In addition to the reading we will do for fun and  as a much needed escape, I offer 5 inspirational books for teachers that can help assist in your efforts to thoughtfully reset, revitalize, and relax through reading. I am a member of Future Ready Librarians on Facebook and recently asked the group what books they have in the hopper to inspire them over summer break. These are the top books mentioned.

The Book Whisperer: Awakening the Inner Reader in Every Child

by Donalyn Miller

This book is a celebration of children’s freedom to read and a fantastic read for teachers and librarians that feel the standardization of reading and the dreaded state assessments fly in the face of a child’s development as lifelong readers. Anyone that has ever felt that packaged reading programs totally remove the joy of reading from students and teachers will appreciate The Book Whisperer. The only way for a child to truly become a reader is by engaging in books intellectually and emotionally and Donalyn Miller will inspire you to influence your students to do just that.

Disrupting Thinking: Why How We Read Matters

by Kylene Beers and Robert E. Probst

Authors Beers and Probst in their past books have shown teachers how to develop students’ close reading skills, but this book, like Miller’s, focuses on the on going problem of students’ lack of engagement in their reading. This book reads like a vision of what reading could be through four strategies for classroom teachers to consider when approaching the teaching of reading. The title is perfect because thinking in this country regarding curriculum and standards—and how they are used or misused needs disruption. This book provides hope and insight into teaching reading with one’s heart and reflecting on how a book can change us. This book, written in a conversational tone, posits that we need to teach reading for a better tomorrow rather than as a strategy to garner higher test scores and improve data.

Teach Like a Pirate: Increase Student Engagement, Boost Your Creativity, and Transform Your Life as an Educator

by Dave Burgess

Dave Burgess is an award-winning social studies teacher from San Diego, California and is widely known for his high-energy, creative style. In Teach Like a Pirate, Burgess offers practical and innovative ideas to advance teacher creativity and  increase student engagement through 30 captivating hooks and 170 brainstorming questions that work on classroom culture and building relationships. In my estimation, positive relationships are the first step in building engaged learners and something that is often forgotten, or put on the back burner in the almighty quest to assess. In today’s educational climate of canned and tired curricula, we can all benefit from some form of transformation as teachers, and Burgess’s energy comes through loud and clear and gives me hope that that energy is contagious and can lead to some pirate-inspired treasure hunting for a chest full of inspiration.

Shake up Learning: Practical Ideas to Move Learning From Static to Dynamic

by Kasey Bell

If you are familiar with other books written by Kasey Bell, you might think that this one follows the same ideas she is known for; the ways that we can use technology to spark learning and engage students. It is not that. According to many readers of Bell’s book, it is a page turner and one that could not easily be put down. In it, she describes that “technology is not the solution, but an opportunity to improve learning.” So many teachers have from time to time (myself included) searched for that magic elixir to transform learning and have viewed technology as the panacea for this purpose. Bell highlights specific changes that we teachers need to embrace to set in motion the paradigm shifts that really matter for ourselves as teachers and most importantly for our students.

Reading in the wild: The Book Whisperer’s Keys to Cultivating Lifelong Reading Habits

by Donalyn Miller

Here we have come full circle from choice 1 to choice 5 with Donalyn Miller’s Reading in the Wild. It is a continuation of the conversation she began in The Book Whisperer and although some have touted it as a reworking of her first book, I must disagree. I see it more as a confirmation that all the frills and furbelows that many so-called “experts” proclaim about how to teach reading are just that. Using survey responses from adult readers and students alike, this book offers five key reading habits for building lifelong readers. It is a departure from the tired “one size fits all” approach and gets into the real ways to create inspired and thoughtful readers that read for the sake of reading. Miller’s style and approach is truly inspiring and demystifies the hows and whys of reading instruction: How it really should be done and why the way we are doing it is not working.

So here we are, at the end of my picks for summer reading for teachers to inspire and motivate them. True, the 10 months that lead up to summer vacation are draining on many levels, but I think we can all agree that the drain is absolutely worth it because it is something we love to do.

This list is just a sampling of the many books out there to inspire teachers, and general reading to recharge one’s batteries is vitally necessary. So read what helps you to reset. Read what helps you to revitalize. Read what helps you to relax. But by all means, read. Happy Summer and here’s to an inspiring break!

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Give me a fountain pen.  And not one of those lousy ballpoints.

– Helen Lawson, Valley of the Dolls

I was first informed of my aptitude for cursive at Boy Scouts in the 3rd grade. I was not a model scout. I never won the Pinewood Derby, could not care less about the sport aspect and absolutely hated being out in nature. But, I’ll never forget the rainy day working on a cheesy writing prompt when Doug Patton and all the other scouts oohed and aahed over my cursive script. They chose me to be the recorder. This was the first time I ever felt truly ‘good’ at something. I’m sad to say there was not a cursive writing badge.

Aside from being skilled at writing in script, I truly believe in cursive. It deserves attention as something necessary and worthwhile by students and teachers. Consider these reasons for building time for cursive into (what I know to be already busy) schedules:

• Primary Sources and Historical Documents: The cursive words themselves have always been like a poem to me, in that they convey more than the concepts they symbolically represent. Yes, reading this script can be tedious, but writing it, I would imagine, was a rather laborious process in itself. Let us place ourselves in the shoes of the framers of our country and attempt to feel what they felt through careful and close reading of documents in their original form.

• Occupational Benefits: Some kids fail to develop good handwriting abilities due to joint hypermobility (low muscle tone) and poor fine motor coordination and hand strength.  Racheal Ojo, MS, OTR/L is a colleague with whom I collaborate regularly. “The skills that cursive handwriting further develops are visual-motor, eye-hand coordination, and fine motor skills.” In her clinical opinion, cursive writing will benefit students with spatial difficulties build fine-motor skills, upper extremity strength, and place less of a demand on the mechanics of writing, due to the rhythmic-fluid strokes. Ms. Ojo feels that cursive writing incorporates these developmental skills and allows students to integrate these skills from parts into a single unit.

• Increased Processing:  In their article The Pen is Mightier Than the Keyboard:  Advantages of Longhand over Laptop Note Taking, Pam A. Mueller and Daniel M. Oppenheimer showed that students that take longhand notes and were able to study them performed significantly better on factual recall and conceptual application questions relative to students that take their notes on a laptop. Encoding information using longhand, it was found, aids in synthesizing and summarizing content.

Knowing the demands that my colleagues face while still wanting to speak to the benefits of cursive writing for the students, I decided to create an after-school club devoted to the beauty and appreciation of cursive.  Introducing (drumroll, please) Scripted: A Cursive Writing Club!

Scripted was a 10 week program that met on Friday afternoons in the library from 2:30 to 4:30 pm. There were 15 members in the club ranging from 3rd to 5th grade. The split was about 50% boys and girls. There really was no budget for this club. We used paper, pencils, pens, and plastic sleeves regularly, all of which we have stocked in the library.

The curriculum I used is called Handwriting Program for Cursive. It was written by Phyllis Bertin and Eileen Pearlman and distributed by Educational Publishing Service. I actually found a PDF of this 10 page curriculum on line, and I have to say it is fantastic. It highlights four basic principles for teaching cursive:

• Handwriting is taught and practiced under the direct supervision of the teacher
• The instructional sequence for teaching handwriting is to trace, copy, and write from memory
• Motor patterns are always introduced through the large muscles of the arm and shoulder
• Language is used to teach and reinforce handwriting

Letters are classified into 10 groups based on motor patterns. Four for lowercase and 6 uppercase groups. The groups have names like “clock climbers” (a, d, g, q, and c) and “tall kite strings” (G and S). Verbalized instructions for drawing each letter are provided and provide something of a “chant” for how to move one’s hand to produce the letter. These verbal instructions were eventually memorized and were a lovely scaffold for the kids. To add a digital aspect to the curriculum, I curated a playlist on my YouTube channel of videos that support independent cursive study.

Since I envisioned Scripted as a social club, each session began with snacks and socializing for about 20 minutes. I allowed cell phones for this time to check in with parents, and to add to our school library’s Snapchat account or share music and videos with one another.  Kids brought their own healthy snacks. Then we moved into hand/muscle exercises and stretching. I worked with Ms. Ojo in designing these activities to speak to the occupational aspects of cursive. The activities were snapping, finger push-ups, wrist rolls, paper tearing, clay manipulation and building with Legos.

The next phase of the session was the direct-teach of stroke formation and the chant to accompany the letter. This was done using an ELMO digital camera to provide a “bird’s eye view” projected onto the Promethean Panel. Students then were called to “share the pen,” to get a feel for the stroke before giving it a go on their own. Afterward, students returned to their tables for desk work of tracing the letters using a plastic page protector and dry-erase pen.  Students got to share their best work if they wanted using the projector.

The final 20 min after cleanup was devoted to poetry reading by me or the students and sometimes both. As stated above, I see parallels between cursive writing and poetry. I feel that they pair together nicely. Where poetry is beauty in language, cursive is beauty in writing.

The culminating event for Scripted was a gallery showing of favorite poems we read throughout the cycle copied in cursive on recycled paper. We used clips of construction paper we tore exercising our fingers to make mosaic tear-art creations to accompany the poems. We were going for a updated nod to the needlework sampler.

I am so completely blown away by the progress of these kids. The growth I saw in them not only as cursive writers but as human beings was inspiring and motivates me to continue this year after year. The success is humbling to me, actually. Students that some had given up on rose to the occasion and proved something to me but most importantly to themselves: That they were good at something. It is a feeling I have never forgotten, and I like to think that I provided something they will also never forget.

I suppose this is all coming full circle. When I began this club, I had no idea I was hot on the heels of the New York City Department of Education. Will Mantell, NYCDOE spokesperson says, “[the NYCDOE] is focused on providing schools with the best instructional resources, and we’ve already released two resources this year for schools to teach cursive and print handwriting.” Teaching Cursive Writing and Teaching Manuscript Writing handbooks were produced for the 2016-17 school year as a tool for schools. These resources present best practices and strategies in writing instruction.

At this time, the NYCDOE is working with superintendents and school leaders on how to incorporate cursive and manuscript instruction. Although cursive instruction is not mandated, the release of these resources lets me know that I am not alone. It lets me know that Chancellor Fariña, the office of Curriculum and Instruction and I are on the same page. This gives me hope for the continuance and appreciation for cursive writing in our schools in this time of pending digital takeover.

The thought of tomorrow fills me with a mix of exhilaration and bewilderment. Exhilarated at the prospects of what it brings and bewildered by the rate at which our lives will undoubtedly change over many tomorrows. In this epoch of digital flashes, I fear we are losing sight of the analog mainstays that have stood the test of time.

There are many parts of myself that are new school, but so many more that are old school and I would not want it any other way. There is a lyric in On & On, where Erykah says that the man that knows something knows that he knows nothing at all. This old soul is holding fast to the knowledge that what I know today will be changed by tomorrow, but that is not going to change my psyche or my DNA and that is where my penchant for cursive and all those other analog cells reside. The same is true for my students and your students. We owe them the analog parts of ourselves so they can fully appreciate and diffuse them into an increasingly digital world.

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