FARTing in School
I got the most delightful email from a teacher in Australia ...
320 Sycamore Studios believes that reading with kids can change the world for the better. Each month (except for August), we publish one original story and one post on books and reading. Everything is written by a human.
A few years ago, after I'd read a bunch of books and articles about the benefits of reading with kids, I wrote up a breezy white paper detailing the benefits.
Those benefits are pretty amazing. They include things like …
developing academic and interpersonal skills
deepening family and classroom bonds
helping kids individuate and develop empathy, and (I feel duty-bound to mention)
improving standardized test scores.
So, yes. Reading with kids is great.
It's great for young kids.
“Reading regularly with young children," a 2014 American Academy of Pediatrics policy paper says, "stimulates optimal patterns of brain development, and strengthens parent-child relationships at a critical time in child development, which, in turn, builds language, literacy, and social-emotional skills that last a lifetime.”
It's great for older kids.
The writer Ted Gioia sent his two sons to Harvard. His secret? “Above all, I read to my children. I did it every night without fail, except when I had to travel. This is the single most important thing I did for their intellectual development. I enjoyed reading these stories, and they enjoyed hearing them — and everyone in the family came to accept the idea that books were fun.”
Near the end of my paper, I suggested a way of making the reading ritual stick.
"If your kids are reluctant, give the family read-aloud time a name.
Call it Families All Reading Together.
They'll love the acronym."
Part of me will always be 8 years old.
An email from Sandy in Perth
All of that is to say that I got the most amazing email a few weeks ago from Sandy, an English as an Additional Language or Dialect (EAL/D) teacher in Perth, Australia.
"We last spoke about the FART acronym that you introduced and you said to write back to you about how it is received in the classroom.
I can say I now proudly display it as a 'subject' on our whiteboard timetable. I attached a photo :) The kids love it."
Her message made me unspeakably happy.
I thanked her and asked if she'd mind sharing a few details. She replied:
"I turned [the "families all reading together idea"] into a whole culture building strategy of teaching the students that we are a FAMILY and family cares for one another. I'm also their 'school mum' so the concept of reading stories to my 'children' just connects so seamlessly. ...
Glorious.
Thank you, Sandy!
Random Recs
Each month I like to share a book or two for young readers that I recently enjoyed. There's no criteria for selection other than: "I liked this; you and your kiddo might, too."
Books are empathy machines.
So says Neil Gaiman, Chris Riddell, Richard Powers, and who knows how many other writers and artists.
As Powers puts it, books are “capable of opening the locked box, if only briefly, to be someone other than ourselves.” (Aside: I reread his novel “Bewilderment” earlier this year and it just cracked my heart open.)
Anyway, I was thinking about empathy recently after reading two middle-grade books, "Inside Out and Back Again," by Thanha Lai, and "When Stars are Scattered," by Victoria Jamieson and Omar Mohamed.
The people I got to be — if only briefly — were refugees. First a girl from Vietnam, and then a boy from Somalia.
Lai's Newbery-winner tells the story of Hà, who is forced to flee Vietnam with her family as Saigon falls. The family settles in Alabama, where Hà has to quickly adjust to new foods, new words, and a new school.
Jamieson's and Mohamed's book (a National Book Award finalist) tells of Omar and his younger brother growing up parentless in Kenya's Dadaab refugee camp after war forced them from their home in Somalia.
Despite their grim contexts, both stories are full of adolescent joys, humor, frustrations and triumphs. Both land in hopeful places. And both will fill you up with empathy.
Yay, books! Yay, humanity!
Reads for Readers
“The Coziest Place on the Moon”
From Maria Popova (creator of “The Marginalian”:
"Somehow it all felt like a children’s book that didn’t yet exist. So I wrote it, having always believed that every good children’s book is a work of philosophy in disguise, a field guide to the mystery we are a part of and the mystery we are ... "
“The Librarians”
Oscar-nominee Kim Snyder's documentary about book censorship comes out Oct. 3 in the U.S. Here's Zachary Lee's take (via the Roger Ebert site):
"What Snyder does so effectively is affirming the dignity of this vocation by showing how the work of librarians goes beyond just saving books; libraries foster better education and community, and the more this country enacts violence toward these spaces, the more spaces for people to be themselves are in decline. It’s a startling and heartbreaking picture of what we may lose."
“The Glorious Future of the Book”
From Ted Gioia:
I have my own home data center. And it requires no water or electricity or any other scarce resource. It’s as renewable as they come.
And that’s just for a start. There are many other advantages.
“How do you get kids to pick up books on their own?”
From Sarah Miller, at Can we read?
My answer is pretty simple: I offer my children lots of new books.
Now, I don’t mean “new” as in brand new, not used, from a new bookstore — I merely mean new-to-them.
There are a couple ways to do this, which I’m going to break down into sections of questions to help you think about not only the books you’re offering your kiddos but how and when — two components of driving this kind of behavior that I believe are even more important than the titles you choose.
Two charming newsletters from bookshop owners
Notes from a Smalltown Bookshop is about the people and moments at a bookstore on the southeast coast of Australia. Here's a taste:
In the bookshop, I’m making coffees for my husband and myself, when between the floral arrangements lined up on the counter, a lovely, kindly face appears. She says, with an accent that speaks of faraway lands, “Are you Jo?” and when I confirm that I am me, she hands me an envelope, already written out to Jo The Smalltown Bookseller. Turns out she is Maureen, a truly delightful reader of this particular Substack, all the way from — and I still haven’t wrapped my head around this — Vancouver, Canada! What an extraordinary thing to happen in our little Port Fairy today! It seems almost like a miracle.
Escape to the Bookshop follows the adventures of Sarah Bringhurst Familia — an American living in Amsterdam who's opening a bookstore in a small Italian town. As one does. From a recent post:
For all the time I’ve been trekking back and forth across the Atlantic Ocean (going on twenty years now), Americans have been moving to Europe for all the usual reasons: work, love, and adventure.
If I were to put myself in one of those boxes, it would have to be that nebulous catchall, adventure, since the Bookish Husband and I moved here together, and it wasn’t for a job. But really, we’re more like economic migrants. We were barely making it as thirty-somethings with two kids in the United States. Now somehow we own a little flat in Amsterdam AND a Medieval stone house in Italy with a cellar I’m turning into a little bookshop. It’s a European Dream come true.
That’s all for now. Until next time …
Happy FARTing,
— Jeff
PS. If you’re looking for an outlet for empathy, Thanhhà Lai started a nonprofit called Viet Kids Inc. to provide bicycles for Vietnamese schoolchildren and Omar Mohamed founded Refugee Strong to support students in refugee camps.
People can be so wonderful.
Did you know that we've published 20+ stories so far, and that you can read them all for free? Just visit our bookshelf page for the links. If you like physical books (and who doesn't!), 12 of our titles are available for sale on Amazon.