Deborah's reflections

My journey to becoming a K-6 TL.

ETL402. Module 6.2: Teaching literature: theories

on January 1, 2021

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Reflect on your own and your professional colleagues’ knowledge of literature. Identify an occasion when you successfully connected a book with a child or group of students and how your knowledge of the book facilitated this process. Identify possible opportunities for a teacher-librarian to respond to this research within the library and beyond to support teacher colleagues.

ETL501 The Dynamic Information Environment was the subject I studied last semester and this is when I realised I didn’t know my collection as well as I thought I did. Picture books are easy because they are quick reads that can be read while accessioning them or pulling them out of the box. Longer texts or digital texts are harder to know as they require more time on my part to become familiar with more than just the blurb. My own children were the source of novel and series books as they often read what was popular at the time.

Over these holidays I am endeavoring to read at least the first couple of chapters of some of the titles in the library.

Lenny’s Book of Everything by Karen Foxlee

His Name was Walter by Emily Rodda

Withering by Sea by Judith Rossell

The Land of Stories: The wishing spell (Book 1) by Chris Colfer

All of these books I have recommended successfully to students, however, I know little about the storylines. A recent book fair allowed me the time to engage with students in what they would like added to our collection. I began a list of the books from the fair they really wanted in the library and this was the list I used to purchase my commission. 2021 I have two goals:

  1. Purchase diverse books to reflect our school population
  2. Purchase student requests.

Books purchased earlier in the year to support the Multilit program were from a list supplied from the company. We had few of the books on the shelves but I recognised over half of the list as adult titles. This seemed odd for a program aimed at promoting reading for struggling primary aged readers. Unfortunately, the teacher ignored the alternative list I produced and went ahead and purchased the books… they ended up on the teacher book swap shelf in the staffroom!

TL promotion opportunities

  1. Staff meeting – sharing of new titles to the library.
  2. Teach staff how to search the LMS to identify titles.
  3. Suggest titles to match upcoming classroom themes.
  4. Promote and share articles that suggest daily free-choice reading will influence their English results.
  5. Promote more titles during library lessons. Students would be willing to help out.
  6. “Golden Lines” display (Fisher and Frey, 2018, p. 92) of standout sentences from student reading.
  7. Use more socio-cultural strategies in library lessons.

 

Chapter 1: Theories of teaching literature (pp. 6-9)

Beach, R., Appleman, D., Hynds, S., & Wilhelm, J. (2011). Teaching literature to adolescents. Taylor and Francis.

Fisher, D. & Frey, N. (2018). Raise reading volume through access, choice, discussion, and book talksReading Teacher, 72(1), 89-97. https://doi.org/10.1002/trtr.1691


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