Unpacking and Finding My Way Back...

For most of the summer my office looked like this.

All the while I tried to teach and keep my cool while working out of boxes and bags. 

Now I am unpacking and working hard (yes, on a Saturday) to get myself ready for the academic year. Here's what my new digs look like.

I have new paint, carpet and lights. The window will replaced at some point (they're WAY behind schedule) during the semester. OH HOW I MISSED MY BOOKS! They were so close but so far away while packed up.

Monday poetry stretch will be returning this week, as will a few reviews here and there beginning with this book by J. Patrick Lewis.

Sorry, but I've got math on the brain right now so you'll have to be patient while I work it out of my system!

So yeah, I have my computer back (though it's still not 100%), my work space, and my books. I'm ready to go. And by the way, I've missed you too!

Where is Miss Rumphius?

This question has a two part answer.

Here is my office.

Here is my computer.

Broken Computer clipart from Clker.com

It's been MANY, MANY days and I'm still waiting for the new hard drive and the files from the corrupted/damaged disk to be transferred.

I don't know how folks update their blogs by phone. I just can't do it. Keep your fingers crossed that one day soon I'll get my computer back. As to my office, it looks to be behind schedule. I'm living out of bags, boxes and a storage closet. Are we having fun yet?!

I'll be back when the dust settles. I promise.

Stepping Away For a Bit

We had an unexpected death in the immediate family today. All my big plans for poetry month are now on hold, as I'll be stepping away for a while. Please keep my family, and especially my husband, in your prayers.

Inspiration for Neverland to Become Center for Children's Literature

Have you seen the article Peter Pan's Neverland could become forever-land? Here's an excerpt.

For the teenager James Matthew Barrie, the sloping, terraced garden overlooking a gentle river was an enchanted land where he and his friends became pirates, clambered over walls, built hideouts and scaled trees in the sunshine.

But the back garden of Moat Brae, a late Georgian villa in the rural town of Dumfries, became more than a playground for the aspiring novelist and playwright. Thirty years later, it inspired Neverland, the magical kingdom where Peter Pan and Tinkerbell flew into battle against Captain Hook, an adventure that captured the imaginations of millions of real-life children.

Now, nearly 140 years after JM Barrie played there as a boy, the mansion and gardens are to be transformed into a national centre for children's literature, after the derelict and decaying building and its garden were saved from demolition by a local trust.

Read the article in its entirety at The Guardian.

Research Report - Families That Read

This from the November issue of Journal of Research in Reading (Volume 33, Issue 4, 2010, pp 414–430). **The highlighting here is mine.**

Article Title: Families that read: A time-diary analysis of young people’s and parents’ reading

Abstract: Parents can play an important role in assisting their children to learn to read, and can act as good role models in promoting reading behaviour. While there has been a raft of research on the impact of parents as teachers, there has been little empirical analysis on the impact of parents in modelling reading. Addressing this gap in the literature with time-diary data, this paper presents a study of the association between parents’ and young people’s reading in the United Kingdom. The paper finds a strong association between parents’ and young people’s reading concentrated in households where parents are observed to read for more than 30 minutes per day. In addition, mothers’ reading is associated primarily with girls’ reading (especially in lone- mother households), while fathers’ reading is strongly associated with boys’ reading. Some implications for campaigns to encourage young people’s reading through increased parental reading are discussed.

Here are some things you should know about the method and data set.

• This was a secondary data analysis from the UKTUS 2000–2001 that surveyed 6,414 households in the United Kingdom.
• All individuals in the household aged 8 years and over (N 5 14,423) were asked to provide information about their activities, the other people they were with and their location in 10-minute intervals for a weekday and a weekend day.
• This study looked at the reading behaviors of the parents as well.
• The young people included in the sample resided in 981 households. There is information from 981 mothers and 749 fathers in the sample. (This means about one-quarter of these households are single parent, lone-mother households.)

Here are some of the more interesting results, some of which are not surprising.

• Girls average significantly more reading time than boys.
• There is no significant difference in the average reading time of young people in lone-mother households compared with those in two-parent households.
• There is a difference in the average reading time of young people whose parents have a degree (20 minutes) compared with those whose parents do not have a degree (9 minutes).
• Young people whose parents were observed to read for more than 30 minutes themselves average significantly more time reading than young people whose parents were not observed to read.
• There is a relatively strong and statistically significant correlation between the proportion of time young people are at the same location as their parent and the time they spend reading. This shows that being in proximity to parents is an important factor in young people’s reading.

I'll say that the gender correlation bothers me a bit. What about households where single parents or same sex parents don't share the gender of their children? Regardless of the family configuration (single dad and daughter, single mom and son, two dads with a daughter, or two moms with a son), I would like to think that modeling and encouraging the habit of reading transcends gender.

Overall, this is one more set of data points that speaks to the importance of modeling and making time for reading at home.

NCTE Convention and Celebrating Poetry

November at The Miss Rumphius Effect will be dedicated to poetry. Take that April!

Way back in January I was invited by the inimitable Sylvia Vardell of Poetry for Children to participate in a panel discussion on poetry and blogging. The date for the presentation is finally drawing near. Here's the info on the session I will be participating in at the NCTE Annual Convention in Orlando.

Session Title: Poets and Bloggers Unite: Using Technology to Connect Kids, Teachers, and Poetry

Date: November 19th
Session/Time: A.09—9:30 am to 10:45 am
Format: Panel

In addition to Sylvia Vardell (who I had the opportunity to meet and drive-by hug quickly at ALA in June), the other blogging member of the panel is Elaine Magliaro of Wild Rose Reader. After nearly 4 years of blogging I'm finally going to meet her! The poet members of our panel will be Lee Bennett Hopkins, Pat Mora, Jame Richards, and Marilyn Singer.

The blogging members of this panel will be featuring the poets on our blogs for 2 weeks before the conference, inviting reader participation. I am thrilled to be featuring Marilyn Singer and will have the honor of introducing her during our session.

That's all the news for now. Look for features to begin here on November 1st.

Where Is Miss Rumphius?

You've probably noticed the lack of posts in the last 8 weeks. Summer school and life have been kicking my butt. However, with a little bit of R&R scheduled, a TBR pile that's huge, and big plans for some new lists and features, I hope to be back in fighting form in no time.

I'm not lying when I say I've missed you. I'm not just talking about posting here, I'm talking about reading you. I haven't visited my favorite blogs in ages. I missed all the reports about ALA (Yes, I was there!), Brush Up Your Shakespeare month, a slew of Poetry Fridays and Nonfiction Mondays, and so much more.

I leave today for a much needed vacation and will be back on August 2nd. I hope you'll join me here when I return.

Sitting on Reviews and Current Distrations

Where are the reviews?
There haven't been a whole lot of book reviews here lately. I've missed the last two nonfiction Mondays. I have a stack of books for review that stands nearly as tall as my desk. So, what gives?

Well, I'm actually holding a huge number of them for April and National Poetry Month. Georgia Heard's book Falling Down the Page: A Book of List Poems arrived today. Page 23 has a poem by our very own Wild Rose Reader, Elaine Magliaro! The book opens vertically and contains delightful poems from cover to cover.

I also recently received a copy of Bella & Bean by Rebecca Kai Dotlich, which received a rave review at A Year of Reading and a lovely mention at Laura Purdie Salas' blog. I've been swooning over the photographs taken by Jason Stemple in one of Jane Yolen's newest books, A Mirror to Nature: Poems About Reflection. (Jason is Jane's son, by the way.) The poems are pretty swoon-worthy too! In the car William and I have been listening to a selection of poems from Kenn Nesbitt's soon-to-be released book My Hippo Has the Hiccups: And Other Poems. They are giggle-inducing and there are several that have been played over and over again.

I also have an enormous stack of books from interlibrary loan on the couch in my office. (Don't get all excited, it's a really old piece of cargo furniture.) There are close to 70 poetry books from Adoff to Yolen with lots of amazing writers in between.

This is my way of saying I'm working really hard on my super secret poetry project for April, so it's stealing a bit of my regular blog time now.

Distractions
There's another reason my blogging has been a bit slow (besides my day job taking up an inordinate amount of time right now). I've been spending my evenings rehearsing for How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, the university musical in which I have a small role. We just finished blocking the first act last night. Woohoo! Given the fact that our first performance is April 10, this is a very good thing. I'm tired and sore (lots of singing and dancing), but having LOTS of fun. The cast is largely composed of undergrads and they are terrific.

So, that's why the pages are cluttered with poetry these days. It's easy to read and write in the little bits of time I can steal away each day. However, something BIG is coming. I hope you're ready for it, because I know I am!

Harry Potter Movie News!

Hot off the presses!

Warner Bros. has announced the official release date for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part Two: it will be July 15, 2011. The studio has split Deathly Hallows, the final book in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, into two movies. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part One releases November 19, 2010.

Thanks to Children's Bookshelf for the news!

Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince will be released on July 17th, 2009! That's a mere 134 days from today (just in case you were wondering).

Reading as a Means to Improve Schools

In Monday's Class Struggle, Jay Matthews posted an article entitled Boosting Schools' Value Without Spending a Dime. The list, which included seven ways to improve schools without spending, emphasized the act of reading. In fact, it's at the beginning, middle and end of the list. Here's an excerpt.

1. Replace elementary school homework with free reading. Throw away the expensive take-home textbooks, the boring worksheets and the fiendish make-a-log-cabin-out-of-Tootsie-Rolls projects. One of the clearest (and most ignored) findings of educational research is that elementary students who do lots of homework don't learn more than students who do none.
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5. Have every high school student read at least one nonfiction book before graduation. I am not talking about textbooks.
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7. Furlough everybody -- including teachers, students and parents -- for an unpaid national reading holiday.

It's a great piece with some very creative ideas. Go now and read the article in its entirety. Check out the comments too for some additional suggestions.

The Guardian's Take on Gaiman's Medal

Here is the latest from the Guardian blog.

Yesterday's news that Neil Gaiman won the Newbery Medal, America's most prestigious award for children's literature, was a welcome surprise for a number of reasons. There was Gaiman's high-spirited, profanity-laced reaction to the news on his Twitter feed – two qualities not commonly associated with children's book authors of yore. There was the more measured and amusing take on his blog (Merrilee-my-agent: "You didn't start swearing, did you?" Me: "No." Her: "Oh good."). But Gaiman's win for The Graveyard Book, about a boy raised by ghosts who faces the wonders and terrors of the worlds of both the living and the dead, also appears to put to bed the notion that the Newbery Medal is out of touch with what people are reading.

Read the entire article, entitled Gaiman's Newbery win is a vote for populism - and for excellence.

In Case You Were Wondering ...

If you heard a barbaric YAWP in the last few hours, it was me. I just learned that I (okay, my institution) was awarded a Picturing America grant. I wrote about this program back in October. Picturing America award materials include forty images mounted on twenty double-sided, laminated posters for display and classroom use and a teachers resource book.

The images will be displayed in our Curriculum Materials Center and available for our classes, for student teachers to use in their placements, and for local K-12 teachers to use in their classrooms. I am thrilled and can't wait to begin using these materials in my classes next fall.

On another note -- Did I mention that I recently had a 3-year, million dollar grant funded? (Yes, that's $1,000,000!) This is a renewal of a program designed to better prepare urban middle school students to take on advanced courses in math and science in high school. In this iteration we are adding a professional development piece to improve the content and pedagogical knowledge of the teachers who work with these kids.

So, I guess you could say the semester is getting underway with a bang. Let's just hope it doesn't go out in a whimper.

Odds and Ends - A Bit of Reading-Related Randomness

I'm up to my eyeballs in grant writing and paper grading. No new news really, just some random links and thoughts I want to share.

Number 1 - A few weeks ago a commenter told me she'd found my blog through another site. That site led to another, and another, and after being led down the rabbit hole I eventually found myself at the amazing site Making Books with Children. I signed up for the monthly newsletter and found my very first issue to be real gem. In the October issue, Susan Kapuscinski Gaylord shared her idea for a sticker poem book. Here is an excerpt from the newsletter introduction.

This month's book used the side panels from a grocery bag for the pages, a plastic piece that came with a purchase of a pair of socks and an elastic for the binding, and candy wrappers, fruit stickers, and the left over sticky paper from red and green dot stickers that were left over from jurying at the Newburyport Art Association to decorate the pages. The poem was inspired by the fruits the stickers were on.

The book in the newsletter is a variation of her stick and elastic band book. You will find many terrific book projects here. If you are looking for a project to do at home or in your classroom, this is a site you won't want to miss!
**NOTE - Susan also has a series of videos to take you step-by-step through the process of making some of these books.

Number 2 - Today in the Guardian blog is an article entitled The Misery of Chain Bookstores. I feel Charlotte Higgins' pain, really I do. The comments are almost as entertaining and thoughtful as the article. Here's a fine example.

It has all become depressingly polarised, viz. the following:

1. I went to a Waterstone's the other day looking for some Thomas Hardy. Any would do: I was in a bad mood, and wanted only to remind myself that it could be worse.

There was none. I am a mild-tempered woman and disinclined to shout, but when I queried this with the pleasant but ignorant four-year-old on the till, her apologetic shrug (she simply had no idea why their not stocking Hardy was even vaguely odd) raised in me the desire to launch myself over the till and batter her to death with a copy of The Little Book of Calm (or whatever).

2. The following day I ventured into a local independent bookshop. The woman on the till gave me a protracted up-and-down sort of look, apparently established (wrongly) that I was not one of life's readers, and ignoring my smile returned to her newspaper. I panicked, picked up a Nabokov I didn't want and a Dostoyevsky I already had, and returning to the till found myself greeted with an icy expression since she was on the phone and reluctant to be disturbed. God help anyone that went in there to pick up a nice PD James to read in the bath. I suspect she'd actually spit in their faces.

Someone lend me one hundred large and I promise I'll open a big, shambling, pleasing, cosy bookshop that stocks everything from Sir Philip Sidney to Doris Lessing. There'll be armchairs. And cake! And neither ignorance nor judgement! And probably a marmalde cat.

Number 3 - Normally I don't talk about what a great mother I think I am, but I'm still reeling from the Saturday afternoon matinee of High School Musical 3 that I dutifully took my son to see, so brag I will. In a theater filled with screaming and swooning tweens (and yes there were a good number of boys in the room), the best part of the experience was the amazing behind-the-scenes look at Coraline. February 2009 no longer seems so far away. Here's a nice clip. Did you know they're making this in 3-D?

Monday Miscellany - Awards, Links and a Photo Op

News
While much of the kidlitosphere gathered in Portland on Saturday for the 2nd Annual Kidlit Bloggers Conference, I spent the day with a group of preservice and inservice teachers leading a workshop. I had great fun, but probably not as much as those reporting on the events from Portland. The good news is that Kidlit '09 will be held in D.C., sometime before the National Book Festival. (Will we even HAVE a festival next year once Laura Bush is gone?)

Awards
Some very kind people have bestowed awards on this blog. Recently, Just One More Book!!, and Blue Rose Girl Elaine awarded The Miss Rumphius Effect the I *Heart* Your Blog Award.
Way back in July (when I was on vacation), I received two awards that I just learned about/remembered while reading old post comments and Technorati links. I'm so sorry I missed these! The amazing Anastasia Suen selected TMRE for an Arte y pico award.
And how cool is this? Becky from In the Pages (one of my fellow Cybils judges) awarded TMRE this award.
All of these awards ask that you pass the honors on, but because I read so many great blogs, and since most have already been tapped for these awards, I'm simply going to say thank you so much for reading TMRE and making me a part of this wonderful community.

Morning Linkage
I had a "parking lot" moment yesterday morning. While I should have been heading into Stir Crazy for some tea and a scone while William was in Sunday School class, I was instead listening to this great interview with Dar Williams on NPR. And yes, I promptly went to iTunes and bought her new album. The interview was THAT good.

Yesterday's episode of This American Life included a story about the Harlem Children's Zone. Anyone interested in kids, education, literacy and/or raising children out of poverty needs to listen to this.

The last two episodes at The Classics Tales Podcast have been The Canterville Ghost by Oscar Wilde. You can still listen to Part One and Part Two.

A Photo Op
Finally, a picture of my son in his new specs. Genes are an amazing thing. I'm just sorry he couldn't escape the one for nearsightedness he inherited from both his parents. He did pick out his own frames and seems quite happy with them, so all's well that ends well. (Until they get broken or lost, of course!)

Newbery Library Exhibit on Children's Books

This Saturday an exhibit entitled Artifacts of Childhood: 700 Years of Children's Books will open at the Newberry Library.

Artifacts of Childhood: 700 Years of Children's Books explores the Newberry's little-known collection of books and manuscripts created for and by children. The exhibition showcases aspects of the interaction between children and books and includes approximately 65 works, drawn from the Library's collection of thousands of children's books in more than 100 languages, from the fifteenth century to the present.

The exhibit is co-curated by Paul Gehl and the kidlitosphere's very own Jenny Schwartzberg. (Who also just happens to have hosted this month's Carnival of Children's Literature.)

You can read more about it in the Chicago Tribune article, Newberry Exhibit to Showcase Children's Books. You can also visit the Newberry Library site for more information. The exhibit runs through January 17, 2009.

Congratulations, Jenny!

Banning Books Because of Poetry

In today's Guardian is an article about Britain's exam board and their request that schools destroy an anthology with a poem containing a reference to knives. Here is an excerpt.

Britain's biggest exam board has been accused of censorship after it removed a poem containing references to knife crime from the GCSE syllabus.

Officials at the AQA board said their request that schools destroy the anthology containing the Carol Ann Duffy poem Education for Leisure had been triggered by concerns in two schools about references to knives. A spokeswoman confirmed the decision had been made in the context of the current spate of knife-related murders.

But poets yesterday condemned the move, saying such "censorship" fundamentally missed the point of the poem, which they said could help children debate the causes of street violence.

You can read the rest of the story and the poem in question in the article Top Exam Board Asks Schools to Destroy Book Containing Knife Poem. I particularly liked Michael Rosen's response.

Michael Rosen, the children's laureate, said: "By this same logic we would be banning Romeo and Juliet. That's about a group of sexually attractive males strutting round the streets, getting off with girls and stabbing each other.

Go now and read it.

Lois Lowry and The Willoughbys

If you didn't hear it this morning, Lois Lowry appeared on Weekend Edition to talk about her book The Willoughbys.

I've heard a lot of mixed reviews. Some folks love it, others hate it. I loved the nostalgia of it. Here are smattering of reviews you may want to check out.

• A Fuse #8 Production
• The Five Randoms
• Read*Write*Believe
• Jen Robinson's Book Page

Has Student Achievement Improved?

Yesterday the Center for Education Policy released a report entitled Has Student Achievement Improved Since 2002? State Test Score Trends Through 2006–07. Here are the main conclusions drawn by the authors of the study.

• Since 2002, reading and math achievement on state tests has gone up in most states according to the percentages of students scoring at the proficient level. Gains tended to be larger at the elementary and middle school grades than at the high school level. Achievement has also risen in most states according to effect sizes. These findings are drawn from states with at least three years of comparable test data.

• Trends in reading and math achievement on NAEP have generally moved in the same positive direction as trends on state tests, although gains on NAEP tended to be smaller than those on state tests. The exception to the broad trend of rising scores on both assessments occurred in grade 8 reading, where fewer states showed gains on NAEP than on state tests, especially in terms of effect sizes.

• In states with sufficient data to determine achievement gap trends on state tests, gaps have narrowed more often than they have widened since 2002, particularly for African American students and low-income students. Gap trends were also largely positive for Latino students, but this finding is less conclusive because in many states the Latino subgroup has changed significantly in size in recent years. On the whole, percentages proficient and effect sizes revealed similar trends of narrowing or widening, although percentages proficient gave a more positive picture of achievement gap trends than effect sizes.

• Gaps on NAEP have also narrowed more often than they have widened in states with sufficient data to determine gap trends. The exception was in grade 8 math, where gaps on NAEP widened more often than they narrowed for most subgroups. In general, NAEP results painted a less positive picture of progress in narrowing gaps than state tests did.

• It is impossible to determine the extent to which these trends in test results have occurred because of NCLB. Since 2002,many different but interconnected policies and programs have been undertaken to raise achievement—some initiated by states or school districts and others implemented in response to federal requirements. Moreover, all public school students have been affected by NCLB, so there is no suitable comparison group of students to show what would have happened without NCLB.

The report raises some interesting questions. Is the law behind the rise in scores? The authors say it is impossible to determine whether NCLB alone has produced these changes in students learning. However, it's hard not be cynical and state the obvious. If you spend 6 years (or more) preparing kids to pass "the test," shouldn't their scores be higher? What I really want to know is whether or not they're really learning more.

Punched in the Gut

You know that feeling you get when you hear dreadful news? Your heart sinks into your shoes, your chest tightens, and you can't get your breath. It's what I imagine being punched in the gut feels like. Or reading negative reviews of your book and not being able to turn away.

Well, it's happened to me. It's been almost two days. I can't breathe. Can't sleep. And. . . I can't tell you why. But, I need to talk about it before it drives me insane. Oh, you'll hear about it soon enough. On Thursday, June 26th, to be exact. You see, a report is coming out then that says *** has received a failing grade on all measures in preparing *** to ***. This is something near and dear to my professional heart. It's something I pour my heart and soul into. It's something that has received a surface-level examination by outsiders and been judged to be inadequate. I can't imagine what the press will do with this. It's not going to be pretty.

So, you can see why my heart feels like it's been in a vice. I hope you'll stick with me as I try to work through this. Thanks for listening.

From The New Yorker to Shrek

From June 8, 2008 - September 7, 2008, the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Fransisco is hosting an exhibit on the art of William Steig. Organized by The Jewish Museum in New York City, From The New Yorker to Shrek: The Art of William Steig features a wide selection of original drawings for both his New Yorker cartoons and his children's books.

You can view a special interactive feature that provides a glimpse into the work of this artist. We particularly love Doctor De Soto and Sylvester and the Magic Pebble in our house, so I'm sorry we won't get to see this in person. If you find yourself in California and are a lover of children's books, do consider taking this one in.