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Advancing Literacy Beyond the Classroom is designed for families, caregivers, and educators who want to support young readers and writers at home. From early literacy to essay writing, AI tools to choosing great books, we're covering it all for PreK-12 students. Join us each month for a new episode where we'll explore practical strategies grounded in the latest research. Learn more about Teachers College Advancing Literacy at https://advancingliteracy.tc.columbia.edu/ .
Amanda Hartman:
Welcome to Advancing Literacy Beyond the Classroom. This is a space where we can talk to families and caregivers to support the literacy learning that goes on outside of school. We welcome you to join us in this learning journey to make learning fun and purposeful. We know that learning, and literacy learning specifically, is a life thing and not just a school thing. As family members and caregivers, we know your role is central to your kids' literacy development. You may have young children, kids, preteens and/or young adults. We have some suggestions that will support their literacy journey. Let's get started. I'm Amanda Hartman.
Emily Butler Smith:
And I'm Emily Smith.
Natalie Louis:
And I'm Natalie Louis. We are staff developers at Advancing Literacy at Teachers College in New York City. We are a center within the Teacher Education and Community Partnerships Division, providing professional development for school districts in the New York City Metro area, across the country and worldwide. This school year, we'll be offering over 20 free workshops for families, caregivers and educators. You can find our events and future workshops on our social media pages @TCAdvancingLit, and our website, advancingliteracy.tc.columbia.edu. Today, we have practical advice, key research, and some examples for families and caregivers to ignite the literacy development and interests of your kids.
Amanda Hartman:
Thanks, Natalie. So I'm going to just start us off with our topic today to help us think about literacy development outside of school. In both reading and writing, we know that your kids' interests and social connections will be at the center of what we want to tap into to engage them in literacy activities. We know that literacy development can flourish when kids see that it is purposeful, it connects to themselves and community, and when they have more skill development. The more competency they have, the more confidence they read and write with.
So as educators, parents and caregivers, the three of us, yeah, we hope that you lean into our varied experiences and knowledge, and other educators in the field, to provide you with suggestions, tips, activities, for you and your kids. We know that each of your families and communities have a wide range of expertise and resources. We also know that every child is different in their needs and interests. So we hope that some of these ideas will ignite some curiosity, a little conversation between you and your kids, that help that literacy journey be fruitful, helpful, and of course, we want it to be joyful.
Okay. So I'm going to start with some questions. I'll also try to answer some of them. But let's start off with even just the title of today, Advancing Literacy Beyond the Classroom, so what does this mean to you all? Let's start with advancing literacy, what does that mean?
Emily Butler Smith:
Thanks, Amanda. Well, I'll start us off in thinking a bit about just unpacking the word literacy in general. I think it's pretty commonplace that when people think about literacy, when you hear that word, you're thinking about reading and writing, that's the first part of it. And that's certainly true for us at Advancing Literacy, that our mission is to ensure that all kids grow as readers and writers, they're able to decode and encode words on the page, to make meaning when they read text, and to create texts that communicate for real world purposes.
So reading and writing, encoding, decoding, but also to think about text in broad ways, that text doesn't only have to be something that's written on the page. It can be that, of course, it can be written language. But kids really need to comprehend text of all sorts. So they're going to encounter texts in books, but also in the world that are graphs or paintings or a manual or... I love this one recently, I'll come to you too as a parent, and my teenager has just really learned to drive, just knowing which side of the car the gas pump is on. And you can see that in the dashboard, but you have to read the icon in order to understand, oh, that thing is on the right side or the left side, telling you where the pump is.
Amanda Hartman:
I just learned that, by the way.
Emily Butler Smith:
It helps in a rental car. So just thinking about literacy being way more vast than a book. And I think oftentimes, when we say the word literacy, we're thinking reading and writing and we're thinking written text on the page, but it's much bigger than that.
Amanda Hartman:
Sure. Well, even just saying that, it reminds me of some of the road trips I've taken with my family and my mom was insistent that we print a map, not just use GPS, but that we print a map, and that my nephew would read the map, he would be in charge of reading it to work on that skill, because that's a literacy skill.
Emily Butler Smith:
Yeah, yeah.
Amanda Hartman:
Nice. Yeah. I mean, when you say that literacy is beyond just reading and writing, it makes me think about, as a educator, those standards of speaking and listening, that literacy is so tied to language, particularly oral language skills, our grammar and syntax, the vocabulary that we have. It plays such a critical role in understanding and both receiving, as well as producing language to talk and discuss that which we might be reading on the page or in art or from these graphs.
And speaking and listening is definitely a skill to be working on that helps us to monitor, do we understand what one another is saying? Are we building on what each other are saying? Especially in early childhood, they say that really to develop language and vocabulary, a back and forth is critical for kids, I would argue for all ages, to really work on that skill, not just the speaking, but the listening, the kinds of questions we ask each other to follow a thought or to respond even to a text.
Emily Butler Smith:
It's funny, when you mentioned the road trip, it brought me back to road trips with my mom and my sister, and my mom always liked that we were locked in the car, not locked literally, but stuck in the car, and she liked the road trip because it gave us a chance to be in conversation with each other in ways that we weren't if we were going about our regular lives. And I think that idea of being in conversation back and forth, extended time, I thought that's where you were headed. But yeah, this idea that speaking and listening, and also the relationship, of course, between speaking, composing an oral text and encoding when we're writing, and the converse of that taking in, comprehending when we're listening, and reading the written word.
Amanda Hartman:
Sure. Like what somebody else is trying to say to us, those are real skills. Yeah. What about for you, Natalie?
Natalie Louis:
I had a unique experience because when we were getting ready to do this podcast, I asked a friend if she could give me her definition of literacy. And Emily, you talked about reading and writing as a part of literacy, and Amanda, you just talked about speaking and listening as a part of literacy. And my friend said, "Oh, that means when you have special knowledge in a certain area, you have literacy." And I was like, "What?"
She then continued to tell me that her partner had cooking literacy, and she was working on her construction literacy, she's trying to get good at making and fixing things. And I hadn't been thinking about literacy like that at all, but of course, that is literacy too, knowledge, the knowledge that you have about things. So then I thought about myself, I definitely have baseball literacy, or literacy in most sports. What about you, Emily, if we thought about literacy that way?
Emily Butler Smith:
Yeah. Thanks. Well, I love that. And I'm also thinking about the ways that our kids... You know your kids in your life who have so many topics that they really dig into. They become literate in Pokemon cards or in whatever the topic is, dinosaurs. They can become so literate in a particular subject area.
For me, well, I think a couple of things come to mind. I feel like I've gotten way better in the last few years on spreadsheets and calendars, tracking information. It might have to do with the college applications process. I've got a first year student in college, so we've just been through a lot of that. So I feel like the calendars and the spreadsheets and just understanding different systems, that's a whole literacy unto itself, a lot of learning. Lice was another one. I had lice literacy, I think.
Natalie Louis:
Not sure I want that one.
Emily Butler Smith:
I know. You don't, you don't.
Amanda Hartman:
You might need it though.
Emily Butler Smith:
It happens, it happens, yeah.
Amanda Hartman:
It's helpful information.
Emily Butler Smith:
It's amazing how quickly you become literate in a certain topic too when you need to.
Amanda Hartman:
Sure. Well, I just remember this year at our multilingual symposium that we ran here at Teachers College, we were watching videos of kids, kids were taking videos at home with their families, things that they do together. And this one boy took a video of his dad cooking and the conversation between the two of them about cooking, and not only the sequential events that were happening during the cooking, but all the specified vocabulary and knowledge that you need to cook the meal that they were making together. The professor did a whole word analysis of all the literacy that was happening during that little video that the boy was taking. It was beautiful. Beautiful.
So it is, it's so important that literacy is literally around us all day. It's in our daily lives, whether we are reading our environment, reading a book or a text or writing or storytelling, even at home, that it takes specified vocabulary that goes with that topic, it probably takes a structure to convey it, and we use reading skills, like inference or synthesis, to put information together. So it just feels so critical that we see literacy as this expansive construct versus something very reductive. So let's talk about the second part of our series, the beyond the classroom. What's important for caregivers, family members, to understand and think about specifically literacy outside of the classroom?
Emily Butler Smith:
Well, thanks, Amanda. I think for me, part of what is particularly important for us to take into account as family members or caregivers is to think about literacy in reading, writing, speaking, listening, knowledge, but also to contextualize this of thinking really purposefully about what it's for, and to think that when we consider literacy, it's really about meaningful connections. It's really thinking schools, of course, and classrooms we hope are built for community and connection. I think most of us who have kids in school or have experienced that, you immediately become connected to families, I hope, or that's the best case scenario.
But I think for me, as a parent and an auntie and a teacher, I want to make sure that family members and caregivers see literacy as opportunities to build really deep connections that shape kids' emotional attachment to us, to our family or community, that help us learn about the people we want to be, to develop resilience in the face of challenges, that when we're in conversation with our kids at home, we're able to forge all of that. So it's, of course, about academic skills, but it's also about the really deep connection.
Amanda Hartman:
That's beautiful. It's beautiful, it's powerful, and it's just so important, the social connection. Yeah. What about you, Nat?
Natalie Louis:
I think if I think about the beyond the classroom part, I just really think that sometimes caregivers don't realize they're doing learning at home, and their lives and everything that kids end up doing with families and their community is learning and it can be used for literacy, kids can bring it back to school. So just being present and interacting around life, whatever that is.
My older son was very into laundry. That sounds really strange. And yet, the amount of language that is generated when you are going to go to the laundromat and do your laundry, the vocabulary that we got. And then, what he brought back when we were picking vegetables at the market, naming them, talking during the prep, like you said, Amanda, in the video, just everything is then literacy, and it comes from home, it comes from outside of the classroom.
Emily Butler Smith:
I think it's interesting too, Natalie, you were talking about things like doing laundry or going grocery shopping, and there are all sorts of opportunities for literacy inside of that, whether that's back and forth conversations that aren't just about, "Put your clothes away," but are more developed, or just the open-ended, I think is what I'm looking for, is the idea of conversation during those activities. But also, understanding that we can easily, as parents and family members and caregivers, get caught up in the logistics of life and it's stressful. There's a lot to track when you're trying to care for small children, it's exhausting. When you're trying to care for adolescents, it's emotionally exhausting.
And I think what we want to think about with beyond the classroom is the opportunities that we have, as there's so much opportunity and so much space for us to use when we are going about our daily lives, and not to be too focused on, yes, we have to focus on the logistics, like, "Do you have your sneakers for PE tomorrow?" Or, "Did you unpack your lunch?" Or, "Did you pack your backpack?" Are you going to sleep? Brush your teeth." We can get all focused on all the logistics of life and we want to think about ways that literacy can live in that space without it being forgotten.
Amanda Hartman:
Yeah. I remember when my nephew was really little, my sister always read to my nephew at night before he went to bed, but I really wanted to be the auntie who would retell family stories. So I picked a couple of things that we did together, whether it was going for a walk and seeing a beautiful bird, very simple stories, and I would practice retelling that story and I would have parts. And this was really even before he said words, maybe he had a few words, but this is pretty early in childhood, and I would put actions with it and I would give our dialogue, I would tell a very robust story, and I would just practice, I would just retell this story over and over and over. And then, you could see how he started to tell it himself and tell the story, just like all that early reading stuff, and also writing. So then, I drew pictures, I made little books for family, family stories. But just having that be a routine for me and him to connect to and to share and enjoy with each other.
Emily Butler Smith:
Nice. So it's helpful too for us to be thinking about one of the things we want to unpack, the title of our podcast, but also for us to be thinking about the research that informs our thinking. And some of that has already come up in our conversation, and we know, for instance, in early literacy, that it's really important for kids to be in multiple exchange conversations to develop their language. But I think it's also helpful for us to think about just what are some key pieces of research that inform and impact your thinking about literacy and the ways families can support kids at home and beyond the classroom?
Natalie Louis:
So I chose Zaretta Hammond. In her book, called Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain, she talks about the concept of learning partnerships, and I thought that was a cool thing to think about in terms of caregivers. And she sees the creation of a learning partnership as having three distinct steps to it and they go in an order. And so ,the first part is the building of rapport. I love the word rapport. Every time I see rapport, I have to look it up again, because it's such a specific... Basically, she talks about it as it's the words and actions that we express to show that we care for someone. And so, you're a caregiver, and the building of rapport is a thing that you could be doing to invest in a learning partnership.
The second phase of building a learning partnership, according to Zaretta Hammond, is what she calls alliance. And so, the alliance part is when the adult and the child bring their skill and will to specific learning challenges. So that's cool to be like, "Okay, I've got some stuff I can do, some skill, you've got some stuff, we both have the will to try it. We're going to try to bring it to this thing, whatever it is, like learning tricks on the skateboard."
And then, her third step is, once you get rapport and alliance, the last part is cognitive insight. I think of this as the aha. I almost want to be like, "Ahh." You have rapport and alliance, and then this is really the place where the kid and the child come to understand... They don't only just learn, they also come to understand their learning moves together potentially. This is how I learned to do skateboarding tricks. Oh, I watched someone else and then I... So it's more than just I learned the skill, it's also I learn to appreciate and know my learning moves and what works for me as a learner.
Emily Butler Smith:
So like how to learn.
Natalie Louis:
Yeah. I think that I could imagine doing that as a caregiver. So I like the idea of learning partnerships.
Amanda Hartman:
Well, it's so important, because what we do together is important, but how we do it is also really important and how that connects to the brain, what the brain does in order to learn. So I can say it to you a hundred times.
Natalie Louis:
Yes, but if you have the cognitive insight-
Amanda Hartman:
If you have the cognitive insight that this is important, that this will be helpful, that this is purposeful, then you can learn it. I can't learn it for you.
Natalie Louis:
Yeah. And potentially replicate in another scenario where you're learning something new, what works for me as a learner.
Emily Butler Smith:
I think what you're saying also resonates, there are a couple of pieces that are coming to mind for me, but one is about the work of Julie Lythcott-Haims. In her work, she was really about making sure that kids had agency, that they weren't just following the rules of something, but were learning how to be independent. And I think what you're talking about with that cognitive insight, you're learning how to learn, learning how to have agency. So that's one thing that comes to mind.
But another, and I think this goes back to, for me, is another part is that connectedness. And what you're describing too is that when you have rapport, when you have connectedness with someone, that's going to shape everything. That shapes your engagement with whatever it is that you're doing, it shapes your trust, and it really also helps to fight loneliness and isolation, which we know... I have two adolescents now that I'm parenting, and we hear it in the media all the time, that loneliness and isolation are some of the biggest challenges that we're facing with adolescents, and really wanting to make sure that they're feeling connected within our family, within our community.
And it also takes me back to some of the work of the former surgeon general, Vivek Murthy, and thinking especially about the advisory that they put out in 2023 on the healing effect of social connection and community. And in that, again, research shows it's not complicated, it seems pretty obvious that children and adolescents who enjoy positive relationships with their peers, with their parents, with their teachers, they experience improved academic outcomes. So these relationships are everything, it's not like icing on the cake, it is the cake in my mind.
Amanda Hartman:
Well, and just thinking about that literacy can be that glue, that reading something together or discussing something together can help to keep building that relationship between... Yeah. I've been looking recently, I just feel like there's a whole resurgence in conversation about some of the decline of reading for enjoyment amongst adults. Some of these statistics are not looking great and they seem to be on the decline, like 48% of adults read one or more books. I didn't do the average because there's some people who read a lot, like hundreds, that make up the average.
Emily Butler Smith:
I'm sitting between two of them.
Amanda Hartman:
But even the 13-year olds, 14%. So there is, I think, what can we do to bolster reading, that can support the social emotional health, that can support the knowledge and skill building that we want to do, that can do these things, and to also read whole books, whole parts.
So one of the pieces of research that I really wanted to talk about was listening comprehension, both being read to and listening to somebody read to you, or even listening to something like a podcast or an audiobook. And the research says that it's really critical for not only elementary school kids, but also for middle schoolers, that the listening comprehension is a place to really build, as kids are learning the decoding process, as that becomes more automatized, as that becomes more fluent, we want to make sure that kids' listening comprehension is also being supported. And we know that as kids are learning to read, that when there is listening comprehension side-by-side, it bolsters the reading comprehension.
And that, I know as an early childhood educator and from my experience with my family, it's so important to read out loud to your kids, we know they learn language structures, vocabulary, knowledge. But to know that that's true for fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh graders as well, to be listening to a book together or reading a book together, not just having them read to us, but to read out loud to them also supports their reading comprehension, I just feel like is a piece of research that we don't always know. I remember my sister was like, "So he can read now. Should he just read to me?" And I'm like, "Sure, and you should keep reading to him." So she did. She ended up, even when he was in fifth grade, I think they read maybe one or two of Rick Riordan's series and they read-
Natalie Louis:
The Lightning Thief, that one?
Amanda Hartman:
They read The Lightning Thief and they read the Jason Reynolds books and Jewell Rhodes Parker and books that maybe he wasn't going to just pick up on his own. I mean, maybe. But when he did it with my sister, he was full on, engaged, all about it.
Emily Butler Smith:
And then, they named their dog Zeus.
Amanda Hartman:
And they named their dog Zeus, for sure off of The Lightning Thief, for sure. So I just think that's just a really interesting piece of research that probably follows the things that we maybe are doing in our home, but just to keep doing them, the payoff is huge.
Emily Butler Smith:
Yeah, I think that's true. When they get old enough to read, we tend to stop reading to them, so good to keep that.
Natalie Louis:
I like read aloud. Who's going to read to me? Ooh, audiobooks, that's like my answer.
Amanda Hartman:
Or a podcast.
Natalie Louis:
Who's going to read to me? Ooh, a podcast. So we've just talked a little bit about research, that feels important, when we're supporting literacy outside of the classroom. And I think in this next little part, we want to talk about suggestions, tips, strategies, we can get really practical about. So what does the research lead us to think about what matters and what we can do inside of our spaces outside of school?
Emily Butler Smith:
Yeah. I love the practical stuff. I'm like, "Let's get this done." But what should we do? So I think it's helpful to think about reading, and I want to think about materials and routines, because I think those are some really straightforward things, tangible things to be thinking about. For me, when you think about the materials first, let's just take what are kids reading, it might be useful to have a mindset around nutrition, because in nutrition, we pay attention to what we're consuming and we're often thinking about that not just at one meal, but over weeks, you're meant to say, "Okay, what did they eat over the week?" Not just at one meal? And you're also thinking about long-term health.
So when we think about the materials of what kids are reading, first and foremost, I think you do want to make sure that kids have access to books, that they are actually reading. That goes back to your point on the research of our kids finishing books. Just like we would say we want them to have access to healthy snacks. If you put healthy snacks in the refrigerator, like cut up vegetables or fruit, they're going to eat that. So if you have books and have access to books, that just gets you one step closer to supporting their reading.
Amanda Hartman:
Make it easy.
Emily Butler Smith:
Yeah, exactly. So local libraries, obviously, are one of the key places you want to make sure you're giving kids access to books, and that's materials. But of course, hopefully, they're also bringing books home from school. And also, a lot of schools are now providing digital access to books. And so, to think about just making sure they have access to books and that's part of the material piece of things.
For me, another consideration when it comes to materials is to just take a yes and approach, like a little standup comedy or whatever it's called, improv, right?
Natalie Louis:
Improv.
Emily Butler Smith:
That's an improv thing. But whatever kids are into. So if your kids are into something, say yes. If they're into reading graphic novels, say yes. If they're into reading comics, say yes. If they're into reading books that are, you think, too easy for them, say yes, it's okay, it's great to have, as long as they're reading. If they want to read the same book over and over again, say yes, which a lot of them do, especially when they're little. There's all sorts of support in that.
And so, I would say yes to whatever kids are interested in. You might think they're silly. But I would just say that that's a way to build interest and sense of positive connection to what they're reading, and then also gives an entry point. So a little bit, going back to that nutrition idea, you might think of it a little bit like fruit or melon. That's an easy way to get some whole foods in, and Brussels sprouts are coming later.
Amanda Hartman:
No, and you're also like seeing what your kid is into, and then that goes back to that establishing relationship. I didn't grow up on graphic novels, I know some people grew up on comics, but if they're interested in that, I should welcome it and maybe even learn from it.
Emily Butler Smith:
Yeah. Right, right. Absolutely. It's also been interesting to me as a parent, again, I mentioned I've got adolescents that I'm parenting, my daughter, who is about to be 13, just cleaned out her bookshelves in her bedroom and wanted to get rid of the books that were, I would say, elementary age books, she was wanting to get rid of them. And I said, "Well, don't you want to keep some of those favorite graphics? You've got The Baby-Sitters Club. Keep some of those things that you might want to reread." And she did, she kept a couple. And lo and behold, a week later she was having emotional challenges, and her book that she was reading otherwise was, I think, a little bit too complicated, and she was like, "I just don't want to read that right now. I need something more mellow." And I was like, "Okay, go back to one of those old favorites."
Amanda Hartman:
Yeah, yeah. I love that.
Emily Butler Smith:
So yeah, it's a coping mechanism. So just thinking about that part of it.
Another thing materials-wise that I would recommend highly is series reading. And again, teachers often think that series reading is like not great reading, just in the same way that we might have that feeling about graphic novels, in part because it doesn't push kids enough potentially. I think the opposite. I think series reading, and the research shows this, that if kids read series books, they tend to be lifelong readers. And so, any of us who are lifelong readers probably had series that we were hooked into as kids.
Amanda Hartman:
Bobbsey Twins.
Emily Butler Smith:
Yeah. Trixie Belden in for me. But that's one of the things. The other thing about series reading to just keep in mind, having predictable structures, predictable characters, helps kids to tuck into new books. It also helps because you're not constantly trying to figure out what to read next, so you're just on a path.
Amanda Hartman:
Well, absolutely. Comprehension. Well, I just think series books is like watching a TV series, it's the same concept, and you can see the pleasure inside of that. Your brain releases a little bit and then can take in...
Emily Butler Smith:
And speaking of take in, your brain takes in a ton. Those of us who watch television series or read books in a series, you put three 100-page books together, you've got a 300-page book that you've just put together.
Amanda Hartman:
For sure. For sure.
Emily Butler Smith:
And if you put three 300-page books together, you've got 900 pages you're tracking. So I think the idea is really thinking about these books can support deeper comprehension, more complex texts over time.
Amanda Hartman:
I love it.
Emily Butler Smith:
Yeah. And I would say a couple more things that just come to mind for me in terms of the materials that kids are reading, I would also encourage, this is some mixed genre. And when we talk about genre, I think for us, it's to think about historical fiction and the chance to learn a lot of content, to think about fantasy, and the chance to, in both cases, build vocabulary and understanding of syntax, that gets much more complicated. But also, in fantasy, we're dealing with moral issues of good and evil, dystopian, same thing, good and evil. And then, to just think about nonfiction, of course, as a place to either pair that with fiction or to stack nonfiction texts on topics in order to develop knowledge on that. And a lot of kids will want to read nonfiction, that could be a yes and also.
Amanda Hartman:
For sure.
Emily Butler Smith:
Maybe your kid only wants to read nonfiction, that can be a yes, and then you're trying to encourage them to read fiction.
Amanda Hartman:
For sure.
Emily Butler Smith:
Yeah. That's a lot on material.
I think maybe a couple of other just things on routines. I would practically make sure that kids are seeing you read. So just in the same way, Amanda, you were talking about the importance of us, as parents and caregivers, families and caregivers, reading to kids, even when they're older, it's also important for kids of all ages to see the adults in their lives reading so that we're seeing that model, and to also just find ways to celebrate. My daughter just read the Hunger Games trilogy and we just watched each movie after the fact, and so it was fun for her to read the book and then for us to watch the movie. And just to think about that's a nice little celebration of reading and keeps her hooked in and reading the next one. Just to be thinking about those as kinds of little ways to celebrate or find authors you like and go visit them, or if they come on tour, get your books signed, different things like that.
Amanda Hartman:
So exciting.
Emily Butler Smith:
What about you, Amanda?
Amanda Hartman:
Well, just to think about... I think graphic novel series are wonderful and it just reminds me the yes and, audiobooks, and Natalie was talking about this earlier, audiobooks are great for kids as well. On our road trips, we always have an audiobook. I think we read Grace Lin's Where the Mountain Meets the Moon. It's a beautiful book. It's long. And I think my nephew was seven or eight on our road trip, and he loved it, he loved it. And sometimes we think, "Oh, audiobooks aren't books." No, audiobooks are books, there's good stuff in there. So I think that idea of listening to audiobooks, listening to podcasts together, are really important.
But I think what I want to say about whether you read out loud, whether you're listening to an audiobook together or a podcast, discuss. What is going to be the conversation that you have? What questions can you raise? What ideas can you share? What reactions do you have? Because kids will learn from that as well. And then, you'll want to ask your kids, "What are your questions?" Look at their reactions, ask for their reactions, so that you're both doing that and following each other's thoughts. So taking that idea of togetherness, that really then really honors, "I care about what you think, maybe what you're feeling," or, 'What you think is interesting or important here," and, "I have thoughts about how this impacts the community where we live," or whatever those things are.
So I just think that idea of finding some space that you can discuss, and it could be a car ride or a subway ride. It could be walking to school and discussing something that you either read together or listened together, and it could be even as you're falling asleep at night. It doesn't have to be just straight reading, we can have a little discussion. Yeah. What were you thinking that, Nat?
Natalie Louis:
I was thinking about writing. So I think sometimes, writing is less... The importance of doing writing at home can feel like people don't know as much about the importance of trying writing at home. And so, I thought of a couple of things that I would suggest. Amanda, you said the first one, which is you're going to become the auntie that is the storytelling auntie. And so, I would say the first thing is to story tell, which you can story tell anything, what you did, what you made, where you went. That's why I love Thanksgiving, it's always my favorite holiday, because people story tell. There's something about it that... I don't know about you, both of you, but I feel like often people are storytelling. Maybe that's parties for you or maybe that's some other venue.
Emily Butler Smith:
I think family stories.
Natalie Louis:
Yeah, family stories. That's what you said, Amanda, right, you're the auntie that does that. When you're doing that, it is really important to use all of your languages. So if you're a multilingual person, you have access to more than one language, there's lots of ways that you can be telling stories, and you can be even mixing language and you can be inviting people in to use whatever language they have access to in the storytelling process. So that's my first one.
I also just want to say you can talk writing. So you don't have to just talk story. That's what they call it in Hawaii, by the way, they talk story to start meetings. You can talk about pictures or you can do informational talk, sort of sounds like a teacher. You can do opinion talk, sort of sounds like you making an argument with a position and some backup. And then, you could do that about your favorite TV show. One time, my boys and I did it on Diego versus Dora the Explorer, which one was better and why? All of that is rehearsal for what they will end up being asked to do when they're asked to write in school, and yet you can make that so your own based on which movie do we go see? Which show are we going to put on?
Amanda Hartman:
Yeah.
Emily Butler Smith:
Yeah. I'm laughing because I just have this recollection again, just funny how memories come back to you when you hear people talking about their stories. But I remember when my son was, I think he was in second grade, and something was hard in school. We were walking down the street and he was telling me about some slightly traumatic experience at school, in the sense of it was super challenging, and he started to cry. And then, he was like, "I didn't understand what the question was asking me. My heart started going thump, thump, thump, and my cheeks got hot."
Amanda Hartman:
[inaudible 00:42:46]
Emily Butler Smith:
I know. And I was essentially sitting there like, "Oh my gosh, great story." I was like, "Great details." I was like, "You might be having a little challenge with math, but great details on the storytelling."
Amanda Hartman:
And he's learning skills to find more precise ways of tapping into his emotions, which is so critical, and it goes back to your idea, from Vivek, just about our emotions and feeling lonely and connected, and to use your voice or to use writing or to use that structure helps you in your everyday.
Emily Butler Smith:
Yeah. And to be able to describe something that happened, exactly.
Amanda Hartman:
And move through an emotion, move through difficulty. I mean, this is what we need.
Emily Butler Smith:
Yeah, for sure, yeah.
Amanda Hartman:
It made me think, Natalie, by storytelling, it both provides kids with things to bring into the classroom, bring it into the... You should write about that.
Emily Butler Smith:
Teachers want that, right?
Amanda Hartman:
Yeah, that's a great idea. And also, just the idea that when you talk an essay together or you're talking through an argument, you're giving practice to text structure, which is both good for reading and writing. Yeah, I love that, I love that.
Emily Butler Smith:
And thinking, if you're doing that analytic work of comparing and contrasting, that's just analytic.
Amanda Hartman:
Yes, for sure. We don't need even paper and pen.
Natalie Louis:
We're composing.
Amanda Hartman:
We need conversation talk. I love that.
Natalie Louis:
Can I do two more?
Amanda Hartman:
Sure.
Natalie Louis:
Another one-
Amanda Hartman:
We love the tips.
Natalie Louis:
Another tip is, I think as a caregiver, it can be really fun to think about all the ways writing shows up in the world, especially if we're thinking we're going to take it beyond the classroom. So writing as a tool, it can be used to help us reflect, like in a journal, we might make to-do lists or take notes to help us remember what matters, I just have a little list here, or we could write or co-write letters about issues that matter to us, or captions for photos in a scrapbook. I think it can be difficult as a caregiver to think, "Well, how would we do writing here at home? We don't have assignments. We don't have a rubric or a descriptor of what we're supposed to make."
But what does writing do in the real world then I think is part of what helped me to think about it at home with my kids. What if the kids wrote and helped with a family cookbook? They could have writing jobs, like a journalist does or a critic does, so they could write an article for the New York Times or a review for a restaurant or an app or a video game. So that's what I did with my kids, was I tried to think like what writing exists in the world and how might we engage... I just remember one time, my husband was missing some tools from his tool closet, and my younger son came over and said, "Well, we need a sign-out sheet." And then, he made a sign-out sheet for our house. It was like, "If you take any of dad's tools, put your name here," and he had columns-
Amanda Hartman:
Sign, yes.
Natalie Louis:
... and he was like, "Tool here."
Emily Butler Smith:
I love it, a sign-out sheet.
Natalie Louis:
I was like, "Who is this kid?" It was when we was first writing.
Amanda Hartman:
I love it.
Natalie Louis:
It was real world.
And then, my last one is that writing is really just making and creating. So I think if we're thinking about what matters right now especially, in the economy, because of the internet, kids are going to need to know how to make and create. How to produce content maybe is another way to say that. And so, the skills you learn when you're writing, how to find ideas, how to plan, how to organize, how to look back at it, revise it. I think you just want to be thinking about what can we make. Emily, you said this earlier, that as soon as they can draw, they're ready to participate.
So this is my last story for this part. When I would go to the supermarket when they were very, very little and they were only drawing, I would have them make our shopping list. And so, they would draw a yellow circle, and then they would read it to me, "Lemons." They couldn't write any letters yet, but they knew that they made something that was going to be used for something, and then eventually, they were able to put a letter there, like an L for lemons, and then they were able to try to spell lemons. I think what can we make is a really powerful question at home.
Amanda Hartman:
Yeah. And also, just so empowering, like I'm going to trust you to make our list, and you are going to help me go to the grocery or you're going to help me navigate this trip. All of that is putting agency and empowering our kids to take action.
Emily Butler Smith:
To not be passive.
Amanda Hartman:
That's right.
All right. Well, we've come to my favorite part, to think about and to share our favorite books. And we've limited ourselves so that it's not too many, we've each chosen two. You know I'm an avid reader, I love reading, and I love hearing what other people are reading because it gives me then more things to read.
Emily Butler Smith:
More stuff to read.
Amanda Hartman:
Exactly. So I will always have a book suggestion for you. So these are going to be my two books that I'm going to suggest to all of you, and I have chosen two picture books. So my first book that I've chosen for you all is Bud Finds Her Gift, and this is by Robin Wall Kimmerer, who is a citizen of the Potawatomi Nation. And she is also the author of Braiding Sweetgrass for adults, so you might have read that. And she also has a YA version of that book.
Natalie Louis:
Ooh, I didn't know that.
Amanda Hartman:
It is beautiful. It's part memoir and part learning about nature and how it is so reciprocal. So this book is a beautiful story about a young girl who is looking for her gift, and the book shows you how both the natural world as well as our human world, we are part of that natural world, we all have gifts to give. It's a beautiful text, and Naoko Stoop is the illustrator. And so, I suggest you with your child or encourage your children to linger over the illustrations. Illustrations in picture books are giving us a lot of information, are giving us inferences, and so those are worth lingering over and giving us beauty.
And so, my second book is Life After Whale: The Amazing Ecosystem of a Whale Fall. This is by Lynn Brunelle, who is not only an author, but a scientist, and she was a writer on Bill Nye the Science Guy.
Natalie Louis:
I love that show.
Amanda Hartman:
And Jason Chin, who is one of my all-time favorite illustrators and writers himself, does the illustrations here, and it is gorgeous. I mean, the illustrations are highly detailed and beautiful, and her writing is... She takes science writing and it just becomes... It is also beautiful, it is also informative, and just so easy to listen to. And it's essentially about when a whale dies, what is the ecosystem that then comes and life that comes out of this fall or this death, and it is gorgeous. So those are my two recommendations.
Emily Butler Smith:
I love. The beautiful nonfiction really is just like so captivating, and I think that's something to really look out for is the authorship and really thinking about how that can play a role. So I've got two, we would say, middle grade, but really thinking upper elementary grades recommendations-
Amanda Hartman:
And middle school, sure.
Emily Butler Smith:
And could probably go into middle school, could go into middle school too.
Amanda Hartman:
Middle school love Jerry Kraft and Kwame Alexander.
Emily Butler Smith:
Yeah, exactly, exactly. So my take is I was really thinking also about authors, because when I'm recommending books to kids, I'm often... I mean, of course, we want all authors in recommendations. But I especially, as a teacher, would like, "Here are some recommendations of books by an author," and then you're going to be set up with there are 10 other books these people have written. So these two texts that I'm recommending, both have lots of other texts behind them or in front of them, et cetera.
So Kwame Alexander and Jerry Kraft teamed up to write J vs. K, which I love. This is a rivalry between a writer and an illustrator. And you may know Kwame Alexander from The Crossover or Jerry Kraft from the New Kid. Those are two of their probably most famous books. But I love that we've got this rivalry and it's in a graphic novel, so I'm always a plug for graphic novels. If you haven't, as an adult, read graphic novels, you should read some, because there's much more going on than you would anticipate. There's a lot to read on the page, and read by meaning maybe not... The words may be fewer than in a novel, but you've got a lot of text to take in in terms of pictures and the meaning behind all of it. So definitely, that's a go-to.
And then, the other one, this is born out of my personal reading. So Max in the House of Spies by Adam Gidwitz. Again, he's a prolific writer, so I think if you can get a kid hooked into some of his books, then they want to know more, so that's always good. But I mentioned earlier, I was a big mystery series reader as a kid, I continue to read mysteries. The current series that I'm reading takes place between World War I and World War II and the rise of fascism, it's a mystery series. And so, Max in the House of Spies is a kids mystery, and Max is a character, a Jewish child who is sent from Berlin to London by his family in order to escape Nazi fascism and becomes a spy.
So historical fiction, it's not true, it's fiction, but has a lot of historical content. And as I mentioned earlier, I also think that's a really engaging, fun way to read and learn about the world. Then I need to look up and see, is this true? Does this person really exist? Find the nonfiction that goes with it and learn through stories.
Natalie Louis:
Yeah, I love that.
Amanda Hartman:
Well, I love that you've picked three authors that are series writers. That's awesome, that's awesome. But it made me think of, Max and the House of Spies, I just finished a novel for middle grade, Safiyyah's War, and it's also about World War II. And so, some kids might be really hooked in by the series, which I love, and some kids might be aficionado, really want to know more about World War II. That's the kind of kid I was. And Aficionado war is all about Paris during-
Emily Butler Smith:
The occupation.
Amanda Hartman:
... World War II and the occupation and the grand mosque in Paris saved so many Jewish lives. And so, this is a story about one girl and her role in that story of bringing Jewish kids and the librarian to safe harbor. So I love either of those ways to hook kids in.
Emily Butler Smith:
You get a little text set too.
Amanda Hartman:
You get a nice little text set.
Emily Butler Smith:
And Max in the House of the Spies is the first in a series.
Amanda Hartman:
Oh my gosh, I love it.
Emily Butler Smith:
Yeah, yeah. Natalie, what about you?
Natalie Louis:
I am talking about YA, so young adults, which is really high school/college/me/old person.
Emily Butler Smith:
Sure, sure.
Natalie Louis:
I just think we need to be reading YA. There's amazing stuff, it's just amazing. My first book is Rising from the Ashes: Los Angeles, 1992, by... Oh, sorry. And then, there's a subtitle, Edward Jae Song Lee, Latasha Harlins, Rodney King, and a City on Fire. I know that's a long title. And it's by Paula Yoo, it was published in 2024. This is an account of the Los Angeles 1992 uprisings after the beating and arrest of Rodney King, and also after the killing of Latasha Harlins too, which I didn't know very much about. And in this account, Paula Yoo especially talks about the impact on the Korean and Black American communities in Los Angeles.
To do this book, she did over a hundred interviews of family members and community members, and it's compelling, it's important, and it's recent history. So I really was struck by I was alive for this, 1992, I was actually in the Peace Corps, so I wasn't here in the States, but I only had a little bit of information because we lived in such a different world. And so, it feels kind of cool to almost loop back and be like, "Whoa, I had nowhere near this amount of information about this particular historical moment." That's my nonfiction pick.
And then, my fiction recommendation is Sisters in the Wind by Angeline Boulley. She's an Indigenous author, she's a member of the Ojibwe Tribe. And in this novel, she tells a story of Lucy, a girl who's put in the foster care system when her white father dies suddenly, and her father has never told her that her mother is Indigenous, so that's how she gets put in a foster home. She does in fact have a family, an Indigenous family, that she doesn't really know about. This book for me, it shines a light on the... It's called the ICWA Law, which is the Indigenous Child Welfare Act, which aims to keep Indigenous children with their tribe so that the tribe stays healthy and thriving. Anyway, it's a big political thing right now, it's under attack. And again, I think I said this earlier, but I especially loved this book in audio because of the Ojibwe language, which I would have probably been left with phonetically trying to sound out, because I don't know the Ojibwe language, and instead, an audiobook, I could hear it spoken fluently. It just added to the experience.
Amanda Hartman:
Beautiful.
Natalie Louis:
It was really beautiful, yeah.
Emily Butler Smith:
Lovely. Wow. Well, thank you so much and thank you for being here and for talking through all of this, the recommendations and thinking about that. We wanted to just say that we hope this series continues to spark curiosity and conversation outside of the classroom with your kids, and of course, supports growth and enjoyment and connection through literacy beyond the classroom. And so, remember that literacy isn't just about the books kids read in school, it's also just thinking about the stories we share, the world we explore, the conversations we have, and thank you. Thank you, Natalie. Thank you, Amanda.
Natalie Louis:
Thanks, Emily.
Amanda Hartman:
Thanks all.
Natalie Louis:
Thanks everyone.
Emily Butler Smith:
Take care.