible to offer these videos monthly at some point. We're going to start out attempting them quarterly and see what the response is. Compared to the hours and hours we spent driving to and visiting schools, repeating booktalks over and over to reach all the classes at a school, this is MUCH less time-consuming. I think we'll get better at it (recording videos, editing, etc.) as we get more experience, so it's possible it will take even less time as we continue.
So the question will be: are the videos decently effective at reaching our teachers and students? And time will just have to tell on that one. We'll keep an eye on how many times the videos are viewed and how the books check out, plus consider any feedback we get from teachers. Ideally, I'd love to also be able to visit the schools in person at least once a year and that might give our videos more impact. We'll see!
Have you ever recorded video booktalks? What tips and tricks do you have to share? Or what questions do you have about how we did ours?
Last year, I was working the Teen Desk when a girl who was CRAZY about the author April Henry came in looking for books. Of course, all of April Henry's books were checked out and she was asking if we had anything similar. And I was stumped. Nothing came to mind that I had read or even really heard of except The Face on the Milk Carton, which kids were reading when *I* was a kid.
That's a long story to say that I requested this genre for one of our Reading Wildly months this year. Of course, I helped my patron with the help of sources like Novelist, but it definitely identified a gap in my knowledge.
For the most part, this genre wasn't a huge favorite with my staff, although I had one who got really into it and found several books that she enjoyed.
Next month, we're going the complete opposite way and we're going to be reading gentle books. I suggested three ways that staff could take this genre:
Christian fiction - definitely something that gets requested in our fairly conservative community
Gentle teen reads - books from the teen area that don't contain mature language and content
Children's books for kids who are reading way above grade level (say, a first grader reading at a fourth or fifth grade level)
So, we'll see what we end up with next month! When I passed around the paper for staff suggestions for this genre, we were very lacking in gentle options for teens.
Hey! It's been awhile since I posted about our Reading Wildly meetings! Part of that is because SUMMER (we don't usually have time to sit down and have meetings during summer) and part of that is because we've been short-staffed and going crazy for the past couple of months. We've done several months of Reader's Choice and share-with-each-other-when-you-can.
But now it's September and we're back! We met last week to share nonfiction titles and to talk a little bit about Becky Spratford's Call to Action: Get Out There and Read Something You Are "Afraid" Of. This felt like the perfect piece to get us back in our groove of Reading Wildly meetings because this is exactly what we try to do with Reading Wildly every month. When we choose our genres for the year, I ask my staff to think about what books they do Not normally gravitate to, what genres or topics they get asked about that make them nervous.
If you are thinking about ways to improve your own reader's advisory skills or about working with your staff to improve your team's skills, read that post above. It is definitely a call to action that deserves an answer!
I am really super excited about October because we will be welcoming the wonderful RA librarian and trainer Becky Spratford to our library to hold some RA workshops for our Staff Day. And also we will be reading thrillers. This is in direct response to some teens who were looking for April Henry readalikes and I came up empty from my own personal experience. I'll be filling that void this month!
At today's Reading Wildly meeting, we discussed funny books. We've discussed funny books in the past and we keep on doing it because this is a genre that kids want all the time and it can be hard to identify these books using the catalog.
We talked about some sources for identifying funny books, including lists on the internet and getting recommendations from friends or colleagues. We also talked about how a lot of funny books have parts that are funny and parts that are serious and that there are different kinds of humor that kids may be interested in. Some kids are really looking for wacky, weird humor and others like something more subtle.
SUMMER IS COMING, so next month will be Reader's Choice, though I have challenged my staff to read something from the room they don't normally gravitate towards. Staff who normally choose books from the Children's Room should pick something from Teen, staff who normally gravitate towards teen books should choose something from the Children's Room. And if anyone feels like they read pretty equally then they can choose.
We probably won't be able to meet over the summer months because we're so busy in our department, but I'm definitely intending a return to our library staff "summer reading log" where we'll share our reading with staff and patrons!
This was the start of our "reading log" last summer.
This month, our Reading Wildly genre was survival. Whether it's the zombie apocalypse or a natural disaster, kids and teens are fascinated with survival and pick up these books often, so it's a good genre to dip into every now and then. Many survival books are fast-paced with lots of action that keeps readers turning the pages. They may be scary or thrilling. Readers may enjoy learning survival techniques JUST IN CASE and exploring characters' responses when disasters happen can help children feel more secure as they find out what characters do to survive whatever happened.
So, we got snowed out for our February Reading Wildly meeting, which was discussing sports books. When we have to cancel our meeting, my first choice would be to reschedule it; I do think it's important to devote time to our readers' advisory discussions. However, because I have to schedule everyone on staff to be here and arrange for desk coverage, that is almost never feasible. Usually what we do is combine our RW meeting with our next department meeting or, like we did this time, combine our RW meetings and briefly discuss two genres. It's not ideal, but we have to be flexible to make it work!
Because we had so many books to share, I asked everyone to do a quick round of sports books and then we moved on to survival books. Today I'll round up our sports books.
This is a topic that seems to come up every year, I think because none of us in my department truly gravitate towards sports books on our own, so we make sure to include sports books when we're planning our reading year. This is definitely one of those genres that stretch us as readers, and it's a subject that LOTS of kids LOVE, so it's definitely important for us to be aware of key authors and titles to suggest.
This month, at Reading Wildly, we did something we'd never done before. In November, I distributed copies of Becky Spratford's Reader Profile and asked everyone to fill it out for themselves. At our December meeting, everyone picked an envelope with someone's reader profile and I asked them to practice their reader's advisory by giving their person at least three suggestions. For our January meeting, I asked everyone to read at least one of the books that had been suggested to them and talk about it at our meeting.
We really tried not to make our meeting a show-and-tell of how successful the reader's advisory transaction was (and I think everyone found something they liked, anyway, which is great!). Rather, we talked about what the challenges were with this assignment and what resources we used to make our suggestions.
Some of us felt pressure, even though we were working with people that we know and feel comfortable with. That pressure was elevated when working with very avid readers - what to hand someone when they seem to have read everything? Time was also a factor - we all knew that we had a limited amount of time to get our suggestions in to allow our person enough time to select and read something. Of course, we have even less time when we're on the reference desk!
One thing that everyone felt helped them feel more confident was handing their person multiple suggestions. This is always something I recommend when doing reader's advisory: encourage people to walk away with a couple of choices. Giving their person three choices gave more flexibility for that person to pick up something they were in the mood for.
We talked about filling out the Reader Profile for ourselves and I think everyone agreed that it was different for us to stop and think about why we liked or didn't like a book. One of our teen librarians pointed out that she loves when kids talk about a book they hate because that will often give her more information about what type of book might work for them. It's also sometimes easier for kids (and people?) to express what they didn't like than to think about what elements appealed to them in a book.
I think this was definitely a fun exercise and a little more interesting than just doing a Reader's Choice month, so we will definitely be doing this again. Just from seeing everyone's Reader Profiles come across my desk, I think that it would be fun to mix it up and try again with someone different.
Next month, our genre is Sports and I assigned an unrelated, but still very interesting blog post: The Importance of Making Reading Resolutions from a RA Service Standpoint by Becky Spratford. Since it is still early in the year, I think this is a great post for us to talk about. Plus, Becky will be visiting our library later this year in October and presenting some workshops for our Staff Development Day, so I am really excited for everyone to familiarize themselves with some of her work before we get to meet her! (That is going to be a great day; I am already really excited!!!)
Have you every practiced reader's advisory on other staff members or on family or friends? How did it go?
Hello, blog. It's been awhile. Things have been a little crazy around here. But we are still reading! This month for Reading Wildly, my staff and I read fairy tale novels. Frozen, The Descendants... fairy tales are all around us and there are lots of opportunities to find readalikes for the books and media kids are loving.
Confession: I missed most of our book discussion this month because I was at a meeting that ran way late. However, my staff were on the ball and shared their booktalks until I could join them.
The second half of this month's meeting was spent discussing what genres and topics we want to tackle for next year and explaining the activity we're going to do for January's meeting.
For January's meeting, I had asked everyone to fill out Becky Spratford's reader profile, as discussed on her awesome blog RA for All. I collected these before the meeting and at our meeting, we each picked one. I'm asking folks to work with their partners to come up with a list of at least 3 book suggestions by the end of next week. Then I'm asking everyone to read at least one of their suggested books for next month's meeting. I am hoping this will be a fun exercise and result in everyone having something enjoyable to read over the holidays and the beginning of the new year.
I'm really excited to talk to everyone about their process in completing this activity and what they learned about themselves by filling out their own reader profiles. I typically leave January's Reading Wildly meeting as reader's choice since I know everything is so busy during the holidays and I think this is a great way to do that while still incorporating some RA practice and thought.
We also discussed what genres we'd like to explore next year and I was really proud of my staff members for putting a lot of thought into this and making some great suggestions. Everyone was a little quiet at first when I asked what they'd like to feature next year, but once people started making suggestions, more and more came flying!
For this month's Reading Wildly meeting, we read horse books! It was a great genre to explore because almost everyone (including myself) read their horse book(s) very reluctantly, which, yes, means it's a genre we need to push ourselves to pick up and explore from time to time.
We kicked off our meeting with a discussion about our common text, the article "What Makes a Good Horse Book?" by Anita Burkham from The Horn Book. This article was helpful for mt staff and me because it gives some clear guidance as to what horse lovers are looking for in a good horse books. I know it helped me to pick up on these elements as I read my books.
Next month, we'll be talking about fairy tale novels and reading a couple of articles about the fantasy genre: "Stepping Into the Wardrobe: A Fantasy Genre Study" by Maria Colleen Cruz and Kate B. Pollock (Language Arts, January 2004) and "Finding Fantasy: The Genre That Makes Difficult Topics Easier for Students to Discuss" by Robin Fuxa (Reading Today, October/November 2012).
We'll also be choosing topics for our 2016 Reading Wildly meetings (exciting!!). We may repeat genres we have done before or add new ones. We're Youth Services now, which includes teens and expands our reader's advisory responsibilities. I'm excited to talk about the possibilities for next year! I know that in June & July we're going to do Reader's Choice and that in January we'll do kind of a variation on Reader's Choice using Becky Spratford's Staff Reader Profile that she posted on her awesome blog RA for All.
It's October, so it's time for another round of scary books for this month's Reading Wildly meeting. We explored scary books a couple of years ago, and it's such a perennial favorite that we brought it back this year. We were a little pressed for time at this meeting because we had to combine our department meeting and our RW meeting (happens sometimes, especially with Fall Break happening), so we didn't have a really in-depth discussion about our article. It was Are Goosebumps Books Real Literature? By Leslie
Anne Perry & Rebecca P. Butler (Language Arts, Oct. 1997) and we did have a few takeaways:
Kids know what to expect when they pick up a Goosebumps book: an easy to read, slightly scary and exciting story.
Scary stories, including the Goosebumps series transcend gender divides. As much as I really hate the idea of "girl books" and "boy books" (and I really do hate it), scary stories, for kids who like scary stories, are easy to hand to both boys and girls without objections from kids or parents.
If we had had time, I would have liked to compile a list of scary story series that would be good for everyone to know, but alas we didn't have time for this.
For next month, we are reading horse books (Children's) and animal books (Teen). It was determined that teens didn't have an overwhelming interest in horse books, but my teen librarians did feel like animal books were something more teens were interested in. We'll also start to brainstorm genres that we'd like to explore next year and I'm excited to now have our teen librarians' input in this process!
Horse books are definitely NOT my wheelhouse, so do you have any suggestions for me?!
This month for Reading Wildly, we read contemporary fiction. You may also call this realistic fiction, but we specify contemporary because we're talking about books set in the present day, not historical fiction.
To kick off our discussion, we talked about the article "One Tough Cookie" by Carey E. Hagan, the Field Notes column from the September/October 2011 Horn Book Magazine. In this article, Hagan discusses her difficulties in getting boys to check out books that are perceived as "girl books".
My staff had a lot to say about this article. We talked about how it was difficult to get not only boys but parents of boys to take home books about girls (sometimes, not always!). We talked about how dangerous this is - to encourage boys to check out and read solely books about boys is to tell them that the lives of girls are not something they have to care about or value.
We shared some strategies for combating this mindset. First and foremost, we must be cognizant that it's good to present boys and girls with books about both boys and girls. We, as gatekeepers, need to check that we're not booktalking a book as "for girls" or "for boys". Instead of emphasizing the gender of the characters, talk about what the characters do or what's exciting, funny, or interesting about the book. Solicit impromptu book reviews from young readers and file those away so that you can tell young readers "I know a boy who read that book and he said it was cool." etc.
Just as we should be including diverse books in what we're booktalking and suggesting, we need to include books featuring protagonists of both genres.
For our October meeting, we'll be reading scary stories (and slightly scary stories!) and reading the article "Are Goosebumps Real Literature?" by Leslie Anne Perry and Rebecca Butler from Language Arts, October 1997.
What scary books would you recommend for us to check out?
Woohoo! Welcome back to Reading Wildly! We had a nice little break over the summer because it is basically impossible for us to get together and meet while summer craziness is going on. Now, the kids are back in school, we are scheduling tons of booktalks, and it's time to pick up with our monthly reader's advisory training.
Our topic this month was Nonfiction, and before we started sharing our booktalks, I asked for a show of hands who found themselves regularly reaching for nonfiction when it's not assigned as their RW topic. I had a few who seek out nonfiction (including myself), but the majority of my staff do not feel that they gravitate towards nonfiction.
I have found that a lot of people have that disinclination. I don't know if it's just that they expect the books to be dry and boring or if the larger format of children's nonfiction is not as amenable to carrying a book around with you, or something else. But I am here to tell you that if you are avoiding children's and YA nonfiction, you are MISSING OUT BIG TIME!!!!!!
(Also, I was once like you. I set a goal to read two nonfiction books a month and I found some great titles that I loved and I have been loving it ever since!)
Ahem. When you get right down to it, nonfiction is an important part of offering a balanced booktalking selection and advising readers who prefer to read true stories. We shared some great titles this month, and I hope you will pick up a couple of them and give them a try! Here's what we read:
We didn't discuss an article this month because SUMMER, but I had selected one, so I passed it out as optional reading: The Dazzling World of Nonfiction by Donalyn Miller (Educational Leadership, November 2013).
For our meeting in September, we will be discussing contemporary, realistic fiction and the article One Tough Cookie by Carey E. Hagan (The Horn Book Magazine, September/October 2011).
This month at Reading Wildly, we talked about Science Fiction books. We had an interesting conversation about the different types of science fiction that exist - it's not all aliens and spaceships (although it is some of that!). And we talked about whether science fiction is more "for boys" and whether science fiction is being written that will attract girl readers, too. (What we actually found was that the books we read were about half and half with girl protagonists and boy protagonists and that almost everyone on my staff [mostly female] was able to find at least one science fiction story they enjoyed.)
To start our meeting, we discussed the following articles: Sci-Fi Series and Stand-Alones Across the Curriculum by Aileen Kirkham (LibrarySparks, March 2012) and Why Everyone Should Read More Science Fiction by Amie Kaufman and Meagan Spooner (Huffington Post, 2013). One consideration we talked about is that some of our school require kids to read in different genres and sci-fi can be a hard sell for some kids who think they don't like it. We're always on the lookout for sci-fi that reads like other types of fiction (example: The Fourteenth Goldfish is a science fiction story, but also has a lot of elements of contemporary fiction).
And then we shared our booktalks and here's what we all read this month:
For June and July, it's Reader's Choice for our monthly meetings.... and we're not going to actually meet! It's so hard to get everyone together over the summer that we're forgoing in-person meetings and I'm asking everyone to contribute to our group "reading log" throughout the summer. We'll be back to our monthly meetings in August, once the kids are back in school and peace reigns again. ;)
