Product Description

Are children reading enough? Not according to most parents and teachers, who know that reading aloud with children fosters a lifelong love of books, ensures better standardized test scores, promotes greater success in school, and helps instill the values we most want to pass on. Esm?? Raji Codell--an inspiring children's literature specialist and an energetic teacher--has the solution. She's turned her years of experience with children, parents, librarians, and fellow educators into a great big indispensable volume designed to help parents get their kids excited about reading. Here are hundreds of easy and inventive ideas, innovative projects, creative activities, and inspiring suggestions that have been shared, tried, and proven with children from birth through eighth grade. This five-hundred-page volume is brimming with themes for superlative storytimes and book-based birthday parties, ideas for mad-scientist experiments and half-pint cooking adventures, stories for reluctant readers and book groups for boys, step-by-step instructions for book parades, book-related crafts, storytelling festivals, literature-based radio broadcasts, readers' theater, and more. There are book lists galore, with subject-driven reading recommendations for science, math, cooking, nature, adventure, music, weather, gardening, sports, mythology, poetry, history, biography, fiction, and fairy tales. Codell's creative thinking and infectious enthusiasm will empower even the busiest parents and children to include literature in their lives.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #4397 in Books
• Published on: 2003-05-09
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: 1.17" h x 7.10" w x 9.25" l, 1.73 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 480 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Codell (Educating Esme) has amassed an exuberant treasure trove for parents who want to help their children develop a love of reading. A strong believer in reading aloud, Codell gives an admiring nod to the work of Jim Trelease (The Read-Aloud Handbook), while presenting her own theory that interest (finding the right books for the child), integration (using reading as a springboard into other disciplines) and invention (when a child's unique ideas are inspired by the writing) can make the difference in how a youngster approaches reading. Codell, a teacher and librarian, resists grouping books by age level, explaining, "don't let somebody else's scoring system define your child, and don't let reading levels level your child's love of reading." Instead, she offers a simple method for determining whether a book is too difficult while pointing out that kids may listen on a much higher level than they read. The witty, comical "Madame Esme" (as she calls herself) offers scores of thematic book lists parents can use to inspire young readers, ranging from topics as diverse as medieval England to dinosaurs or hiccups. Covering a vast spectrum of subjects and authors, Codell casts a wide net as she builds a magical literary bridge between home and school. With appendixes of Caldecott and Newbery winners present and past, the book is akin to having one's own personal children's librarian at one's fingertips. Codell creates a contagious enthusiasm for the enormous value of children's literature, which will leave parents primed for their next trip to the library or bookstore.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About the Author
Esme Raji Codell is a teacher and children's literature specialist at an elementary school in Chicago. Her public radio feature based on this diary was awarded First Prize for National Education Reporting from the Education Writers Association. She is also the recipient of the Dr. Peggy Williams Award for outstanding new teacher in the field of reading and language arts, given by the Chicago chapter of the International Reading Association. Esme lives in Chicago with her husband and son.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
This book started with a potato. I was sitting at my kitchen table, staring at a dimpled, wrinkling, sprouting old potato. I thought to myself, if I had a potato, nothing but a potato, how could I teach a classroom full of children? Well, I could cut a potato in half. (I can use the paring knife from my own kitchen, right?) We could review fractions. With one half, I could cut a design and do potato prints. We could plant the eyes from the other half of the potato (it can have eyes, right?) and grow more potatoes, charting their growth. We could write a story about a potato, or write a book of potato recipes or potato poems. If we grew enough potatoes, we could make potato stamps of all the letters of the alphabet, and I could teach reading. I could go to the public library and find "The Potato with Big Ideas" from Little Old Mrs. Pepperpot by Alf Proysen or Brave Potatoes by Toby Speed. We could talk about the Irish potato famine of 1845, maybe read true accounts from Feed the Children First by Mary E. Lyons or Black Potatoes by Susan Campbell Bartoletti. We could write letters to the executives at Frito-Lay about their potato chips, or Playskool regarding their product, Mr. Potato Head. Perhaps I am a bit potato headed myself, wasting precious time plotting the pedagogy of potatoes, but it begs the question, how do we teach our children, using what is available to us? Moreover, is there anything available to us that is as plentiful and versatile as potatoes, ready to feed all appetites? Yes, there is. Children's literature is our national potato. Thousands of studies from the U.S. Department of Education as well as findings by independent researchers here and abroad consistently credit the utilization of children's literature for everything from school achievement to emotional development to increased life span and higher standards of living. So many of the dreams and goals we have for children, and that they have for themselves, can be advanced through the use of children's literature. So much of the blame exchanged between school, community, and family about education's failure can be converted into shared responsibility and success through children's literature. But the thing is, if you hand somebody a potato, or if you hand somebody a children's book, and he doesn't know how to make it cook . . . well, then. This book is a recipe book for children's literature: how to serve it up so it's delicious and varied. Children's literature makes for a main course or a sustaining side dish, so you can use these recipes no matter what is on the menu in your child's classroom. First, let's recognize the main ingredient: trade literature, which is the kind of books and reading material you can find readily available at bookstores and libraries. These books have clearly designated authors and illustrators, with characters that usually appear in print before they appear on a television screen. I was trained as a teacher but it was not through teach