HEARTful Reading by Mary Louise Sanchez

Even though I retired as a teacher/librarian, I still I like to keep connected to the world of school librarians and teaching. I love learning and I love reading! And, since I'm a pending middle grade author, I feel it's also important for me to keep informed of what's happening in the realm of education. 

In the January/February 2018 issue of School Library Connection I recently read an article about SEL. The article is entitled "On Common Ground" by Mary Frances Zilonis and Chris Swerling. I had never heard of SEL, but soon found out it's a hot topic in educational research. CASEL (The Collaborative for Academic Social and Emotional Learning) defines SEL as "the process through which children and adults acquire and effectively apply the knowledge, attitudes, and skills necessary to understand and manage emotions, set and achieve positive goals, feel and show empathy for others, establish and maintain positive relationships, and make responsible decisions."  Eight states have partnered with CASEL to adopt these SEL Core Competencies.

·       Self-awareness

·       Self-management

·       Relationship skills

·       Responsible decision making

No sooner did I read this article when a blog I follow by Lee and Low Books advertised an upcoming webinar on—SEL. I tuned in to a very professional presentation with excellent graphics and book lists which highlighted the SEL themes in many of the published Lee and Low Books. Katie Potter is the Literacy Specialist who works for Lee and Low Books and after much research on her part, she developed six themes of SEL. The title of her webinar is: "Using Diverse Books to Support Social and Emotional Learning." I encourage you to also view the list of fine books Lee and Low publishes which match these themes listed on their website, Lee and Low Books

·       Empathy

·       Positive Relationships

·       Recognizing and Managing Emotions

·       Problem Solving

·       Grit and Perseverance

·       Perspective-Taking

Since  Tu Books, an imprint of Lee and Low Books, will be publishing my middle grade historical fiction novel, The Wind Called My Name, around the fall of 2018, I wanted to see how my novel fit the SEL themes. I'm proud to say I believe my book touches on all these themes. I believe most authors want their texts to matter to kids' hearts as well as their minds.

We do a good job of reaching the minds of our students when we ask recall questions, comprehension questions, and close reading questions. But students are more than their test scores. We need to work harder at making text matter to our students' hearts and to ask students to also pay attention to the emotions books awaken in them. One way to do this is to have student speak about how the text made them feel and share their thoughts, because each reader will come away with a different experience.

Hopefully, our students are given many opportunities to answer the question posed by Kylene Beers and Robert E. Probst in their book, Disrupting Thinking: Why How We Read Matters. The question is:  How has this text changed me? We want our students' thinking to be disrupted by what they read and we want to see changes in our students.

These changes can lead to a better understanding of other people and themselves. The authors list some questions in their book, Disrupting Thinking, that  we can ask our students to help them learn that reading should touch their hearts as well as their minds:

The authors, Beers and Probst offer a framework to help students "attend to the textual, intellectual, and emotional aspects of their reading." They call the framework BHH Reading (Book, Head, Heart). You can learn more about their vision for teaching reading on a podcast from their publisher, Scholastic.

                      

February is I LOVE TO READ MONTH. Let's make a concerted effort this month to not only help students respond to their reading with their HEADS, but also with their HEARTS. 

Here are recent middle grade historical fiction books that touched my heart. What are some books that have touched your heart?

Goodreads image

Goodreads image

Goodreads image

History of the Horse in Western America

Horses, and their cousin the mule, played a major role in my frontier, historical trilogy, The Iron Horse Chronicles. Will Braddock, the young protagonist, rides a Morgan horse. Will’s sidekick, Homer Garcon, owns a mule named Ruby. Lone Eagle, Will’s Cheyenne friend, rides Indian ponies. Will’s army friend, Lieutenant Luey Moretti, rides typical cavalry horses. 

When doing research for my books, set at the time of the building of the first transcontinental railroad in the late 1860s, I wanted to ensure I wrote factually about the animals. Henderson Libraries, in Henderson, Nevada, where I live, has numerous books that provided the answers to my questions. I found studying the history of the horse in the development of the American West allowed me to better understand what my fictional characters faced during their involvement with “Manifest Destiny.”

The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Horse Breeds by Susan McBane, although not written specifically for middle-grade students, provides “a comprehensive visual directory of the officially recognized world horse breeds.” The book is coffee-table size, but will be easily understood by younger readers.  Fossils of Eohippus, the earliest ancestor of the horse, have been found in the Wind River basin in Wyoming. That, coincidentally, is the setting for much of Bear Claws, the second book in my trilogy. Eohippus existed about fifty million years ago, and it and later ancestors had died out and disappeared entirely from the North American continent long before the first Native Americans are believed to have immigrated from Asia across the Bering Straits. The horse, as we know it today, did not appear in the Western Hemisphere until the Spanish arrived to exploit the “new world” following Columbus’s “discovery” of America.

A excellent book covering all aspects of horses that is specifically written for middle-grade students is Horse Crazy by Jessie Haas. The book is divided into four parts, with the first part being “In the Know: Essential Equine Education for the Truly Obsessed.” This part includes a good chapter on prehistoric horses, pointing out that Eohippus stood only fourteen inches high, the size of a fox. The book discusses the development of the current-day horse for use by cavalry. The author informs us that the American Indians created their pony from horses abandoned by or stolen from the Spanish Conquistadors. This volume also includes recommendations for several historical novels featuring horses.

Another fine book for middle-grade students is Pocket Genius: Horses compiled by DK Editors. This book is described as a pocket-size encyclopedia featuring more than 125 individual breeds of horses, ponies, and their cousins — zebras, mules, and donkeys. The anatomy and behavior of each of the breeds is concisely presented, along with information on coloring and markings. This compact volume provides an excellent introduction to the equine world for younger readers.

Since I was particularly interested in the Morgan horse, I was pleased to discover Sarah Maass’s small volume entitled The Morgan Horse. It is one of fifteen Edge Books devoted to horses, each book pertaining to a single breed. The Morgan is one of the horse world’s newer breeds. About 1791 the first of this famous breed appeared in Vermont. Although rather small in size, the Morgan soon developed a reputation for its strength. During the Civil War and the long-running battles with the Indians on the western plains, the Morgan was favored by the U.S. Cavalry. That was a primary reason for me selecting this breed to be the horse ridden by Will Braddock in The Iron Horse Chronicles.

There are dozens more interesting books about the history of horses that will appeal to middle-grade readers. I present here some that were helpful to me during my writing.

Edge of the Seat and the Ever After by Eden Unger Bowditch

The history of children’s literature is something of a jumble. John Locke claimed that children should learn by playful and fun reading material. John Newberry was one of the first to produce works for specifically for children. And so it began…though sensibilities have certainly changed. Or perhaps…changed back?

There are myriad familiar (and less familiar) stories that have been passed down through the ages from storytellers to children, who then grow up to be storytellers themselves. There are familiar versions (edited from perhaps somewhat disturbing earlier versions) of fables and fairytales that we know from Disney films and from other gently (or severely) altered publications from the 1930s through the 1950s. Traditional versions of stories, like “The Little Mermaid”, are very different than their Disney reinventions. Disney does not have the ill-fated mermaid as losing the love of the prince and falling overboard to die and become at one with the sea foam. Along with other forms of censor, Grimms’ Fairytales and Hans Christian Anderson stories were re-envisioned to provide ‘happily ever after’ endings and offer clear divisions between good and evil. Stories, in which the protagonist may have behaved badly, perhaps chopping off a head or two, would still present the ambiguously good hero as righteous. And then, fearful of the delicate sensibilities of the young, grown-ups began to change these beloved old tales to fit into nice packaging and send the reader to a happy place. Even John Newberry, namesake of the Newberry Award, seemed to be called into question since he wrote, in the letter from “Jack the Giant-killer” that “Little Master Tommy” would be “whipt” if found to be lacking in appropriate skills and demeanor. Goodness! We could not let our children know that there was any such thing! The little mermaid got the guy and no child would ever have to hear about chopped off noses or cloven boys who were raised by witches. It was believed, for those interim years, that scary stories had to be abolished. From the people who brought the fig leaf to Michaelangelo’s nudes, we got clean and happy, all day, every day.

 

But then, psychology gave us a surprise. Children LIKE scary and WANT to hear stories of danger and yuck. Children who learn to navigate the treacherous fantasy and can better cope with the real. And why stick to the straight and narrow? These stories were handed down and altered over the centuries. Why not take it further? We now have stories like The Three Little Wolves and the Big Bad Pig by Eugene Trivizas and Wicked by Gregory Maguire, both revisiting the ideas we have always held about good and evil and who is right or wrong. We now understand that it is a fine thing for kids to read Italo Calvino’s Italian Folktales or tales of the Grimms closer to the originals, which can often be fairly disturbing.

Middle Grade books still straddle ideas about adolescence and issues that are considered to be challenging to childhood innocence. But, perhaps, we know how smart and capable young people are. We know that every story isn’t tied up with a bow. We have learned that being on the edge of your seat is sometimes an important place to be when reading a book. There are such fine authors here at PMGM and I, personally, have been on the edge of my seat more than once as I perused the pages of their novels. And it is, indeed, a fine place to be.

-Eden Unger Bowditch