Connecting Students to Books. Season 1, Episode 3

Welcome to Season 1, Episode 3 of The Book Love Foundation Podcast! And thank you for joining us in this celebration of teaching and the joy of learning.

Subscribe in iTunes

Donate to the Book Love Foundation

Episode 3 Show notes
You can learn more about the Book Love Foundation at Booklovefoundation.org, where you can also make a donation. 100% of the money you give to the Book Love Foundation puts books into classrooms. Applications were due on March 1, and this year we received 140 from across the United States and Canada. I've only just begun reading them and sorting them for my board members, but I already know we haven't raised enough money to fund all of the deserving teachers who have applied. Can you help us reach potential donors? Send a link to our podcasts to people you know and encourage them to help us with this mission. Help us bring the joy of reading to more teenagers. Help us create a love of reading in every school. Help teachers build reading lives that last.

– Penny

CONVERSATION SEGMENT
Dr. Kim Parker currently teaches grades 10-12 English and Writing at Cambridge, Rindge and Latin High School in Cambridge, MA. She blogs about her literacy work with underserved young people at www.classroomlinernotes.wordpress.com. You can also follow her on Twitter @TchKimPossible and email: [e-mail]
Jennifer Brinkmeyer teaches Reading Strategies and English 9 at Iowa City High School and serves as language arts curriculum coordinator for the district. In 2014, she received UChicago's Outstanding Educator Award. She regularly presents at Iowa Council Teachers of English conferences.  You can also follow her on Twitter @jjbrinkmeyer and email: [e-mail]
Brian Kelley teaches 8th-grade creative writing at Charles F. Patton Middle School in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania. He is a co-director of the Pennsylvania Writing & Literature Project. You can email him at [e-mail], connect with him on Twitter @_briank_ , or follow  his blog: http://www.brianjkelley.net/

Penny talked about conferring with her student Kaedyn about The Death Cure by James Dashner
Here are Penny's Book Love Workshop Handouts.

BOOK TALK
Here are the books from this episode s book talk, courtesy of Donalyn Miller:

Reading without nonsense, by Frank Smith

Unidentified Suburban Object, by Mike Jung

The We Need Diverse Books Movement.

Dumplin’, by Julie Murphy

Side Effects Vary, by Julie Murphy

Rad American Women A to Z, by Kate Schatz 

Drowned City, by Don Brown

The Great American Dust Bowl, by Don Brown
Donalyn Miller has taught 4th, 5th, and 6th grade language arts and social studies in the Fort Worth, TX area and was a finalist for 2010 Texas Elementary Teacher of the Year. In her popular book, The Book Whisperer, Donalyn reflects on her journey to become a reading teacher and describes how she inspires and motivates her middle school students to read 40 or more books a year. In her latest book, Reading in the Wild, Donalyn collects responses from 900 adult readers and uses this information to teach lifelong reading habits to her students. Donalyn is the founder of the annual #bookaday event and co-host the monthly Twitter chat, #titletalk. Her articles about teaching and reading have appeared in publications such as Education Week Teacher, The Reading Teacher, Educational Leadership and The Washington Post.

Donalyn's web site is https://bookwhisperer.com/, and she can be found on Twitter @donalynbooks.

STUDENT STORY
This episode s student story was from Kim Parker.

The books mentioned in her story were:

Everything Everything, by Nicola Yoon  

Atonement, by Ian McEwan  

The Boy in the Black Suit, by Jason Reynolds 

All American Boys, by Jason Reynolds and Brendan Kiely 

Books from Ni-Ni Simone

Thank you for listening to the The Book Love Foundation Podcast. If you enjoyed listening, please share it with a colleague or two.

★ Support this podcast ★

Creators and Guests

Host

Penny Kittle

BK

Guest

Brian Kelley

Teaches 8th-grade creative writing at Charles F. Patton Middle School in Kennett Square, PA. A co-director of the Pennsylvania Writing & Literature Project.

Guest

Donalyn Miller

Middle grade language arts and social studies teacher in the Fort Worth, TX area and the author of "The Book Whisperer" and "Reading in the Wild".

DP

Guest

Dr. Kim Parker

Teaches grades 10-12 English and Writing at Cambridge, Rindge and Latin High School in Cambridge, MA.

JB

Guest

Jennifer Brinkmeyer

Teaches Reading Strategies and English 9 at Iowa City High School and is a language arts curriculum coordinator for the district.

What is The Book Love Foundation Podcast?

Celebrate the joy of reading with the Book Love Foundation podcast. This is a show filled with information and inspiration from teachers and leaders across grade levels, states, and school systems. We interviewed authors and educators for the first five years and now turn our attention to leaders in public, private, and charter schools. Find out more at booklovefoundation.org or join our book-love-community.mn.co of 2500 educators from 28 countries. We sustain joy together, one kid and one book at a time.

Penny Kittle 0:00
The book Love foundation podcast is produced by the teacher learning sessions, connecting teachers with ideas, experts and each other.

Kim Parker 0:10
I don't think we should worry about level. I think that if we can find things that that they're interested in, they're gonna read that's never fail. Never it has never failed. Even if it's a really tough book, if they're really into it, they're gonna read it.

Melissa 0:28
Even if books are big, if you like them, they seem a lot smaller.

Penny Kittle 0:33
One of my boys, a senior, said, When I interviewed him, you know, I really missed reading, he didn't even realize he'd missed it,

Donalyn Miller 0:43
she said, to this room full of teenagers, I mean, it was just beautiful. She said, if you think that the fat girl never gets the cute guy, there's not a problem with my book. There's a problem with society.

Penny Kittle 0:59
Welcome back to the book Love foundation Podcast. I'm Penny Kittle and I'm your host. I'm recording this today while looking across a field of snow in my front yard, but all week, I've been hearing a chorus of birds at dawn. We're on the brink of spring, finally, a beautiful time in the White Mountains of northern New Hampshire. Today's episode is focused on connecting students to books so much more than good intentions. Is required to create independent readers in middle and high school, so much more than good intentions. I know this because I had good intentions for my middle school kids when I first moved from elementary to middle school teaching, but they weren't reading. We can't just tell kids to read. We have to make it our work to connect all of our students to texts that will keep them reading, books that will surprise them, speak to them, books that might answer questions they didn't even know they were asking. Why? Because practice matters. A volume of reading matters, as Nancy Atwell, that 2015 global Teacher of the Year said, in her incredible third edition of in the middle, the number of books a child finishes is the most significant statistic of all. It represents and predicts so much about his academic future, and yet, connecting every student to the right book, the book to kid match, as so many teachers call it, is much harder than choosing one book and telling cajoling, insisting and policing every student in the class to read it, and we know the truth, most kids don't respond. Too many middle and high school students fake read, which is the subject of an upcoming podcast. Too many students not only don't read the books we assign to them, they don't read any books at all. Too many students have, long ago, lost interest in reading and passed through school one year after another, reading very little. In order to change this, in order to connect every student to a book, we have to know a lot of books students might like. We have to sit beside them and learn about their interests. We have to make the reading lives of our students our work every year, this feels too hard, but I try to take it one kid at a time. Every year, many of my students read more than they ever believed was possible. Every year, some students tell me they've discovered a love of reading for the first time. And every year, students remind me it's never too late to discover a love of reading. My students help me remember that it is possible and important to make a love of reading the center of my teaching. In today's episode, we will listen to master teachers and book Love Foundation grant winners talk about ways they connect their students to books. You'll be inspired by their passion and their strategies, by the Big Magic, in the words of Elizabeth Gilbert, that they make happen in their classrooms. Joining me is Kevin Carlson from the teacher learning sessions.

Moderator 4:14
Today's conversation begins with Kim Parker, who teaches in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Here she and Penny talk about Kim's classroom library, how it helps her connect her students with texts, and the importance of giving kids access to lots and lots of books.

Kim Parker 4:31
What I've been able to do is to get books that are shorter reads for kids, more categories for books. I mean, I think before, I just had a lot of books and didn't understand necessarily what it meant to organize them. So now I have these really great baskets that I know I think younger teachers use, but have been really great with kids, because I can separate them by war books or romance or death and dying, which is a really big topic, isn't it? Love that basket. Oh, they love it. I know they love it. I said, Oh, yep. So I've been able to get the books out to be in a community where reading is our thing, where kids always have a book that they can go to, and I think that having the access to the books is what's been really important. Because I don't, I mean, I've never had a classroom where we didn't have books, but I know that I have colleagues and I've been in schools where they don't have books, and it's really hard to get any sort of traction with kids as readers. If you can't say, oh, you know what, you read this book, you might like this book, or you can, you can put a whole bunch of books on their desk and say, try these. And if you don't like this one, well, here's a whole bunch other ones that you might like. So it's just made the access so much more important and immediate and responsive to what they need.

Penny Kittle 5:46
Yeah, I love that word, responsive. I can't tell you how many classrooms I have been in in the last few years where there is not a single book in the classroom. An English classroom, there will be maybe 80 copies of The Catcher in the Rye on one shelf, but that is not what kids consider a library by any means. No at all. And I don't know how you can be responsive if you don't have something else to put in their hands or a stack of books to say, what about these? Or, you know, I was thinking just yesterday, I had a the first book club meeting with my ninth graders, and three of the boys had chosen a book that they really didn't like. And so what do I do? I'm going around my classroom. Of course, I'm being observed at this moment right, with three people in my room. And I've got all these book clubs starting for the first time they've ever met as book clubs. And so there's all that kind of busyness of are you How you guys doing? Are you doing? All right? But these boys need a change. And right? I go around to my library, and I just pull anything I've got three copies of, and I put six or seven different possibilities on this table, and said, start browsing and see what you come up with. And how would I have solved that? Because I had three boys, you know, I gave them time to read at the start of book clubs, while I was conferring, and watched those three not reading heads on the desk, kind of flipping the pages. And, you know, I said to the class, it's the first indication to me that you don't like your book is when I see the body language and all the kids are nodding, you know, because everybody else is an engaged reader. And these, you know, I had to solve that problem. How would I do that? If I simply sent them to the library and said, Go find a book, they would have no idea it would take half an hour and then come back empty handed.

Kim Parker 7:24
Yep, I know exactly what you mean, and it's just those moments, right? You don't have a lot of moments with them. It's what I told someone. I said, that's why I always function with a sense of urgency that gets on the kids nerves. But I'm like, we don't have any time to waste, right? You have to find a book. You have to find one that resonates with you. And if not, there are millions of books in the world, right? We might have millions of books in this classroom, so we will find you something

Penny Kittle 7:45
yeah Oh, I'm so with you on that the urgency of teaching and the value of time, because we have not enough time, I'll never have enough time.

Moderator 7:53
Jennifer brinkmeyer is a department chair and teacher in Iowa City, Iowa.

Penny Kittle 7:58
What are your personal tricks for connecting kids, individual kids, to books

Jennifer Brinkmeyer 8:02
typically I mean, I'll start with the traditional questions, you know, genre and author. But you know, there's always some students who are like, I know. I know nothing. I don't like books at all. And I start with some of my home run books at the end of ninth grade. Every year my students for their speech units. They do Best Book of the Year speeches. And I do that to help students think about summer reading. Yeah. But I also use it to gather my speed dating books that I'll use in the fall. Because I say these are the books that ninth graders last year loved. Here they are. And so that gives me kind of a preset list when I'm getting to know new readers in the fall, and so I can usually work with those you know, you have to build that relationship. They have to feel like they can trust the books you're giving them and that you have you know you want them to find one that they'll actually like, rather than just try to please you by fake reading it.

Moderator 8:59
So in addition to having access to books and the freedom to explore books, students need to know that they can abandon books that don't work for them, that the choice is real and the choice is theirs. Dating metaphors seem to work well.

Jennifer Brinkmeyer 9:14
I really like the speed dating language because, you know, you tell a kid, you know, you don't have to commit to this book for life, not even a month, not even a week. I just want you to take it on date for like 10 minutes tonight, and if you want to break up tomorrow, that's fine, because I think kids get nervous that when they start a book, they're committing themselves to this 300 page journey that they might not like. So that's been really helpful language for helping especially reluctant readers try some things until they can find something. Usually it's just that they don't know how to name what it is that they like. I've met very few students who absolutely hate reading and there's nothing they could ever like. Usually, once they find a book, they're like, Well, okay, yeah, I do like horror. I didn't really think you meant that too. I meant and anything.

Moderator 10:00
During reading workshop. While students are reading, teachers confer with students. There is so much to learn from each student and so little time to give each of them that they have very little time to talk about their thinking. When you sit beside readers, you learn about their challenges, their growth and what to teach them here, Brian Kelly, who teaches in Kennett square, Pennsylvania, confers with Melissa about her growth as a reader, her current independent reading book, The Stand by Stephen King.

Brian Kelley 10:30
That is that the biggest book you've ever read?

Melissa 10:33
Oh, probably it's a pretty thick book, yeah.

Brian Kelley 10:37
Does that intimidate you at all? Like, when you see it?

Melissa 10:40
Not really, because I kind of realized, like last year, I would have never picked up a book that big. I'd always go for the smallest books and but like this year, when I read that um, daughter of spoken bones series, and they're, like, pretty big for me, I realized that, like, even if books are big, if you like them, they seem a lot smaller. Yeah, because, like, if you really like a book, they're gonna the size doesn't matter, because it's just gonna, like, you're just gonna blow through it really.

Brian Kelley 11:07
I love the way you put that. I think that's so true. And I find that, like, there's sometimes there's some books I'm sorry that they're over.

Melissa 11:14
Yeah?

Brian Kelley 11:14
Feel that way.

Melissa 11:15
Even if they're, like, the biggest books ever, you still too small.

Brian Kelley 11:19
Yeah, that is such a cool way to put it.

Moderator 11:22
Here are some of Penny's thoughts on conferring.

Penny Kittle 11:26
Conferences allow teachers to encourage and celebrate what readers are learning. I assess student understanding. Teach strategies to help readers overcome confusion, and often suggest ways that a student can set and meet goals. I also ask questions that help me understand when and where my students are reading outside of school. I watch for patterns in conferences and use that to help me plan mini lessons that will guide my students to be more attentive and more analytical in their reading lists of questions for different kinds of conferences are in the book Love workshop handouts on my website, pennykiddle.net, I don't know how to teach reading effectively without regular reading conferences. During these individual conferences, I problem solve with students. When Caden confessed a few weeks ago that he was lost in The Death Cure by James Dashner, I helped him backtrack in the book until he found a place where he remembered what was happening. We skimmed the chapters he'd read since and mapped out what was happening until we reached the point where he was currently reading. Just that few minutes of attention helped Caden get back on track. I was able to show him how a strategy like Rereading is useful, while also telling him that his understanding matters that reading should make sense, and when it doesn't, readers use strategies to fix that confusion. Our classrooms are busy places. Every student deserves a few minutes of my time. I need to focus on what each student needs, but it's also a time to uncover the individual interests in that room full of students, each child is given time to tell me who they are, what they value, and what interests fuel their engagement and learning.

Moderator 13:15
Penny with Kim Parker

Penny Kittle 13:17
I believe, as Allington said, that interest Trump's reading level. And so a kid will persist with a book that they find captivating, even if we are not matching it by their reading level. What do you think about that?

Kim Parker 13:31
I think that's exactly true. That's exactly true. I have more ELL kids this year than I've ever had, and they all read. They read a lot, and it's because they have books that are of interest to them, and they are challenging books. For the most part, they're sort of reading all over the levels, but they we have the conferences with them. They have opportunities to read and write about their books to clear up any confusion. They feel like they're a part of a community of readers. So anytime you know anyone's experiencing any sort of difficulty, we talk about it, we work it out, we give them the help they need. I don't think we should worry about level. As you said, I think that if we can find things that that they're interested in, they're going to read that's never fail, never it has never failed. Even if it's a really tough book, if they're really into it, they're going to read it.

Penny Kittle 14:18
You know, it's such an important question, What have you discovered about yourself as a reader, and that we didn't always honor, that kids had things to discover about themselves as readers.

Kim Parker 14:30
Right. It really devalues who they are as young people, right? Like we make discoveries as grown ups every day, and we value I have a son who's 19 months. We value his discoveries, but we don't value theirs.

Penny Kittle 14:42
Right.

Moderator 14:43
Here. Penny and Kim talk about why it matters to match texts to students.

Penny Kittle 14:50
One of my boys, a senior, said, When I interviewed him, you know, I really missed reading. He didn't. He didn't even realize he'd missed it. You know, he'd quit. He was a reader in middle school, and here he was a senior having skated along, and he was like, wow, I can just collapse into a book again.

Kim Parker 15:07
Yeah, I wish more people would understand that what is most important is that kids are reading right, that they have choice and that they can do really great things with text, and we just don't give them enough opportunities.

Penny Kittle 15:20
And the idea that developing a passion is worth taking the time for, that it can change everything. One of the joys of working with the book Love foundation is connecting with board member Donna Lynn Miller. Donna Lynn's passion for the reading lives of students is well known. It is contagious. She is an unstoppable advocate for all children and their teachers. Since today's episode is about matching students to books, today's list of Hot Titles comes from the book. Whisper her herself. Donnalyn Miller, I'm curious about you know you who read so many books, if you could give us some of your favorites?

Donalyn Miller 16:02
Oh, my goodness, I tried to make a list. This was where I actually tried to make a list before our call, because before our conversation today, because I could just talk about books forever, and I wanted to make sure I didn't forget some. But, you know, I read a little bit of everything. So I'm always reading books published for adults. I'm always reading a book about teaching. At some point, I'm big audiobook listener because I travel a lot. I'm often in a rental car or in an airport by myself, and those audiobooks help me out. So our friend Colby is trying to get me into podcast more and things, but some things that I read recently that I think are really great, I'm reading, reading without nonsense by Frank Smith, and that's an oldie but a goodie, and it's a book that I guess I missed in my teaching education, but Nancy Atwell mentioned it as a book that had been extremely influential on her teaching. And I thought, wow, this is certainly one I want to read, because she's been such an influence to me too. So reading without nonsense, I just finished a new novel that I think middle school kids would love. It's called unidentified suburban object by Mike young and Mike is one of the co founders of the weenie diverse books movement. He is just a wonderful human being and excited to read his book, but it's funny. It's funny, but it's looking at serious issues in a funny way. You know, the main character is Korean American. Her parents immigrated to the United States from Korea. They never talk about Korea. They refuse to talk about it. They don't really want to get involved in her quest for finding out more about her Korean identity, and she knows her parents are hiding something from her about their past that is either painful to them or that they just don't want her to know about that deep tone of what I just described to you, though, the book is extremely funny, just the main character's personality, her interactions with her friends, the interactions that she has with her parents, and I like that he was able to take that light touch with some serious topics. I think it makes the book more accessible to more kids. Some books that I read last year that I think kids will really love is Dumplin by Julie Murphy. Did you get a chance to read that one?

Penny Kittle 18:16
Yeah, I did. And I've had a book club at my ninth graders this year that just loved it.

Donalyn Miller 18:20
Well, Julie Murphy is a Texas home girl. She lives right up the road for me actually, and we actually have a colleague in common. My former assistant principal was Julie's science teacher in the seventh grade. Just, you know, Dumplin, you could both talk it too, and talk about what your students said about it. But Dumplin is just, it's pure text. Pure Texas. I know the people in that book. I'm related to half of them, I feel like and she's really nailed that small town life. I know you live in a small town too, and I can still appreciate some of the things that she's talking about, but also what it has to say about body image, about girl empowerment, and not in ways that you know, in ways that are real, in ways that show you know you can still have self doubt. Also Texas beauty pageants, man, I mean, you know they are, and I'm sure there's a hole in the ozone layer just over Texas for all the Aqua net that we've sprayed up into the air from here, but

Penny Kittle 19:21
Funny. Do you know her other book, though, was very popular my room side effects may vary. Yeah, I've got a lot of kids reading that.

Donalyn Miller 19:28
I think she's just a great new talent and also just a force for good in the world. She gave a hilarious keynote speech at a conference here locally that was a young adult book conference, and so there's that hundreds of kids in the audience listening to her, and she was talking about how the saddest letter that she ever gets from people, you know she gets, she gets some people calling her out about being an overweight woman and talking about her feminist mafia and all these things which she thinks are ridiculous. But she does get sad letters from people that say that they don't think the wrong. Romance in dumpling is realistic because the fat girl never gets the cute guy. And she she said to this room full of teenagers, I mean, it was just beautiful. She said, if you think that the fat girl never gets the cute guy, there's not a problem with my book. There's a problem with society. Yeah, and so I just admire her greatly. You know, I can't wait to see what she writes next. I think, I think she's just, she's doing a companion to Dumplin. Did you hear about this? No, so she's writing a companion to Dumplin right now that has a different protagonist, but it's set in that same little town. So I'm excited about that. See what else I've liked lately? Did you see Red Woman A to Z by Kate Schatz, so it's 26 biographies of notable American women, but they're all American women that a lot of our kids don't know. So people like Patti Smith, people like Sonia Sotomayor, people like Bessie Coleman, and the book is the design of the book is just beautiful. It's got these block wood cut pictures of each woman. I think it's the kind of book that kids that say they wouldn't want to read a biography would love to read because there's one person per two page spread. So it's the kind of book like you would pick it up in the classroom, read a couple a day, and then eventually you'd figure out, hey, I read a whole book of biographies. But I also love that it's I kind of have a fondness for picture book biographies and biographies written for teenagers, because, well, I love biographies written for adults, too, but I think it's always finding out about people that I don't know that much about. You know, yeah, absolutely introducing kids to people they don't know. I could go on. There's more I like to drown city. Don Brown, oh my gosh. I love that book. Well, I loved his Dust Bowl, his Dust Bowl graphic novel that he did a few years ago. And I put that on a ladder with with all of our Dust Bowl texts that we have. But drown city is about Hurricane Katrina. Don Brown interviewed hundreds of people who survived Katrina, who also had been down there afterwards, before, during and after the events around Hurricane Katrina. I think the book is honest in its portrayal of what actually happened to people there and how institutional challenges and racism led to a lot of people suffering more than they needed to. I also like that the book, some of the proceeds for that book are given to Habitat for Humanity. It's continuing to build houses down in New Orleans. They've still not recovered. You know, I go down to New Orleans and I drive by all those trailers, you know, people still living in government housing while they built all these beautiful casinos. So you know that it's going to take a long time for that area to recover. But I think that book would be a powerful one for kids to read, because for our students, Hurricane Katrina is already historical. It is. It's already historical event. You know, you and I lived through that on the news. And I have students that came to Texas from Hurricane Katrina, that were displaced, never went home. And so it seems more fresh in my mind. But for many of our students, they don't have context for it anymore.

Penny Kittle 23:19
Yeah, those are such good recommendations. Thank you.

Donalyn Miller 23:22
You're welcome.

Moderator 23:25
The books that Donna Lynn mentioned are in the show notes at teacher learning sessions.com/go/book. Love, or by going to the podcast network menu and selecting the book Love foundation podcast that book list is a small excerpt from Penny's conversation with Donna Lynn, and we will share the rest of it soon in an upcoming episode. You do not want to miss it.

Penny Kittle 23:51
In this episode, we've talked about how you can connect your students to texts. We talked about what you can do class after class, year after year for all of your students. To close the episode, here's a story of what it looks like for one student, a girl in Kim Parker's class, who found that right book, and from there became a reader.

Kim Parker 24:12
She's a senior. She is she's come out of ELL classes, so she's been in regular classes for the last, I think, year and a half, two years. And she said that before she started, when she would read, she would just look at something. Think it was too hard, put it away, put it away, put it away. And she said, probably she's one of those one or two books, like I've read one or two books, and I didn't really read them. She said, I sort of skimmed them and faked it. And so I said, Well, I asked her, What was the difference between then and now. And she said, It's because one, you made us read, right? You said, every day you have to read, and two, you let us read whatever we wanted. And she said, so I've read these books, and I've had these experiences that I never thought I would have. And she's read, she's read 16 books, and we have about two weeks left. She said she's aiming for. It, yeah. She said she's aiming for 20, but she's at 16. She's reading everything, everything right now, by Nicola Yoon, and she says, You have to read it, Dr Parker, you have to read it. You have to read it. And I said, I'm on it. I'm reading another one that I'm reading currently, reading atonement, that a student has been on me to read. I love that both of those books, right, right? Yeah. So after that, I said, I'm going to get to it. I'm going to get to it. But she has such a different way of thinking about reading. And she says, You know what? I like it. I enjoy it. It's something that I can see myself doing all the time. She said, I have a habit. She's a star basketball player too, and she says, I read on the way to games. I read when I have free time. Now, reading is a habit for me. And I was like, oh my goodness, Cue the music. But she was just sort of, she had this moment, and I think she hadn't really worked it out until she started to talk about all of the thing, the changes that she had noted. And it's just this kid who, I mean, really nice kid, everyone knows her, but she had not thought of herself as a reader. And she said, Yeah, reading is something that I do by choice now, and it's something that I think I'll do. She said, I can see it, how it's affecting all of my other work, how I'm able to understand more, how the vocabulary that I've been noticing has helped me to be able to write better. It's all of those things. And she's just, I couldn't have, I couldn't have orchestrated it anymore, any better, and it's all her it's all her growth. I was just sort of there to witness it and to say, how about these books? How about these books? With readers, there are books that really move you. And her book is the boy in the black suit by Jason Reynolds. Sweet. She said, You know, my dad wasn't around. My mom raised me all my life, and, you know, I couldn't imagine not having my mom. And so how he worked through it gave me a way to look at it and think about it. And she's like, that's her book. So I think that I'm going to pick her up a copy, just to make sure she when she leaves me, she'll always have that book with her.

Penny Kittle 26:59
Thank you for listening to this episode of the book Love foundation podcast. Applications were due on March 1, and this year, we received 140 from across the United States and Canada. I've only just begun reading them and sorting them for my board members, but I already know we haven't raised enough money to fund all of the deserving teachers who have applied. Can you help us reach potential donors? Send a link of this podcast to people you know and encourage them to help us with this mission. Help us bring the joy of reading to more teenagers. Help us create a love of reading in every school. Help teachers build reading lives that last. Thank you so much for listening. I'm Penny Kittle.

Moderator 27:46
If you enjoy this podcast, please help us spread the word about the show. Talk to your colleagues about it and share it on your online social network. Please let people know that you like it and tell them why. If you're listening on iTunes, please subscribe and take a moment to leave a rating and a review. That's a great way for you to help support us, because it helps other teachers learn what the show is about. In our next episode, a conversation with Kylene Beers,

Kylene Beers 28:15
I think that when teachers have the tools in front of them to help them think carefully about what they're doing and to make the choice that always best supports children. We do that, and that's what I think I love the most about teachers. They never stop looking at their own actions and making any changes they need so that it helps kids.

Moderator 28:45
That's next time on the book Love foundation podcast. The book Love foundation podcast is produced by the teacher learning sessions.com connecting teachers with ideas, experts and each other. You