Welcome to Episode 12 of The Book Love Foundation Podcast! And thank you for joining us in this celebration of teaching and the joy of learning.
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Episode 12 Show notes
In this episode, the topic is reading break at Kennett High School.
Four days a week, at 9am, for 20 minutes, the school becomes nearly silent. Students gather in groups of 10-15 students all over the school to read with teachers. Almost all of these reading breaks hum with engaged reading.
Engaged readers are not hard to spot. They ignore distractions. They continue reading through the morning announcements. They settle into a peace and contentment we so rarely see in high schools today.
The enthusiasm for reading in students and in teachers is easy to see as well–they finish one book and have plans for the next, they bring in books to read and to share with each other. They continually invite, rather than police, kids into reading, simply because they know how important it is.
Our school is committed to developing a community of readers. I believe it happened because we hired a principal who used to own a bookstore. Neal Moylan responded to growing apathy about reading with time for pleasure reading. And, he tripled the English teachers library budget for them all to start classroom libraries, then also allocated money for any teacher in any content area to personalize their classroom library. That with a shrinking budget.
The teachers you ll meet today are not English teachers. But they are passionate about reading, and they are advocates for individual kids.
And, to recognize Memorial Day, we conclude this episode with a story of a legacy, a woman who left her mark on everyone who knew her.
Thanks so much for joining us today.
CONVERSATION SEGMENT
Thank you to Neal Moylan, Peter Innes, Kate Sargent, Cheryl Furtado, Joe Riddensdale, Lindsay Cole, Melissa Cyr, and Jason Cicero.
(Kennett reads. And it rocks, too. -kc)
The staff members we interviewed named these books as their favorites, although we didn’t end up using this in the edited show
If I Stay, by Gail Foreman
Cat’s Eye, by Margaret Atwood
Temple of My Familiar, by Alice Walker
The Color Purple, by Alice Walker
Possessing the Secret of Joy, by Alice Walker
An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth, by Chris Hadfield
The Endurance, by Earnest Shackleton
Gulliver’s Travels, by Jonathan Swift
Roots, by Alex Haley
The Odyssey, by Homer
Crime and Punishment, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Don Quixote, by Miguel de Cervantes
American Sniper, by Chris Kyle, Jim DeFelice, and Scott McEwen
Lone Survivor, by Marcus Luttrell and Patrick Robinson
Athletes Wanted, by Chris Krause
White Like Me, by Tim Wise
Black Like Me, by John Howard Griffin
The Hunger Games books, by Suzanne Collins
The Maze Runner, by James Dashner
Pop, by Gordan Korman
THE MAN CLUB SAMPLER
The Car, by Gary Paulsen
The Rifle, by Gary Paulsen
Trapped, by Michael Northrop
Alabama Moon, by Watt Key
Dirt Road Home, by Watt Key
A Long Way Gone, by Ishmael Beah
Snitch, by Allison van Diepen
The Talk-funny Girl, by Roland Merullo
Caged Warrior, by Alan Lawrence Sitomer
Homeboyz, by Alan Lawrence Sitomer
Boot Camp, by Todd Strasser
Hole in My Life, by Jack Gantos
BOOK TALK
from Lindsay Cole (biology):
The Harry Potter series, by J.K. Rowling
The Resurrection of the Romanovs, by Greg King and Penny Wilson
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, by Rebecca Skloot
The Family That Couldn’t Sleep, by D. T. Max
from Melissa Cyr (World Studies):
First Crossing (Anthology)
The Kite Runner, by Khaled Hosseini
Unbroken, by Laura Hillenbrand
from Jason Cicero (math):
Enumeracy, by John Allen Paulos
The Visual Miscellaneum, by David McCandless
books by Roald Dahl
These books are all available at The Teacher Learning Sessions Book Store.
Browse By Category / Book Love Foundation Podcast / Episode 11
Purchases through the TLS Book Store support The Teacher Learning Sessions.
“In Lieu of Flowers…,” by Kevin Carlson
Written in memory of Suzanne J. Rood, 1935 – 2007.
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The post Kennett Reads! Ep 12 of the Book Love Foundation Podcast appeared first on Teacher Learning Sessions.
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