Kids Need Books

While following activity on Book Twitter this spring, I saw the hashtag #KidsNeedBooks appearing more and more frequently. This movement, in a nutshell, came from a number of authors and educators trying to get books in the hands of kids to give them something to read during summer break.

When I was in elementary school, summer reading was one of the greatest things about the break. The local library had a program that tracked your reading throughout those months, with little prizes along the way and a party of sorts at the end. Even so many years later, I can clearly remember walking through that overpoweringly air-conditioned building and exploring the shelves each week, and the anticipation that would build with each title I would add to my growing “To Be Read” pile.

Unfortunately, this isn’t an experience widely shared by many of my own students. Too many of them don’t see summer break as a chance to dive into reading and fill their heads with new adventures, but instead a time that brings a lot of instability and insecurity into their daily lives. Wouldn’t it be great if all kids, from the ones who frequent the bookstores or libraries to the ones taking their summer break one day at a time, had at least one book they could escape into for part of their day?

As the last day of school gets closer for my students and me, I’m taking gradual steps to close down my classroom. In doing so I’m reminded how my classroom library is so much more extensive than what I have displayed on the limited space I have available for my bookshelves. I keep most of the library boxed up during much of the year, rotating the titles with each academic term to keep them fresh and keep the kids interested. As I see these boxes and boxes stuffed full with books — novels, nonfiction, picture books, graphic novels, hardcovers, paperbacks, even a few galleys, you name it — it occurs to me a lot of the books I’ve collected over the years aren’t living up to their potential being packed away.

I think I’m going to do something about that this year. In the spirit of the #KidsNeedBooks movement, which I would encourage everyone to learn about, I’m going to sort through the pile before packing them away for the year and make them available for my students. Book ownership really comes to pass when you read a book, but it’s a powerful thing at that age to be able to hold a book you love in your hands and know that copy is yours, and that you can re-read it as many times as you want.

One book can change how a kid might think about the world. The summer gives them plenty of time to do that thinking. Anyone interested in learning more about this movement should look up the hashtag, and see what kinds of exciting things have happened after a few people following through on a simple idea.

#KidsNeedBooks

Summer Reading

The title words posted at the top of this post probably bring to mind a very specific mental image, one most people kind of enjoy. You know, a bathing suit clad you or me – or, well, a fictitious mental avatar that has my face, but one instead mounted atop an oddly mismatched Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson body rather than the truer-to-life Cheers! bar regular-style physique I rock day-to-day – lounging on a beach or beside a pool, with a toe in the water and a well-worn paperback in my, or your, shiny, SPF-70 coated mitts.

I mean, who doesn’t love that kind of summer reading?

Yeah, well. Kids, apparently.

Not all kids, mind you. I’m sure the world is full of youngsters voraciously consuming pulp adventure, or heck, maybe even a few gothic classics, in the sweet glut of responsibility-free hours that pile up during the days from June to August and comprise their break between grades. It just seems like those kids are getting harder and harder to come by. Nowadays, see, with dedicated year-round sports and 24/7 internet access and video games and Netflix and Youtube and, well, a culture that spits forth entertainment content for all ages like a time-consuming tsunami, it’s almost like kids have to try to be bored anymore.

And, I don’t know about you, but boredom was what usually sparked my interest in hunting down books when I was younger.

Sure, I want to go all Real Housewives of the Library of Congress and be all, “Back in my day, you picked up The Chronicles of Prydain in the middle of July, when the sun was too bright, and the mercury just had to be triple digits and the air was almost solid with humidity, and you devoured that book with relish while draped across a cool tile floor. And when it was done, you then went looking for the next one without so much as missing a beat.” The fact is, though, I also spent a good portion of the summer between 5th and 6th grade watching old Batman reruns I could barely make out of snowy UHF static. So there’s precious little doubt that if 10 year-old me had had the entirety of Netflix and Hulu and YouTube at his fingertips, he never would have learned the name Lloyd Alexander, or Tanis Half-Elven, or a million other names that ultimately became part of who I grew up to be.

Are you stuck in my boat? If you know or parent MG-aged kids, do they just happily read of their own accord during summer break, or do you have take away everything with a glowing screen and threaten them with month long, electricity-free paleo-summer camp to cajole them into cracking the spine of a book between during their long break between grades? Do you join book programs from the bookstore and library? Resort to bribery, perhaps? Have you found yourself promising the kids an extra Pokémon Go walk through the neighbor for every chapter the read? Or do you go straight to the Benjamins* to encourage kids to do more be reading and hopefully less vegetating while they wait for the dread Back to School sales?

What tricks do you have up your sleeves to help keep your maybe less than literary kids MIddle Grade Minded during the long hot summer?

Pud’n

---

*That is, cash money