Born to Read Trainers

Karen Hall started this training with not one, but two listing activities. The first was the standard word association with “peace,” which yielded tolerance, sharing, teamwork, getting along, no fighting, respect, harmony, unity, calm, quiet, love, chocolate. The second was a slight variation in which Karen asked “what makes you feel peaceful?” Here we got chocolate (again), dogs, sunshine, pools, sleep, not being at work, no chaos, a good book, family, wine, margaritas, Hawaii, when others are happy, bubble baths, walking, childless restaurants/movies, shopping, rainy days, kayaking, music, money, weekends. Interesting to compare the two lists, abstract vs. concrete.

The training continued with a storytelling activity using the vocabulary words from the first four books. Karen had each participant pick one of the words out of a basket. Going around the table, the first person started a story, incorporating her vocabulary word. The next person picked up where she left off, round-robin style. “This got everyone loosened up with some playfulness and laughter,” writes Karen.

After some intense reflection on how conflict makes participants feel, Karen introduced more hands-on activities. The group made its own “It’s Ours” pond mural, and then Karen displayed some items that might go on a Peace Table in a classroom. Homework for the second session was to bring an item to add to this table.

Before the end of this first evening, Karen told her participants about her own experience relating to the book My Friend and I: a friend once tore a very special cat pillow that had been given to her. The friend’s mother made her a new pillow, which she still has, and brought to the training. Sharing a personal story like this is a great way to make sure your group understands that having the expertise of a trainer doesn’t make you any less of a regular person!

In the second session, the Old Town group had a long discussion about superhero play:

The participants who worked at a center-based program all said that superhero play was banned from their center. The family child care providers were more apt to be more flexible and allow the play, as long as some rules were followed. One family provider said that she talks to the children about what makes a superhero super (they help people, do good things for others, etc.). Another brings superhero figures to the doll house and has them do things that regular people would do, i.e. Superman cooking dinner or Batman putting the children to bed.

Karen handed out copies of the article “Beyond Banning War and Superhero Play—Meeting Children’s Needs in Violent Times” for participants to take with them. To conclude the training, she read I Call My Hand Gentle aloud, and then the group created “Our Path to Peace” on one wall in the room. The participants each took a couple of footprints and wrote things on them that they would do either in their classroom or personally to promote peace. The colorful end result appears in the photo below. Thank you, Karen, for your detailed report and innovative activity ideas.

The chair of the Maine Association of School Librarians’ Intellectual Freedom committee, Kelley McDaniel, recently shared this letter with the Maine library community. It’s written by the director of a public library in Colorado, in response to a patron challenge to Sarah Brennan’s book Uncle Bobby’s Wedding. Hopefully, most of you have seen this book by now. It’s about a little girl who’s afraid that her relationship with her beloved uncle will change after he gets married. The fact that he’s marrying a man is made perfectly clear, but it’s not the point of the story.

McDaniel writes that she particularly admired the library director’s letter because:
- he listened without judgment—he was in no way dismissive of the complaint or the complainant;
- he explained the process, thoughtfully and explicitly, and he followed the process;
- he spoke reasonably and rationally—there was nothing emotionally charged in his letter.
The letter may provide some talking points for the discussion of controversial titles in Many Eyes, Many Voices, or it may just give you some insight into the work librarians do every day to preserve civil liberties and intellectual freedom for people of all ages.

A multimedia report on this month’s Peaceable Stories in Augusta just came in from Sharon Abair. Seeing the photographs as I read her notes really made me feel like I was there! Most of the photos feature book extension activities that the participants tried with their children in the week between training sessions. Sharon likes to make a list when she gives this homework assignment so that all the books are covered (see her report on Many Eyes, Many Voices). More on that in a moment…but first, I want to tell you about Sharon’s word chart.

Here’s a picture of the chart. Many teachers have something like it. Sharon used hers in the training to model one way of highlighting the vocabulary in It’s Mine. She writes each of the new words the children will hear in the book on two cards. As she puts one set of cards in the pocket chart, she discusses the meaning of the words. Then she passes out the other set of cards to random children. After discussing the book’s title (”do we ever hear that phrase?”) and walking through the book and see what they think it is going to be about, she reads the book aloud. Whenever one of the new words come up, she points to the word, and whichever child has that word comes up and puts it in the pocket chart beside the word that looks like it. When the book is finished, Sharon discusses the story, having the children help her put it in sequence. Then she passes out a choice of colored paper and markers and they each choose a section of the story that they would like to illustrate. When they are done, she hangs the pictures and they talk about the story in sequence again.

I’m sure some of you read the article “Rich Environments for Young Learners” in the May 2008 issue of Young Children. I thought of it when I saw this photo of the table in the Child Care Options classroom, decorated with the training participants’ drawings from It’s Mine.

Perhaps you are wondering how Sharon makes time for all that show-and-tell from the homework assignment. Well, her secret is to modify the “question slips” activity, mixing all four categories of questions together and just spending a short time on them during the first session. By the second session, everyone is more comfortable participating; this group spent a over an hour discussing reactions to the questions and reactions to reactions.

Sharon also used an article from Young Children called “Creating Environments for Peaceful Problem Solving” in her Peaceable Stories training. It’s on page 22 of the November 2006 issue. If you would like a copy for reference or to use as a handout in trainings, please let me know by adding a comment to this post.

The group had a good conversation around “peace within communities,” relating the various types of communities participants are a part of to the work community they all share.  Some of the vocabulary that came up was:
•    steward
•    responsibility
•    personal space
•    roles
•    heroes
•    community service workers (one program uses this term for their daily “jobs” within their classrooms)

This post is already so long that I don’t think I’ll post the other photos just yet. Look for them in future posts, instead. Thank you, Sharon!

Late last month, Child Care Connections brought Peaceable Stories to Freeport for the first time. This allowed people who work in towns like New Gloucester, Brunswick, and Pownal to participate without having to drive all the way to Scarborough. The group included one Born to Read volunteer and a few providers who’d just been through Many Eyes, Many Voices earlier in the month.

Trainer Janet Lyons started the first session with the word association exercise, and noticed that while most of the associations were passive (calm, quiet, a walk on the beach, etc.) one program defined ‘happy noise’—when all the kids are engaged, getting along, and enjoying themselves—as peaceful. The example was playing loud music and having all the kids dance together.

I wonder if Janet read the article about adult learning environments in the July issue of “Young Children,” because she really paid attention to her room! On the first night, she tried hanging quotes from the Activity & Resource Guide, along with pictures of nature scenes, on the walls. Realizing that they were difficult to see, she scattered them on the desks in the classroom for the second night, and people took time to read them.

Janet submitted detailed notes on the activities her participants tried between sessions:

One family daycare with school-age children started to create not one but three peace corners for quiet reading and reflection. The children were actually painting an area under the staircase to put a light and pillows in. One daycare had the children paint pictures of themselves and their best friend, and on the back the teachers wrote what the children said about their picture. In another classroom in the same program, hands were traced and the children told what they used their gentle hands for. A family daycare made stone soup, and all the children wanted the stone.

But the most important outcome of this training was that for the first time, Who’s In Rabbit’s House was not listed on evaluations as the book participants were least likely to use! Why? Because Janet had copies of the Peaceable Stories CD to distribute to each participant. Some trainers have played their own discs during past trainings, but we wanted to see if having a copy to take home would make a difference. Thanks to Janet for being willing to be our guinea pig with this experiment! Here’s how she did it: on the first night, Who’s In Rabbit’s House was left out of the book bags, and Janet explained that she “would like to hold it out until we could all look at it together and hear it read by Michael Sandberg. I told them that Michael did an excellent job of reading the book, and that his reading made a difference in my own feelings about this book.” On the second night, she distributed the books and CDs:

We listened to Michael read and followed along in our books. We spent a lot of time looking at the artwork and discussing how the actors moved across the page, and looking for Frog. People liked the book and several thought that they might use the CD at quiet time. A small discussion centered around the positive impact of children hearing a male voice reading to them, as not all children have men in their lives.

We have enough copies of the CD to provide one to every Peaceable Stories participant in the three trainings this month, but then we’ll have to decide whether or not to order more. I look forward to hearing from this month’s trainers about how they use the CD, and whether it makes as big a difference as it appeared to make for Janet’s group.

One participant in last month’s Many Eyes, Many Voices training in Bangor shared a story that our trainers, Karen and Bahia, as well as Denise, who observed the session, can’t stop thinking about. This woman’s son attended her child care program, and had a friend whom he’d seen come in and out of the center for two or three years. One day, they were coloring with crayons after school when he suddenly stopped and looked at her hands and legs, looked her all over and said, “{her name}, you’re brown!” And the friend kind of nodded shyly and looked down, as if saying “I know,” in a self-conscious way. The son was five at the time.

The question of when children notice differences in skin color is a common one in Many Eyes, Many Voices. Many participants are uncomfortable with the idea of discussing race when “kids don’t even notice it.” Bahia writes, “I find it so fascinating and continue to wonder if he, and/or other kids who are said to not notice skin color, simply do not have acknowledgement of differences modeled in their environments, or do not have the language reinforcement they need to express when they notice such highly visible differences.” Most educators don’t see any harm in discussing scientific concepts or new vocabulary words before kids really grasp them independently. It’s the status of race as a socially constructed and historically fraught category that makes some wish to defer discussion about it until kids “notice”—or find the words to ask—at which point they may be caught off guard.

It’s also worth noting that children of color may become aware of racial differences sooner than white children for the worst possible reason: because they encounter discrimination. Bahia again: “I noticed that in the discussions, the focus continued to be on the children who were noticing or not noticing differences, instead of exploring how the children being noticed (or not being noticed) for being different were feeling. I’d like to help shift that focus if I have the opportunity to co-facilitate one of the trainings again.”

Here’s an article by Marguerite Wright, author of I’m Chocolate, You’re Vanilla, that addresses these questions in greater depth. Has anyone read Wright’s book?