I went to the public library this afternoon to check out some books on the subject of Thanksgiving for my kids at school. I decided today that kids these days know little to nothing about Thanksgiving! I decided to get a head start on supplementing their education about this wonderful season and holiday.
I am a reading interventionist, and I get 45 minutes with 8 groups of 3-6 Kindergartner's, First, Second, and Third graders a day. My job is to focus on sharpening reading skills that are lacking to help increase their fluency. I spend about 10 minutes at the beginning of each session reading aloud to my students. Research shows(and I whole-heartedly agree without having to be told by data) that students who listen to fluent readers, who are consistently and frequently read to, tend to become better, more avid, and more fluent readers themselves. I asked each student in each of my 8 groups if anyone read to them at home, be it grandparent, parent, or babysitter. Do you know that not one of my students gets read to aloud outside of the school setting? Which is probably a major factor in their low reading scores. Which is why I decided to spend 1/4 of my time that I have with them reading aloud. Anyway, that was a side note.
So, I went to the public library this afternoon to get some books on Thanksgiving because I decided that my kids know too little about it, and it would be a great subject to incorporate into our daily reading times. Just to make things easier on myself(this was after car line duty and faculty meeting and other sundry errands) I decided to ask the friendly, helpful librarian sitting at the children's desk if there were any Thanksgiving books available. Actually, what I think I asked was if the Thanksgiving books were all in one place or if they were spread around the children's section. She said that she didn't think there were many Thanksgiving books left, and proceeded to click away on her little computer to try to locate some for me. To my dismay and disappointment, she came up with only 2 titles. I thanked her(even though she really didn't have to look them up for me, I could have done it just fine by myself) and went to find the two titles that she mentioned. They were very boring books indeed, and I was not satisfied with them at all. I thought, you've got to be kidding me! Was she really telling me that on the 3rd of November all of the Thanksgiving books are checked out? Well, I always knew in the back of my heart that my second calling is to be a librarian. So what did I do? I went to the online catalog at the computer banks in the other section of the library to do some investigating. I then went back to the children's sections, found my books, checked out, and walked out of that library with 14 books about Thanksgiving. HA. Don't tell me there are no more books left about Thanksgiving! I found books about Thanksgiving feasts, leaves, Autumn, applesauce, Pilgrims, Indians, bats, and the Mayflower. I mean really, doesn't that librarian know that there is more to Thanksgiving than the actual day? Or the actual word? Only 5 of my books have the word Thanksgiving in the title, but I guarantee you that they are all about the subject and season of Thanksgiving. Maybe some adults don't know as much as they need to about Thanksgiving either....
You can bet that experience just made my day. If there weren't any Thanksgiving books left before I got there, you can bet your bottom dollar there sure weren't any left when I checked out! Just kidding, I actually left several that I found for other patrons. Then, I trounced past the librarian at the children's desk on my way out with my stack of books. I have to admit that I did feel the naughty need to show off a little bit. I smiled politely, said thank you, and walked out the door.
Mission accomplished.
*The picture at the top, by the way, is the view of the Fall arrangement on my mother's front porch back home. I mentioned in one of my earlier posts that she has artificial ferns growing in the hanging wicker baskets on her front porch. This picture is to give her more credit. When it comes to her favorite time of the year, she can actually put together a charming display that warms your heart. And, not everything is artificial. The pumpkins are in fact real, live pumpkins. So I suppose that there are two Thanksgiving Triumphs in this entry, mine at the library, and my mother's on her front porch. If she reads this, I want her to know how much I love coming home during this time of year because of all the special, priceless memories she has made for our family over the course of my lifetime.
No comments:
Post a Comment