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Mini-Museums for Middle Grade Favorites

By on November 20, 2020   /   Articles  

Hello, fans of Middle Grade! I hope the school year is running smoothly for your students, your readers, or your own kids, whether they are learning in-person, remotely, independently, or in a hybrid or homeschool environment. While online learning and the use of technology are certainly helpful in this time of Covid, I know my own kids sometimes grow weary of screens and keyboards in their current environments. So I wanted to share a fun and engaging reading activity that can work equally well in both the home and classroom: A Mini-Museum display based on a great Middle Grade read.

As a teacher, librarian, or homeschooling parent, you can pose this idea before readers start or finish a book, or encourage readers to choose a favorite story with which they are already familiar. The Mini-Museum employs reading, writing, and creative/critical thinking skills, and culminates in a hands-on and 3-D product. You can include teamwork and presentation/delivery skills if you choose. The steps are simple and the supplies minimal—and the search for objects gets a reader out of his or her chair and away from the screen.

Step One – After (or while) reading a novel, the reader lists notable and important physical objects mentioned in the book that have some significant relevance and/or symbolic value to the plot, characters, theme, point-of-view, or setting. Eight to ten objects make a nice-sized museum collection, but the suggested or required number would be determined by your readers’ abilities, your environment, your time, and the book choice.

Step Two – Readers gather household, three-dimensional objects that are the real thing, a replica, or a constructed facsimile of each object on his or her list.

Step Three – Readers choose and prepare a display space. This can be a shelf, tabletop, or windowsill in the classroom, or a table or empty corner at home. Use cardboard boxes, recyclables, or piles of books to create museum stands and exhibit spaces. A variety of sizes and levels makes the overall look of the display more interesting and easier to see. Readers can cover these items with plain fabric or paper for a clean “museum look.”

Step Four – Readers fill the museum with their objects. Objects of greatest significance get the choicest spots in the display.

Step Five – Readers write brief descriptive captions to display near each object, like you’d see in a real museum. These can include the object name, the date of use (setting of book), the materials that form the object, and a few sentences on the object’s significance to one or more story elements in the book. Mount the typed and printed (or handwritten) captions on folded index cards and place each free-standing description near its object.

Step Six –Optional share and tell with the class! Thanks to smart phones and cameras, most readers can find a way to show their display distantly to their teacher and classmates.

If you’ve read or taught the excellent Stella by Starlight by Sharon M. Draper, you’ll recognize how these real objects make great representations of the novel’s important character and plot points:

  • Notebook (Stella uses one to practice writing late at night.)
  • Cigar box (Stella keeps her collection of inspirational newspaper articles in one.)
  • An edition of the Star Sentinel (This is the newspaper Stella creates.)
  • Small, unmarked bottle (Stella buys medicine for her sick brother Jojo.)
  • Clean rags torn into strips (Stella tends to her mother’s snakebite.)

Students can manufacture some objects when necessary, like Stella’s original newspaper the Star Sentinel, which she types on a donated typewriter. A description for the torn rags might be something like: “Extra wound dressings, circa early 1930s; wool and cotton. Stella uses dressings like these to help treat her mother’s snakebite. When she finds Mama unconscious in the woods, Stella brings water, whiskey, and dressings to clean and wrap the wound. Mama survives in part due to Stella’s quick actions.”

Benefits of a Mini-Museum Display:

  • It’s highly flexible with strong potential for individualization.
  • Visual-spatial learners will enjoy creating the display space.
  • Readers can work in groups or independently, depending on their situation and capabilities.

Thanks for reading and sharing this idea! Enjoy the holidays, keep safe, and stay well.

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Stella: Interview with McCall Hoyle

By on November 18, 2020   /   Articles  

November is National Epilepsy Awareness Month, and one of the Epilepsy Foundation’s goals for this month is to get more people talking about epilepsy. So, with that goal in mind, I’m thrilled to have had the opportunity to talk with award-winning author McCall Hoyle about her upcoming book STELLA and her writing process.


Please tell us a little bit about STELLA.

STELLA is a hopeful story about a retired working beagle who must find the courage to overcome her fears and use her special nose to save a girl’s life.

The story is told from the beagle, Stella’s, point of view. I love stories like A DOG’S PURPOSE and THE ONE AND ONLY IVAN that are told from an animal’s point of view.

I can’t wait for readers to experience life through a Stella’s eyes, ears, and, especially, her nose.

 

 

 

You started your career as an author writing Young Adult (THE THING WITH FEATHERS and MEET THE SKY). What got you interested in writing Middle Grade? How does writing it differ from writing YA?

Mostly, I just want to write the story that is calling to me at the moment. Someday, I might write an adult novel. Thankfully, I have an agent who nurtures my creativity and encourages me to write whatever is calling to me at the moment.

Plus, I really wanted to write something that my son and sixth-grade students could enjoy. And of course, I just love middle grade fiction.

I feel like writing for middle grade is a lot about discovering where you belong in your family and in a smaller “world”. To me YA feels more like an exploration of where you belong in the world at large.

Many of the themes I come back to in everything I write involve family and those relationships, so middle grade feels like a good fit.

 

What inspired you to write this story and/or these characters?

I was suffering a serious case of writer’s block after the release of my second YA novel and couldn’t motivate myself to write anything. My YA novels weren’t appealing to my fifth-grade son, so I decided to write something specifically for him with zero intention of pursuing publication.

We both love dogs, and I’m an amateur dog trainer. Plus, our little beagle Sophie was getting on up in years. She was mostly deaf and blind, but she made up for these weaknesses with her super sniffer. Up until her final days, she was playing scent games and loving them.

So I wrote Stella one chapter at a time for my son and as a tribute to Sophie. I read the story aloud to my son and husband one chapter at a time. Anyone who’s taught elementary or middle school knows that kids are super honest. They don’t pretend that they like something just because you’re their mom or their teacher. My son loved Stella!

So I got my nerve up to tell my agent that I had this middle grade manuscript narrated from a dog’s point of view that I wanted her to read. I expected some pushback, but she never missed a bit and read it quickly. She told me she cried, which coming from her is a huge compliment.

Then one thing lead to another, and Stella is going to be a real book. And I couldn’t be more excited to share the book of my heart with the world.


November is National Epilepsy Awareness Month. Both THE THING WITH FEATHERS and STELLA deal directly with epilepsy. What would you like our readers to know about epilepsy?

It’s not so much about what I want readers to know about epilepsy as it is that I want to remind readers that we cannot tell what is going on inside of a person just by the way they look on the outside. Epilepsy is a frequently invisible and misunderstood neurological disorder.

Both the THE THING WITH FEATHERS and STELLA include girls that deal with epilepsy in their own ways. Emilie in THE THING WITH FEATHERS has a golden retriever who is her best friend and a trained seizure response dog. Stella is not a trained seizure response dog, but because of her close connection to her girl, Cloe, she learns to pick up on the chemical changes taking place in Cloe’s body.

As a dog lover, I am fascinated by this special connection between humans and dogs and will never tire of writing about it.

You refer to one of my all time favorite quotes in STELLA:  Eleanor Roosevelt’s  “You must do the thing you think you cannot do.” Can you tell us why you included this particular quote in STELLA and what it means to you?

I wrote a biographical report about Eleanor Roosevelt when I was in middle school, which was several  decades ago. I’ve always been attracted to real life stories of intelligent female leaders. The First Lady’s words have sort of been a mantra for me most of my life.

You don’t think you can finish a marathon. You must do the thing you think you cannot do. You can’t quit your job in finance, go back to school and become a teacher. You must do the thing you think you cannot do. You don’t think you can write and publish a book. You must do the thing you think you cannot do.

I taught high school for several years and was frequently surprised by what teenagers thought they could not do. Often, a well-meaning adult had unintentionally spoken words that lead to these doubts. If just one young person reads STELLA and internalizes Eleanor Roosevelt’s words, all the hard work that went into writing the book will be worth it.

 

We at Mixed Up Files love teachers and librarians, and I know you do too. Could you tell our readers about a teacher or a librarian who had an effect on your reading or writing life?

My fifth-grade teacher, Mrs. Turner, sat on the floor and read aloud to us even though we were perfectly capable of reading to ourselves, and she was probably too old to sit comfortably on the floor. She made reading seem fun and made us feel like a community of readers.

Stories brought us all together–no matter how different our home lives were. It was a good feeling that stuck with me.

 

I know you are a dog lover (like me). Would you tell our readers about your favorite dog(s).

Oh my goodness! That might truly be the toughest author interview question ever and the first question I’m not sure I can answer. I really like smart, eager-to-please dogs, whether they’re purebred golden retrievers or the rescued mixed-breed that adopted my family when I was eight. These are the dogs that make you feel like a good dog trainer and good about yourself.

But then sometimes, I’m drawn to the challenge of a dog that seems too fearful or too aggressive to learn. The same philosophy that applies to my classroom teaching applies to my dog training. All kids can learn. All dogs can learn. And it’s our job as teachers and dog trainers to facilitate the learning.

Can I say, “I like all dogs?”

 

McCall Hoyle lives in the foothills of the North Georgia Mountains with her husband, children, and an odd assortment of pets. She is a middle school teacher and librarian. When she’s not reading, writing, or teaching, she’s probably playing with or training one of her many dogs. You can learn more about her at mccallhoyle.com

 

 

 

STELLA will be available in bookstores everywhere on March 2, 2021. In the meantime,

Head over to Goodreads for a chance to win a copy of STELLA.

And, be sure to pre-order a copy of STELLA from your favorite independent bookstore.

 

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Diversity in MG Lit #22 A Progress Report

By on November 16, 2020   /   Articles  
We’ve hit the award season for books. In the next weeks there will be plenty of best-of-the-year lists going around. I wanted to focus on something slightly different. In years past  the Cooperative Children’s Book Center (CCBC) has analyzed the years books and put together a graphic representation of diversity in children’s books. In a nutshell, in 2018, 23% of children’s books depicted POC characters. 27% depicted non-human characters. 50% depicted white characters. This is an improvement over statistics gathered in 2015 but clearly there is plenty of work to do.
I have been keeping track of which books are getting the big promotional push in both public media and in professional conferences. I’m going to highlight three events of the last six months. And I’m going to do so with a big caveat. I am not a social scientist. I have made my conclusions on the race or ethnicity of the author based on readily available information from the publisher. Not every author states their race explicitly. It would be unethical for publishers and booksellers to ask an author to identify themselves by race. I know that people do not always belong to the race or ethnicity they most resemble. So please take my observations as just that—the candid observations of one person working as an author and bookseller.
First up—The Childrens Institute—a conference hosted by the American Booksellers Association where many publishers send their authors to promote forthcoming books to independent bookstores. This year it was online. I went to the pitch sessions where publishers had about 20 minutes each to introduce us to about a dozen titles each. The diversity of offerings varied a lot from one publisher to another. A few had as many as 90 or even 100% books by diverse authors featuring diverse characters. A few publishers had no diverse books at all. But overall when I totaled up the more than 200 book pitches I heard,  it was very close to 50-50 authors or illustrators and diverse authors or illustrators. (In my calculations I included white characters as diverse if they were disabled or LGBTQ though those were both small categories.) When challenged about lack of diversity the publishers with none or very few diverse books all pointed to past lists that had more diverse books or future ones. Many books got delayed this year or were moved to a later season. Notably every single  publisher who was asked was aware of the need for diverse books and trying to fill the need, though with varying degrees of success.
The New York Times just came out with their holiday guide to children’s books. It interested me because their content (unlike the Children’s Institute) is beyond the control of the publishers, yet it can have a powerful impact on sales. Again I took a look at not the characters of the stories but the authors and illustrators and reviewers.
16 reviewers contributed: 8 POC reviewers (3 men and 5 women) and 8 white reviewers (5 men and 3 women). So far a 50-50 split.
These reviewers presented books by 73 authors and illustrators. 26 of the creators were POC (10 men and 16 women). 47 of the creators were white (21 men and 26 women.) So 36% POC creators and 64% white creators.
Two things caught my eye. First, the gender divide was slightly more favorable to POC women.  I was also surprised to see that of the white authors & illustrators 17 or 23% of the total were not Americans but only one of those foreign book creators was a POC. So you could also represent the book creators as 1% foreign POC, 23% foreign white, 36% POC and 41% white.  Still room for improvement but clearly an effort at inclusion is being made.
Finally, it was my great pleasure to go to the virtual SCBWI Non-fiction conference. It was hosted by the Smithsonian in partnership with the Society of Children’s Book Writers & Illustrators. There were 32 men and women on the faculty, 47% POC and 53% white. That is very close to parity even though the organization as a whole has a predominantly white membership. The faculty was 25% men and 75% women—not equal but reflective of the gender composition of the SCBWI as a whole.
Overall, I am encouraged. There are areas in need of improvement, but I have been glad to see acknowledgement of the problem across the board. Everyone I’ve talked to agree that the needed changes are coming slower than they’d like. Unfortunately publishing is not a speedy industry. I think the unsung heroes in all this are independent bookstore owners—most of whom are white women—who have pressured publishers for years to provide books that better represent the neighborhoods they serve.
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