Entries Tagged 'Kindle' ↓

Inspired by Malcolm Gladwell’s Late Bloomers.

Books I’ve finished this week: Stargirl, by Jerry Spinelli, Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins, and When You Reach Me, by Rebecca Stead – all of them are 5-star books and highly recommended

Seven days . . . what a difference it makes:

I have had a wonderful holiday — how about you? There were a few days during all the pre-holiday madness that I thought I was getting sick, but I’m grateful I didn’t. It was just my body telling me to slow down and rest. So I did — and it helped.

I’ve been reading a lot — and re-reading some old favorites. If you have kids in your life, I can’t recommend this book enough. I first read it when Erica was two years old and it helped guide me in choosing read aloud picture books. Eighteen years later, those books are timeless and still richly entertaining and satisfying for the boys. I’ve not been reading aloud as much as I should, but that’s going to change in 2010. I also ordered The Book Whisperer, by Donalyn Miller and can’t wait to read it. I’ve gotten so much out of her blog and it’s helped me to source good books for my oldest son.

And just for me, the biggest treat was reading Amy Tan’s The Opposite of Fate: Memories of a Writing Life. She writes a lot about her mom and the grandmother she never knew except through stories and portraits. Reading it was personal, poignant and real. Like Amy, I never knew my grandmother, but her presence is felt through what my mom shares about her own life and the choice she made to marry an American and leave Japan — and her mother. I’ve often wondered about my grandmother’s perspective and wished I could have known her. In her book, Amy acknowledges that there’s a level of “knowing” her grandmother that’s experienced in dreams and intuition and she channels that in her writing. There are stories that need to be told and perhaps the granddaughter is the one to finally tell them. I’m hopeful.

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There’s not a lot I hate. I hate racism and sexism. I hate abuse of power. And with a red hot passion, I hate the Accelerated Reader (by Renaissance Learning) when it’s being used incorrectly. I hate when its use in schools (Conroe ISD, I’m looking at you) is MANDATORY and a student’s grade is tied to their participation in the Accelerated Reader (A/R) Program. And I will continue to hate it until it’s a voluntary program that doesn’t carry unreasonable, exclusionary incentives. I’ll definitely continue to hate it unless and until it generates within my children a sincere and lifelong desire to read good books. And I can assure you that I’ll hate it whether my kids do well or poorly on A/R “quizzes.”

I believe it should be used as an assessment tool only, and/or an optional and fun tool for kids to gauge their comprehension of their favorite books — books they would have been reading anyway regardless of how many “points” were associated with it.

Here’s a succinct quote from the website for The Read-Aloud Handbook (my all-time favorite book about reading and choosing quality books for your family — and incidentally, the book I used as a guide when purchasing at school book fairs)

As I see it, the real problem arrived when districts bought the programs with the idea they would absolutely lift reading scores. “Listen,” declares the school board member, “if we’re spending $50 grand on this program that’s supposed to raise scores, then how can we allow it to be optional? You know the kids who’ll never opt for it—the ones with the low scores, who drag everyone else’s scores down. No—it’s gotta be mandatory participation.” And to cement it into place, the district makes the point system 25 percent of the child’s grade for a marking period. Oooops! They just took the “carrot” off the stick, leaving just the stick—a new grading weapon. . . .

I just spent my entire morning going through our books to identify whether we own books in my child’s “reading level” (determined by testing that takes several weeks of a teacher’s instruction time). And we do own many — I just had to identify the number of points each one carried. Over the years, I’ve accumulated a lot of books purchase through school book fairs (you know — the ones that benefit the school library and increase their collection of good books?) and I’m not surprised that I already own several that fall in to his range. The frustrating thing is that I was told that my son couldn’t take an A/R quiz unless he had checked out in the school’s library. Nevermind that we already own the book or could purchase a book. Whatever — it doesn’t matter now because I’ve already made the decision that it’s the one rule I’ll not comply with — I’ve spent many hundreds of dollars over the years accumulating books that I’ve moved across a few states over the last decade. If there’s an A/R quiz for a book we own and he’s reading it (and enjoying it), then he should be allowed to take a quiz on it.

Before taking a quiz, he has to fill out a graphic organizer along with the “in-class log” — two barriers to quiz-taking that I’m still not comfortable with. He has a designated day every week on which he is “guaranteed” an audience with his teacher to go over his progress and his goals and then to take a quiz (or quizzes) on the computer, and is supposedly allowed to take one any time and any day he is ready (as long as he’s completed an activity sheet/graphic organizer and also filled out the log).

So my challenge is working within this system (while following the “rules” and encouraging my children to do the same) and engaging my kids with good books to read while at the same time confining them to a reading level that might or might not contain books in which they have an interest. Luckily, I’ve found some excellent books on the Kindle. The issue hasn’t been about the lack of good books — it’s the lack of district support for reading those books (“Oh, I’m sorry, that’s above his reading level. He can’t take a quiz on that one”). And now I’m anticipating some resistance to the idea of allowing my boys to read “A/R” books that I purchase for the Kindle when there’s no physical book to take to school with them. But if the book has a quiz available and it’s in their reading level, and they’ve followed nearly all the rules, then I think they should absolutely be allowed to take the quiz. Did I mention I hate this?

Edited to add: Read #7 from this page on the Conroe ISD site. What a blatant contradiction of their mandatory A/R program (and it also contains a grammatical error)

I fully support the concept of promoting Sustained Silent Reading (“SSR”) in schools and at home and would love to see the A/R program used as the foundation to support SSR.

This first back-to-school week for my kids has gone well. Thank you for your thoughtful comments and emails on my previous post. Back-to-school week has also been my first “back-to-me” week. I had low expectations for filling my time the rest of this month because things will step up gradually beginning in September. I have big plans but wanted to bookend those plans with some silence and stillness first. And the photo? Last week was supposed to be my haircut, but it was postponed. Big changes should require a hairstyle change too, don’t you think?

I’ve continued to read a LOT, though that has leveled off as well. Meanwhile, my Kindle has been hijacked by either my husband or my oldest son and since they’ve been reading more, and I’m finding turning to my stack of “actual” books — including library books.

If you’ve been keeping up with me at Goodreads, you might notice that I’m reading a couple of books that have been on my “To Read” list for ages: A Homemade Life: Stories and Recipes from My Kitchen Table and The Soup Peddler’s Slow and Difficult Soups: Recipes and Reveries. I’m also looking forward to reading The Wordy Shipmates. (I’m back to reading some nonfiction in between the novels). Finally, I’m hopeful that I’ll get a lot out of this book too: SHED Your Stuff, Change Your Life: A Four-Step Guide to Getting Unstuck. I’ve hit a wall with this summer’s de-cluttering and organizing and I hope that this book will address one of the next steps I need to take – dealing with issues of old magazines! I have Blueprint, Domino and a handful of Mary Engelbreit magazines that are taking up an entire shelf of one of my bookcases. I want to reclaim the space, but for some reason, can’t bring myself to just recycle those magazines. Of course, if anybody wants them and is willing to pay the shipping, I’ll send them to you. That’ll be the ideal solution.

So in my last entry, I mentioned my renewed passion for reading — it’s still going strong. I’m on the sixth Harry Potter book, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (Book 6) while I’m also reading The Blue Zones, a fascinating book about longevity. Although I purchased it to read on my Kindle, many of the other books I’ve been reading are from the bookstore or the library — places I’m going more now that I have a Kindle. Reading begets more reading (for me anyway) and leads to total absorption in subjects that interest me.

Although I acknowledge I have little control over how long I live, I’m interested in learning about what I can control in order to preserve the quality of life I would like to have, and I would like to do that in a balanced and holistic way. So far, I like what I’m reading.

Before everything else – knitting, crochet, blogging – my first passion was reading. I learned to read in 1969 while my family was living in Turkey. We didn’t have a television on the Air Force base where we lived, and our only entertainment consisted of live shows at the NCO club (few and far between) and radio. I listened to Mystery Theater at 4:00 p.m. on Sundays, but I was hard-pressed to find much else to do from week to week. My mom was always too busy — with the four of us girls (a toddler, a preschooler, one in junior high and one in high school) — to think of ways to occupy our time. I had to find and make my own entertainment and diversion. So when one of my older sisters taught me to read, I finally had a way to pass the time alone — and went from scribbling in books to actually reading them.

I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that after I became a reader, I was never lonely and I was never alone. I kept it up for a few dozen years until hobbies (and the internet) began to consume me and edge out reading as my favorite way to pass the time.

With all the upheaval the past couple of years have brought, I’m surprised I didn’t escape to reading sooner. When trouble came and uncertainty became the status quo, reading was and continues to be soothing and calming. I went from reading craft-related books to filling up on fiction and recently decided to read (and re-read) some well-known classics. So when Lolly posted about her summer reading adventure, I thought I would blog and echo some of the same sentiments she shared in her blog entry. Specifically, I am encouraging you to join Goodreads and discover how much fun it is to read and share with others. My blog sidebar on the right has a widget showing what I’ve read recently. Right now I’m reading through the Harry Potter series. It’s not available as a Kindle download, but I wouldn’t have purchased them through the Kindle if they were — my oldest son already owns all the books, so as I finish one of the books, he slips in to his book closet and hands me the next one. He’s a great resource for background information and Harry Potter trivia as I read. Thankfully, he doesn’t mind divulging a spoiler or two as I prod him for information while I read.

Find me on Goodreads and add me as a friend — I’d love to see what you’re reading too.

What began as a vague curiosity became more intriguing as I researched the Kindle. I didn’t feel a need for one until I started daydreaming about a long summer reading list. It’s not that I don’t love to have a book in my hand and it’s not that I don’t love a spontaneous trip to the library, but my trips to the library don’t often yield success — there are plenty of books there but rarely the ones I want to read when I want to read them. So when Debbie recommended that I read The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, I added it to my “To Read” list on GoodReads. When I clicked through the links to the different sites offering the book, I noticed that it was offered in a Kindle version for a little over $7. While I was viewing all the different books offered in the Kindle store, I noticed that there were many, many books that could be downloaded for free (literary classics that are currently in the public domain). That’s when I began to seriously consider asking for one for my birthday. And I eventually did just that.

I’ve mentioned to many of you that I really do love and enjoy it. I insisted that it wouldn’t replace actual books (as if!) and yet, some appear to be skeptical about a device that holds potentially up to 1500 books. If you enjoy reading, you would enjoy a Kindle. Simple.