RealeBooks.com

A dear retired friend, Liza Lee, enjoys her yearly work with the WHAS Crusade for Children here in Louisville, Kentucky. This annual event focuses our entire community for a few days on collecting money to support a range of services for children with special needs.

We’ve just started experimenting with Twitter. Our first Twitter experiment is to give our users ideas about books they can make using content available on the web.

Follow us at: https://twitter.com/realebooksideas

Or, start up RealeWriter, select “RealeBooks Main Branch” from the “RealeLibrary” popup menu, and select “RealeBooks Ideas” from the “Section” popup menu.

Let us know what you think of this experiment by dropping a note to (JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).

As I have said here before, everybody knows something worth sharing. If we haven’t read much poetry or read many novels or read many essays, then we may not be well-positioned for sharing our own lyrics, our own stories, our own ideas. But if we have been alive and out in the world for some years, we all know about things, we all know how to do stuff, we all have developed understandings of situations that could be of value to others, especially school-aged others.

Memorial Day is when the pools open and everyone switches gears to a “summertime when the livin’ is easy.” Summertime should also be a time when the learnin’ is easy. It is important here at the end of May to note that it’s not the learning that happens in school that kids object to in their school experiences. What they object to are the 180 seemingly unending days of “activities” represented by “pencils, books and teacher’s dirty looks.” You remember the clever little poem. “School’s out, School’s out, teacher’s let them monkeys out…etc.” It’s the grind of school (sadly, but accurately represented by “teacher’s dirty looks”) for which no affection is lost.

There are book illustrations – those lovely paintings, drawings and photographs appearing along with the text, between the covers of a nice book.

And then

There are book illustrations – the images created by readers about a text they are reading, or have read.

And then

There are book illustrations - created by student writers to accompany their own compositions.

My colleague Jonathan Thurston, through his non-profit corporation, the International School of Art, Business and Technology, has created a unique collaboration between developing artists/illustrators in the US and child-authors in Ghana.

I know! Sounds like a movie. It probably should be. Let me begin with a story that Jon shared about his trip to Ghana to make RealeBooks for the children there.

Here are three things that most adults (even teachers!) don’t know about literacy

I work in middle schools, which must be the capitals of “This is boring. When’s lunch?” So I’m used to kids saying stuff like that. It is just a form baby talk of course. Adults are rarely bored and then only for a few minutes. We realize we’re bored and then we do something about it. We’ve learned to entertain or better ourselves when we find time on our hands. We read, we write, we play music, we make music, we create stuff, we putter, we organize, we clean, we call a friend, we take a walk, we play with the kids or our pets, we sit and wonder at the beauty of nature, we cook something delicious, we go shopping, we garden, we write a few more lines of that great American Novel or poem or play that is trying to get out of us, we work on our facebook, we email a pal a not particularly funny joke. We DO something. In short, we make our own good times.

My major professor in graduate school, Tony Manzo used to tell the story of little Mario, from a poor Italian neighborhood in the 1950s New Jersey. Mario’s auntie was intent that he learn about the “old country” so she arranged to take him for two weeks to Italy. Mario was naturally excited about time away from school (ahem) and begged his parents to let him go. They acquiesced and off he went for 14 days in Rome, Napoli, Firenze and all the rest with aunt Sylvia.

We have just recently instituted the WORLD LITERACY RealeLibrary. The address is http://world.realelibrary.com and it features RealeBooks written about far away places…unless of course you live in one of those places.

In my work as a literacy coach I often hear teachers say that certain of their kids won’t (or can’t) “do their work.” Hmmm. Children… work…

How much of the Inauguration Speech did YOUR kids understand? (For that matter, how much of the Inauguration speech did most adults you know understand?!)

As we know, President Obama is a highly educated man. His famed speaking ability has been influenced by his reading of thousands and thousands of books before, during and after his formal schooling. In those books he found fabulous vocabulary, elegant sentences, complex descriptions and multi-page arguments that showed him the power of language.

Happy Friday! Today, we released RealeWriter 3.4.2. This is a free update for all RealeWriter 3 users. You can download it here: Download RealeWriter.

Our Release Notes list all of the changes, including those for the limited 3.4.1 release. Read on for what I’m really excited about in this release!

What if we just gave every parent 100 books to read with their pre-schoolers??

No really now.

Every parent in the world needs 100 books to read to their little ones before they go to school…if school is an option in their part of the world. If everyone in this world could read and write, then everyone in this world could be part of the ongoing conversation about ideas and values that is critical to democracy. Reading and writing and democracy go hand in hand.

And one big step in that direction is to make sure that every home has books…100 books…for their little ones to read and love and learn from.

As children from pre-school through high school read less and less, what with being so busy in soccer, video games, karate, Netflicking, bullying each other on the playground, and the like, they bring less and less grasp of book language to schools. Book language, as it turns out, is the most accessible source for children of powerful vocabulary and for engagement with elaborate sentence structures.

Sometimes the simplest gifts are the very best!

We travel a lot in our work with FOCUS project from the Bureau of Indian Education. We work as literacy coaches for three schools serving the children of Native American families. We are gone as much as two weeks a month doing this rewarding work, with dedicated teachers who like all teachers seek to lead their children beyond their circumstances to new possibilities.

Because we have two (rather large) dogs and two cats, while we are traveling it is cheaper to pay a pet sitter for the pack than it is to board all four of them. Not to mention, it’s easier for us and for the pets. Well Rick, our retired but active pet sitter kindly gifted us bookmarks for Christmas.

It’s a perfect time for parents and teachers to start “the ball” rolling.

The “ball” is literacy. In way-too-many schools and in most homes, literacy has always been considered the act of reading things written by others and “getting” what they are saying. Which, thankfully…and sadly…is (at least) half right. That’s why for most kids, literacy doesn’t actually roll at all. It just sits there. The kids don’t get in the game. They just wander off.

Everybody wants children to learn to read well. It is what we all wish and work for. Capable and confident reading is essential for ensuring for children a future of being fully informed about the roles they may take in their communities. That in turn establishes the fundamentals for them as contributing citizens and productive workers. But, as I’ve said before on this blog, reading is just the “breathing in” of literacy. For becoming fully literate, there must be a breathing out. Writing. These two awesome capabilities work best when they work together.

There’s much to be said about the power of local publication, both for the comfy reading it provides to children who find themselves seeing faces and places they know and love in their books as well as for the writing invitation implied by a system that celebrates what kids already know and love in their communities.

The No Child Left Behind legislation, designed to ensure that all children become fully literate has had some decidedly unexpected side-effects.