Retiring from my school’s library after 10 years meant many things: freedom from lesson plans and the frantic pace of the school year with all its events and deadlines, freedom to write, to publish, and also to garden and bake.
It also meant solitary time with books I love. Alone time with books is great, but there is a downside…No sharing a favorite title face to face with an eager reader or finding just the right read for a less than eager one. I missed this part so very much the past 3 years.
I am back in the library a few hours a week this year (you can check out what I’m doing there HERE). Now I have the best of both worlds.
While I’m not delivering instruction in library classes anymore, I am a fellow book lover in the room sometimes when kids – and teachers- come to visit.
Over the summer, I tried to think of a way to jump start these conversations even with my limited time on campus.
Enter the whiteboard prompt.
I made a loose promise to myself that I will erase and replace these about once a week. For each one, I just write a question/invitation or a finish-the-sentence kind of prompt, then walk away. If I want to share, I don’t do that until there are comments up already.
The first prompt I wrote didn’t get any love at all. I try snap a photo to capture each one, but I missed the first one. I just wrote a question/invitation, or a finish-the-sentence kind of prompt, then walked away. I’ve made a loose promise to myself that I’ll erase and replace about once a week.
A favorite book you read recently was:
Maddi’s Fridge
The Fallout
The Queen of the Tearling
Five Nights at Freddy’s: The Silver Eyes
The Kane Chronicles: The Serpent’s Shadow
Book Scavenger
The Dark Tower
House of Hades
All Things Wise and Wonderful
All the Light We Cannot See
Percy Jackson
Look at this list and you won’t be surprised at the YA books that these middle school kids shared, but they are passionate consumers of other books as well, both picture book and middle grade novels. A seventh grader who shares that they just read a picture book about hunger and food insecurity? That’s a conversation that I am excited to have.
The next prompt was a book you would recommend to your teacher:
Clockwork Scarab #supergood
All Creatures Great and Small
The Golden Compass
All the Light We Cannot See
The Giver
Little Brother
Robert Heinlein (various)
I see some great MG titles here, don’t you?
The next was during a busy week, but what a fun list it produced.
My Favorite Re-read is…
Airborn
The Sandwich Swap
The Horse & His Boy
The board stayed blank for several days, and then a fascinating list came from the next prompt!
A book that blew my mind:
Godel, Escher, Bach
The Fault in Our Stars
The Kane Chronicles (The Red Pyramid)
The Golden Compass
Bone Clocks
Danny, the Champion of the World
I wasn’t sure what to write this week, but a first grader who came to the library reluctantly with an assigned group chose not to check out. Instead, he spent time with a non-circulating pop-up book. All at once, a discovery inside prompted him to ask me this question: “…Who knew that books could have such secrets within?”
Even though I’m only there for a short time each week, I feel that I am part of the conversation again. I’ve seen parents and teachers add their picks to the board.
This is what I missed: not being part of a community of readers. You’re part of my community, too. Maybe you can answer the question I posed after my first grader’s quote. What have you discovered about books lately?
Most authors spend many hours researching topics before they begin writing. For fiction, getting details right is important, but for nonfiction it’s essential.
These were roads typically traversed on foot or motorbike. While we jounced along, huge chunks of rock and piles of dirt scraped the underside of the van. At times we could only pass by driving with two wheels in the ditch at the side of the road. Sometimes the van tilted so much, it seemed as if we were riding on two wheels rather than four. This harrowing ride was made more difficult when we needed to pass an occasional vehicle by a hair’s breadth.
After more than an hour, we came to the remote village in the mountains. We took a tour of the extensive farm, then settled in for the interview, while his wife cooked beef stew over coals in a small metal fire pit in the kitchen.
Chickens wandered into the screened-in porch, while a goose pecked at the screen as his story unfolded. He began with the family tree, so I would know his father’s history. He rattled off names and dates. What an incredible memory! And I left his farm with a full stomach and many memories of my own.
held. Because the prison is still in use, we had to wait for the guards to clear all the prisoners from the areas we would be touring. And we received special permission to take a few pictures. The prisoners watched from behind barbed wire fencing while we entered the older buildings on the grounds. It was an emotional day for the independence leader’s daughter because this was the first time she had seen the cells where her father was held for seven years. Throughout the tour, the guards were very respectful of the descendant of a man who’d helped secure Kenya’s freedom.
I spent one day at the area considered the “Eden” of the Kikuyu people and heard their origin story and history, and viewed historical artifacts, granaries (pictured), and homes. The fight for independence mainly began with the Kikuyu, who wanted to stop British settlers from taking over their land. Ancient and modern history combined later when I got to hear about politics from an official in the present-day government who is Kikuyu.
Another stop was the archives in Nairobi, which has a museum on the first two floors that added to my knowledge of history. My main goal, though, was to look at official records. Although they could not pull the specific records I requested, they did bring me a file from 1954 titled “Information and Propaganda,” which contained British records of the revolts, arrests, and killings. It was jarring to read the British accounts after hearing the Kenyans laud the Mau Mau as freedom fighters. The British called them “terrorists.” Interesting to see how people with opposing points of view can describe the same events so differently.
I recently went on an impromptu trip to Colorado that changed the way I think of the word “adventure.”
A buddy of mine has had a rough summer full of the kind of life that starts to get to you after a while, and really wanted to head out to the mountains and spend a few days recuperating in the great outdoors. So we packed up a couple tents, a few sleeping bags, and headed out. And while we were out there hiking backwoods and swinging in hammocks and sitting around campfires, I started thinking about the whole genre of middle grade adventure. How it’s like that unplanned, unexpected trip into the unknown, and what makes that special. Why the books I remember so fondly from my youth books contained stories of expansive journeys and daring-dos, and why, after all these years, I came back to take kids on similar adventures.
On our little excursion, I too had some things niggling at the back of my mind, coloring the world around me. Questions about how to handle things of life, worries about what to do in situations that were waiting for me back home. But it was the color of those lenses that affected my thinking, my experience. This was true of my friend, as well. The new experiences of our short adventure—though far more limited in scope than the stories of, say, Fablehaven, Keeper of the Lost Cities, or Peasprout Chen—helped me process and make decisions I was avoiding. It was clarifying, and made our trip all the sweeter.
This is the power of fiction: to take us on an unexpected, uncertain journey, to change our hearts and introduce us to new friends. Kids need those adventures. And middle grade fiction is specially positioned to 