Category Archives: Educator Resources

Lesson plans, activity guides, and helpful tips from our literacy specialist and guest educators.

Educator Resources

Teaching Students to See Themselves as Readers

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Katie CunninghamGuest blogger Katie Cunningham is an Assistant Professor at Manhattanville College. Her teaching and scholarship centers around children’s literature, critical literacy, and supporting teachers to make their classrooms joyful and purposeful. Katie has presented at numerous national conferences and is the editor of The Language and Literacy Spectrum, New York Reading Association’s literacy journal.

“Guess What?. . . I Can Read This Book All By Myself!” These are exciting words for any teacher or parent to hear. When we hear them we know the child in front of us sees himself or herself as a reader, often for the first time. Right now, teachers across the country are wrapping up their first round of reading assessments, using the information to make choices about small instructional groups, and determining teaching points to support all of their students as growing readers.
But what assessment measures do we have that gather information on who sees themselves as readers? Are we listening closely enough for those words? When we hear them what do we do? More importantly, when we don’t hear them, what can we do?
Can I Have a Pet? from our Bebop Titles
Can I Have a Pet? from Bebop Books

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Educator Resources

Book List: Children’s Books About Transracial Adoption

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Because our books deal with many different kinds of families and all different types of diversity, we regularly get asked for books that feature transracial adoption. Because we don’t live in a color-blind world, transracial adoption (adopting a child of a different race or ethnic group) is a complicated act, and presents unique challenges for both the adoptive family and the adoptee.

Below we’ve compiled a list of children’s, middle grade, and young adult books that feature transracial adoption in some way. Please note that this list should be taken as list of resources for further investigation and not as a list of recommendations. Before using a book yourself, we encourage you to evaluate it (we recommend Dr. Sarah Park’s excellent post, Adoption and Children’s Literature, as a guide).

Pinterest: Books About Transracial Adoption

Picture Books

Bringing Asha Home by Uma Krishnaswami, ill. by Jamel Akib: A young boy prepares for the arrival of his new little sister, Asha, from India.

Journey Home by Lawrence McKay, Jr., ill. by Dom Lee and Keunhee Lee: Mai travels to Vietnam with her mother, who was adopted, in search of her mother’s biological family.

Horace by Holly Keller: This allegorical book about adoption focuses on a spotted cat adopted by two striped tigers, focusing on the idea that love and family transcend looks.

 A Mother for Choco by Keiko Kasza: A book for the very young set about a little bird who is ultimately adopted by a bear.

We Wanted You by Liz Rosenberg, illus. by Peter Catalanotto: This story works backwards through the years, telling one family’s adoption story.

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Educator Resources

How diverse is the NYPL’s 100 Great Children’s Books list?

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Stacy Whitman photoGuest BloggerStacy Whitman is the founder and publisher of Tu Books, an imprint of Lee & Low Books that publishes diverse fantasy, science fiction, and mystery for children and young adults. She holds a master’s degree in children’s literature from Simmons College. This post is cross-posted with permission from Stacy’s blog.

In celebration of their exhibit The ABC of It: Why Children’s Books Matter, the New York Public Library has released a list of 100 great children’s books from the last 100 years. I’m pretty happy to see that 27 of the 100 titles are diverse (in humanity) titles, and that there’s even more diversity in the authors (Donald Crews’s Freight Train, for example, doesn’t feature human diversity in the text, because the main character is a train, but the author is African American). How many of them have you read?

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Educator Resources

Integrating Reading, Writing, Speaking and Listening Standards in Grades 4-5

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Katherine AliKatherine Ali is a dual-certified elementary and special education teacher. She recently graduated as a literacy specialist with a Masters in Science from Manhattanville College. She has experience teaching internationally in northern China and now teaches in the Bronx, NY.

In order to be active participants in the literate world, students must be reading, writing, speaking, and listening at all ages. The natural interplay of language looks slightly differently across grades levels, but the foundations and mission are the same:

Reading:  Text Complexity and the growth of comprehension

We want our students to ascend the staircase of text complexity and simultaneously sharpen their comprehension skills.  Students, of all ages, need to build stamina through independently reading more rigorous and complex texts.  Additionally, read-alouds allow students to access content and concepts they may not be able to decode themselves.

Writing: Text types, responding to reading, and research

Opinion pieces, research-based projects, and narratives are the three main categories of student writing the Common Core State Standards focus on.  It is also imperative that our students engage in the writing process and expand their writing style using the conventions of the English language.

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Educator Resources, Guest Blogger Post

Integrating Common Core Standards: Reading, Writing, Speaking, and Listening in Grades 2-3

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Katherine Aliguest bloggerKatherine Ali is a dual-certified elementary and special education teacher. She recently graduated as a literacy specialist with a Masters in Science from Manhattanville College. She has experience teaching internationally in northern China and now teaches in the Bronx, NY.

In order to be active participants in the literate world, students must be reading, writing, speaking, and listening at all ages. The natural interplay of language looks slightly differently across grades levels, but the foundations and mission are the same:

Reading:  Text Complexity and the growth of comprehension

We want our students to ascend the staircase of text complexity and simultaneously sharpen their comprehension skills.  Students, of all ages, need to build stamina through independently reading more rigorous and complex texts.  Additionally, read-alouds allow students to access content and concepts they may not be able to decode themselves.

Writing: Text types, responding to reading, and research

Opinion pieces, research-based projects, and narratives are the three main categories of student writing the Common Core State Standards focus on.  It is also imperative that our students engage in the writing process and expand their writing style using the conventions of the English language.

Continue reading →

Educator Resources, Guest Blogger Post

Integrating Reading, Writing, Speaking & Listening in Grades K-1

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Katherine AliGuest BloggerKatherine Ali is a dual-certified elementary and special education teacher. She recently graduated as a literacy specialist with a Masters in Science from Manhattanville College. She has experience teaching internationally in northern China and now teaches in the Bronx, NY.

As educators, we witness the transformations of students throughout elementary school.  First graders will one day become fifth graders, while fifth graders were once first graders.  So we must think, where did our students come from? and where are they going next? Our classroom must be structured to prepare our students for the future and help them build a skillset they can bring with them.  In order to be active participants in the literate world, students must be reading, writing, speaking, and listening at all ages.

Here on the LEE & LOW blog, I’ll illustrate what it looks like to integrate reading, writing, speaking, and listening across several grade levels: K-1, 2-3, and 4-5. The natural interplay of language looks slightly different across grade levels, but the foundations and mission are the same.

Reading:  Text Complexity and the growth of comprehension

We want our students to ascend the staircase of text complexity and simultaneously sharpen their comprehension skills.  Students of all ages need to build stamina through independently reading more rigorous and complex texts.  Additionally, read-alouds allow students to access content and concepts they may not be able to decode themselves.

Continue reading →

Educator Resources

Integrating Reading, Writing, Speaking, and Listening in the Classroom

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Katherine Aliguest bloggerKatherine Ali is a dual-certified elementary and special education teacher. She recently graduated as a literacy specialist with a Masters in Science from Manhattanville College. She has experience teaching internationally in northern China and now teaches in the Bronx, NY. 

There is a natural interplay of reading, writing, speaking and listening in the modern day elementary classroom. Morning meetings, read-alouds, and group projects foster an integrated model of literacy with a special focus on speaking and listening. Appendix A of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) states that “oral language development precedes and is the foundation for written language development; in other words, oral language is primary and written language builds on it.”

After students have begun reading and writing, speaking and listening still have an integral place in the classroom – so much that the CCSS set specific standards for speaking and listening to promote a balanced approach to literacy: “The speaking and listening standards require students to develop a range of broadly useful oral communication and interpersonal skills…students must learn to work together, express and listen carefully to ideas, and integrate information.” The speaking and listening standards expect students to participate in “rich, structured conversations” in which they are building on the ideas of others and speaking in complete sentences. Teachers need to create models and routines for deliberate and intentional dialogue that builds bridges to the students’ reading and writing. In that way, students have the opportunity to also recognize the organic intertwining of these modes of receptive and expressive language.

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Educator Resources

How to Set Up a Skype Author Visit

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Over the past few years, I’ve watched the number of requests for virtual visits go up quite a bit. Part of this is because schools and libraries have had their budgets for author visits slashed, and part may just be because more people have access to speedy Internet and other technology that’s needed for a virtual visit to work.

Either way, virtual author/illustrator visits can be a great way to enable direct interaction between book creators and readers without the costs of an in-person visit. While authors usually still ask for an honorarium for virtual visits, often their honorarium is lower and travel costs are not an issue. Some authors also offer a free shorter (10-20 minute) virtual visit to classrooms or libraries who have purchased copies of their books. Here’s how to set up your first virtual author visit.How to Set Up An Author Skype Visit

1. Set up the technology

Sometimes when I work with people who are thinking about setting up a virtual visit, they get a little panicky about the technology aspect. But virtual visits are actually quite easy, and don’t require all that much in the way of equipment. Here’s a basic list of what you’ll need:

  • An operating system compatible with Skype, Google Hangout, or another similar program

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Educator Resources, Guest Blogger Post

Teaching Writer’s Craft With Multicultural Literature

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Jane GangiJane M. Gangi is Associate Professor in the Division of Education at Mount Saint Mary College in Newburgh, New York, where she is a member of the Collaborative for Equity in Literacy Learning (CELL); CELL is working with Student Achievement Partners to make Appendix B of the Common Core more inclusive of multicultural literature.  She is the children’s literature section editor for the Connecticut Reading Association Journal, and Routledge will publish her third book, Genocide in Contemporary Children’s and Young Adult Literature: Cambodia to Darfur in November.

Most educators realize children need to see themselves in text to become proficient readers and to develop healthy identities. When our classroom library collections largely contain books with white characters, white children have more opportunities toWhat if we could embrace children of color with mirror texts, provide white children with window books, and teach writer's craft simultaneously? become proficient readers and to develop healthy identities. Rudine Sims Bishop (1990) described books that are “windows”—those that offer “views of worlds that may be real or imagined, familiar or strange” that children “only have to walk through” imaginatively. “Mirror” books are those in which “literature transforms human experience and reflects it back to us, and in that reflection we can see our own lives and experiences as part of the larger human experience” (n. p.). What if we could embrace children of color with mirror texts, provide white children with window books (for too long it’s been the reverse), and teach writer’s craft simultaneously?

Writer’s craft is part of writer’s workshop. In a mini-lesson, a teacher might read aloud a beautifully written book and then ask children to respond to what they notice about the author’s writing. Often children notice the format of a book and come up with evocative phrases, images, and sentences they observe in the book. If, however, they do not discover writer’s craft on their own, teachers can help them see components of writer’s craft.

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Educator Resources

“The Common Core is Not a Curriculum”

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What is the Common Core? How should it be used?Guest blogger

Katherine AliKatherine Ali is a dual-certified elementary and special education teacher. She recently graduated as a literacy specialist with a Masters in Science from Manhattanville College. She has experience teaching internationally in northern China and now teaches in the Bronx, NY.

As a first year teacher in the Common Core Era, I felt fortunate to have the Common Core State Standards as a guide for my instruction, especially working in a school with an under-developed curriculum and limited resources.  One of my most used applications on my phone was CommonCore, day in and day out.  Studying and closely reading the standards helped me choose the literature I wanted to share with my students, and furthermore it affected how my students and I were going to interact with those materials.  A video created by D.C. public schools, seen during a presentation I attended, was a turning point in my own understanding of the major differences between the Common Core and a curriculum.

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