Born to Read Trainers

Janet Lyons facilitated the first Peaceable Stories workshop ever to take place in Windham on May 21 and 28. The group was very small – just 9 people – and all but one participant was center-based. Two did not have English as a first language, and struggled to understand some of the books and concepts. One participant came from a background in juvenile justice, and said she went into early childhood as a second career because she thinks it’s a good way to reduce the need for people in her first career!

Janet began the first session by passing around a copy of the Family Circus cartoon that went out with the Trainer Reflection Retreat report in March, and followed that with a quick exercise about finding and testing your comfort zone. She had participants pair up and stand toe to toe for as long as it took for each to explain where her name came from and what it meant to her. Later, Janet pointed out that we didn’t include the word “fable” in the subtitle of It’s Mine in the vocabulary list in the Activity & Resource Guide. I’d love to get some feedback on whether or not it’s worth adding! Janet suggested defining it for children to help them learn about literary genres.

Janet devoted a full 15 minutes of her first session to a walk-through of the Activity & Resource Guide. She was careful to point out all the various features, including the ECLG connection and the space to write notes. She highlighted the points on page 14 about pre-reading books and giving kids words to use before asking them to “use their words.” In looking at the pages on It’s Mine, she pulled out the CD to show that the song was on there, and had a copy of Frog and Toad Are Friends as an example of a related title. She also walked through the resources section, pointing out that local librarians are the best resource for more books.

Right before the end of the first session, Janet gave an assignment to share one book and try one activity before the next session. Participants came back the next week with some wonderful projects. One had decorated a Kleenex box to look like a cookie jar, and had all the children made paper cookies with an idea for sharing to deposit in the box. (They also used the cookies for counting and letter recognition.) Another had planned an art show to display children’s drawings of what they think peace is, inspired by If Peace Is….

Two more Peaceable Stories trainings are wrapping up this week, so keep an eye on the blog for more reports.

The Bi-County Conference in Sullivan, Maine, is sponsored by the Child Care Opportunities RDC for Hancock and Washington counties. This April, Bahia Yackzan facilitated two workshops sessions, each one hour and fifteen minutes long, on Many Eyes, Many Voices. She chose to distribute one copy of Thanks to the Animals and one Somali Alphabet book to each participant. Since she had so little time, Bahia made a point of asking the group to state their needs/requests/questions at any point so they would leave with what they came for. Her major goal was to communicate the value of the program and entice the participants to take the full 6-hour training. However, she took the time to read Thanks to the Animals aloud and take the group through the corresponding section of the Activity & Resource Guide. She also played the Somali Alphabet CD, describing this as “a great opportunity to talk about developmentally appropriate exposure, how great it is for even the littlest ones to hear all kinds of sounds.”

We are so pleased to be able to spread the messages of our Born to Read trainings at these conferences around the state. Many thanks to the RDC staff and conference coordinators who have thought of us, and to all the presenters who’ve ably represented us.

When this blog is quiet, you can be sure that it’s because Born to Read has been busy! Since my last post, we’ve worked with three different facilitators to present workshop sessions at three day-long conferences. We were disappointed that we had to cancel our own Born to Read conference, which would have taken place in May 2009, and we were thus all the more grateful for the opportunity to reach a total of around 100 conference-goers this spring.

The first conference was sponsored by Child Care Options RDC at Kennebec Valley Community College. Janet Lyons facilitated a 3-hour session on Peaceable Stories in which she gave copies of It’s Mine and When Sophie Gets Angry—Very, Very Angry… to each participant. She read Dudley Randall’s poem “The Ballad of Birmingham” as a way of starting a conversation about how peace and safety aren’t always where we expect them to be. (You can find the full text of this poem here.) Then she divided participants into three groups and assigned one of the “Reflective Questions for Educators” from the Activity & Resource Guide to each group.

The discussion of It’s Mine focused on vocabulary (quibble, bicker, defiantly, and peaceful) and emotional literacy. Janet also modeled a picture walk using Arnold Lobel’s Frog and Toad Are Friends to look at friendship from another angle. Participants made frog and toad puppets (with instructions from this website), and talked about how the activity could be adapted for different age groups. The discussion of Sophie revolved around how people get from anger to calm, with several participants recognizing that some of the children in their care need to actively burn off frustration before they can talk about what the problem is and how to solve it. There was also some discussion of Peace Corners (or Tables), and how adults respond to children who need space or activity in order to deal with their emotions.

More recently, Myrna Koonce led a session at Carelink RDC’s conference at the University of New England in Biddeford. Myrna and Janet had planned together, but their sessions wound up being quite different, because Myrna had twice as many participants and only half as much time! She introduced both It’s Mine and Sophie, and guided the group to look closely at the illustrations in the latter to see how Molly Bang’s use of color mirrors what is happening in the text. With both books, participants seemed to enjoy being broken down into small groups for discussion, even though the room set-up (a lecture hall) made it challenging. However, the room was transformed into a theatre when a few participants agreed to act out It’s Mine, and had everyone laughing at their dramatic characterizations.

Myrna reported a great participant-to-participant “aha” moment. Someone described a large cardboard box that’s designated as a quiet place or “peace place,” but wasn’t getting used by the children. Someone asked if she ever used it. “Oh,” she said, “I never go in there!” “Maybe if you use it,” her colleague suggested, “the children will follow.”

Reports on our third and final conference session, and the Peaceable Stories that took place last month, are coming soon!

The Center for Grieving Children is presenting a workshop with Lynn Plourde on Thursday, March 28, called “The Healing Power of Words.” Lynn will read some picture books (her own and others’) and allow time for questions and answers. Together with Center staff, she will discuss empowering children to express their feelings in their own words.

The workshop runs from 3 to 5 p.m. Visit the Center’s website to register. You can also visit Lynn Plourde’s site, and check out the booklist that Born to Read compiled a few years ago, with help from St. Joseph’s College students, on Loving (and Losing) Grandparents.

Susan Bennet Armistead, co-author of Literacy and the Youngest Learner (among other books) and professor of Early Literacy at the University of Maine, recently contributed this comment to an e-mail exchange among literacy trainers:

I want to add to the discussion going on about center-based vs. family child care providers. I STRONGLY urge us to consistently use the language of “early childhood professional” to refer to either group. We have to assist people in identifying themselves as professionals (since the world doesn’t) and avoid distinctions of locale. The work we do is (or should be) fundamentally the same, regardless of our setting. When we wrote Literacy and the Youngest Learner, we intentionally included group homes, child care centers and 1/2 day preschool programs. Throughout the book, we refer to the professionals and their settings as “teachers” and “programs.” The objective is to make sure that every person in an early childhood setting perceives the work they do as providing a caring educational environment. “Program” promotes the notion of intentionality. As leaders, we can model the shift of vocabulary to help people see themselves in a new light. I also don’t think it’s a bad thing to have this discussion openly and early in the training series, so your participants can discuss the similarities and challenges of their work as equal colleagues.

Born to Read struggles constantly with this question of language. Late last year, when we surveyed the early childhood educators who have reading volunteers through our partnership with RSVP, we asked them, What do you usually say when someone asks “What do you do for work?” Here’s the list of responses we got:

Child Care [or childcare] (8)
Child Care [or childcare] Provider (7)
Day Care [or daycare] Provider (4)
Child Care Director (4)
Preschool Teacher (4)
Preschool Director (2)
Day Care (2)
Childcare Teacher (2)
I own my own daycare (2)
Family Child Care Provider (2)
Child care/ teach children
Early Childhood Education
I am a preschool teacher
Teacher/caregiver
Program Coordinator for Pre-K
early education
I am a home childcare provider
home childcare
family child care services
Grow responsible children
watching children grow
Take care of children
I Love my Job
I run a family child care and preschool
I run a preschool
Executive Director of a non-profit
Family Service Worker
Educator
I’m an early childhood educator
Head Start
I work with children and families
small business owner
pre-school
Preschool\Head Start
pre school teacher and director
I’m an early childhood educator. We learn social and independent skills with a focus on literacy.

Please weigh in! What terminology do you think is best? How can a shift in language be accomplished?