Advancing Literacy Beyond the Classroom

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Emily Smith
Welcome to Advancing Literacy Beyond the Classroom. This podcast is for families and caregivers to support the literacy learning that goes on outside of school. We welcome all of you to join us to make learning fun and purposeful. We know that literacy learning is a life thing and not just a school thing. As family members and caregivers, we know your role is central to your kids literacy development.

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Emily Smith
You may have young children, kids, pre-teens, and or young adults. We have recommendations to support their literacy journey. Let's get started. I'm Emily Smith.

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Amanda Hartman
And I'm Amanda Hartman. We are staff developers at Advancing Literacy at Teachers College in New York City. We are a center within the Teacher Education and Community Partnerships Division, providing professional development for school districts in the New York City metro area, across the country and worldwide. This school year, we will be offering over 20 free workshops for families, caregivers, and educators.

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Amanda Hartman
You can find our events at future workshops on our social media pages @advancingliteracy and our website Advancingliteracy.tc.columbia.edu.

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Amanda Hartman
Okay, so Emily, let's start off by helping us unpack our title, All the Places for Meaningful and Joyful Writing in the World: Journals, Letters, Essays, and more. Why do you feel like this is such an important and critical topic today?

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Emily Smith
Thanks, Amanda. I think it's helpful. First, to start, I'm going to talk about this in two places or two ways. First, as a writer myself and I want to talk about one of my earliest memories of writing. This happened in my school library when I was in first grade. We had a book making station of sorts, and I can still picture the book that I made there.

00;02;00;24 - 00;02;21;12
Emily Smith
It was covered in some form of a floral wallpaper scrap, probably donated by the hardware store, and it was a fictional story told in pictures and words about planting a garden. I brought that story home and I read it to my mom. I expect that it was not written in a way that could be read by most people.

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Emily Smith
I was not yet writing conventionally in first grade, and she said, we can do this too. And we went to the plant store and bought some plants, and we planted some flowers around a tree in the front of our house. And this was a really powerful lesson for me. Largely, I think one of the big things about it that I took away was my writing could inspire action, that something could change.

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Emily Smith
And for me, at this time especially, it gave me some time with my very busy mother. This was meaningful and joyful to me. It had an impact on my life. So when I think about this title, all the places for meaningful and joyful writing in the world, I think about the messages that our kids get from very young ages, about what writing can be and what's possible.

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Emily Smith
And I feel like I'm so lucky that I had this experience that one of my first memories of writing is this, you know, beautiful experience. I think the flowers died quickly. So I'm not saying it wasn't like a massive garden or anything, but it taught me about the power of words, and it could give me some feeling of independence, connection and action.

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Amanda Hartman
What a beautiful thing that your mom was like. We could do this as well. Like literally the garden, but also the idea of creating some sort of book from it. I think that's a beautiful.

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Emily Smith
Yeah, I feel really lucky in.

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Amanda Hartman
That idea.

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Emily Smith
And there wasn't a lot of correction to the writing. It wasn't about, is this conventional or is it not conventional? It was about the meaning.

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Amanda Hartman
Yeah. This is something that exists in the world. We can do something like this book talks about, and we can make it and we can make it our own. Yeah, it's really cool.

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Emily Smith
Wonderful. And I also come at this not just as a person with my own writing history and experiences, but also as a parent. And I think when we talk about, again, this title, all the places, there are so many places in our lives that are opportunities for meaningful and joyful writing with our kids, no matter their age. So I want to think about that in terms of all the places you can put writing into your life, from lists to text messages or emails, signs, invitations, notes and letters, as well as larger projects like making books or any other bigger way of conveying information.

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Emily Smith
So they're just many options. And as we talk about supporting meaningful and joyful writing today, I think the big picture is important to keep in mind. So all the places. How about for you when you think about this title? What are some of the things that come up for you?

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Amanda Hartman
For me, I really want kids and families to understand the impact, that idea of impact that writing can have on us as individuals, particularly just thinking about how it could impact our emotions and our thoughts. I've just read Suleika Jaouad’s book, The Book of Alchemy, which is for adults, and there are over 100 prompts, along with essays for you to write to and to think about your internal life.

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Amanda Hartman
And so her whole premise of this book is to think about writing as a way to pause, as a way to have some introspection and a chance to really observe the world that's around us. So I love this for children as well, that they can see writing as a chance to pause, to think about their internal selves, and also to observe the world around them.

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Amanda Hartman
I think that can hold a lot of meaning for children. And then a couple of years ago, I don't know if you read the letter that the Obama family wrote to librarians, it was a letter of gratitude to librarians. And I just felt like, particularly as an educator, just how beautiful a gratitude letter is. And this one, particularly to librarians about the importance of libraries and books, really resonated with me.

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Amanda Hartman
What a beautiful way to show people that you see them, that you recognize them, you see their hard work. I just think that idea of being seen and recognized and showing gratitude really stuck with me. And I feel like families and children can think about where does that fit in their life experience and what that could mean, not just for them, but for the people who are in their lives.

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Emily Smith
I think that's just beautiful. I want to highlight something for me that just feels important to note is thinking about how we bring joy to ourselves. It was about that, like my writing brought joy to me. But I also think your example here is about how we write and bring joy to others. And it's just such an important thing that when we think about something being meaningful or joyful, of course we're thinking about that probably from the perspective of like, how do we make that happen for kids?

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Emily Smith
That our kids can also bring meaning and joy to others in the world? Yes, exactly. The communication that happens in writing.

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Amanda Hartman
Yeah, exactly. And then lastly, I was just thinking about this idea of meaningful, like what is meaningful or what is purposeful. How can writing be meaningful and purposeful for children? And we use writing to ask for things, to inquire, to demand things that we ourselves and our communities need. So how can we think about using writing as a civic responsibility, and the power that letters and or essays or op-eds can have on other people, community to community leaders, government leaders, other people who are in positions of power.

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Amanda Hartman
That letter writing can really be a source for voice and change. So I want children and families to think about how that also can be a generative source of meaningful writing.

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Emily Smith
Yeah. That's beautiful. And I think we're really trying to cast the net wide here in the sense of all the places and all the meaning and all the joy that we can use, that we can bring when we're thinking about using writing. Okay. So we typically move next to thinking a bit about research, and I know you've brought some ideas that you want to share with us in terms of researchers that you go to.

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Emily Smith
And I have some as well. So let's let's head there.

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Amanda Hartman
Great. Well, I was thinking about Gholdy Muhammad, Dr. Muhammad from the University of Illinois Chicago. Her scholarship has really focused not only on literacy and bringing more skill and intellectualism into the classroom and curriculum, but she argues about how the work with children and literacy should work to develop their self-knowledge, to develop knowledge about others and not shy away from criticality, social issues, and to make sure that learning is joyful.

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Amanda Hartman
So this book, Unearthing Joy, is her latest book, and I believe it was published in 2023. And she's really centering in this book that you want to have rigorous literacy education and make sure that it's joyful. And part of what she talks about as what's joyful is meaningful and purposeful. So this quote, I'll just read it. “When we unearth joy, we are bringing rich experiences into the classroom that children remember that they feel loved by and they feel invigorated by, and they feel a sensation throughout their body when they're learning.

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Amanda Hartman
That's joy. We feel the difference and we remember it. But most of all, we learn the goal is learning. The goal is not just fun or sensations. The goal is coming away elevated, higher, ascending. And that's what joy offers that ascension.”

That's gorgeous. And I think that sometimes, certainly in the classroom and even at home with our children or outside of school with kids in our care, we can sometimes forget that it's all about really the learning.

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Amanda Hartman
It's not necessarily that every sentence is punctuated accurately, although that is helpful and nice and wonderful to do, but that the motivation and what stays with us through joy really does put a mark on what learning is.

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Emily Smith
And those two things are not at odds. You can be, you could learn about conventions and punctuation in joyful ways. So we should just say a lot of people have had negative experiences with writing and feel like it's painful. It doesn't have to be.

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Amanda Hartman
Yeah, that's a very good point. That's right. And we should really be working towards that both inside and outside the classroom. Yeah. So her first book, Cultivating Genius, is also a really amazing book. And in this text, Doctor Muhammad talks about really the genesis of her work and scholarship around black literary societies in the 1800s. And she studied how people worked as a collective to both educate one another and to share and grow knowledge together as a collective with a pretty clear goal and mission for freedom and equality.

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Amanda Hartman
And so that purpose driven literacy work that they did as a collective really brought strong purpose and meaning to their lives and also to the community at large. And so what Doctor Muhammad is advocating here is that same kind of idea to find purpose and meaning in your work, and that it does not exclude things in our society that need critical attention to.

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Amanda Hartman
So whether that's writing for change or what it means to write in a democracy, to write for a purpose, to write for freedom, she is advocating for that both inside the classroom and I would say probably also outside the classroom, much like these literary societies did.

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Emily Smith
And really want us to always be thinking about writing as a tool that we can can employ. All of this is so big and powerful that, like human reason for writing, we've got one more piece from Adam Grant you wanted to talk about to.

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Amanda Hartman
This is his most recent book, Hidden Potential. And I think this quote from a motivation perspective, helping others enriches the meaning and purpose of our own lives, showing us that our contributions matter and energizing us to work harder, longer, and smarter. So when I think about the children in our care, it matters. Motivation matters. Having things that matter, tapping into the things that matter to them that they find purposeful.

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Amanda Hartman
Then when they are outside of school with us, they will lean a little bit more into their something like writing and spend a longer time on it, even if it feels a little bit hard. That's not the issue. The issue is, do I feel that I have a purpose behind a behind it? And so when he talks about this.

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Amanda Hartman
He also talks about gratitude and how important gratitude is, but also the concept of contribution. And that contribution is just as important as feeling gratitude. So this idea, that contribution, he says, fuels our soul. And so I think both Doctor Muhammad and Adam Grant are talking about the same things here, that when we have that purpose, it not only makes us feel better, but it puts something meaningful into the world.

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Emily Smith
Absolutely. So important. Thank you. I wanted to bring in another writer, Tom Newkirk, who's written extensively about writing pedagogy and his work on Writing Unbound. This is work about kids writing fiction, and I think it's interesting, he writes, and this is a sort of question that he asks, “Can schools create a space big enough and free enough so that writers can write the way they want to, or do filters inevitably get in the way?”

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Emily Smith
Filters like grades, rubrics, special requirements, limits, comparisons to other students that contaminate the space. And then he asks, can we enter the dizzying worlds that students create? We're often thinking when we're talking to families and caregivers about how they can take what schools are doing and what the application is at home, or how to support what's happening in schools.

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Emily Smith
And in this case, I think Newkirk is critiquing some of the limitations of schools. I think that offers a space for families and caregivers to be thinking about what's something that could be happening at home that isn't happening at school, because there are demands on curriculum and standards, and teachers have only so much time to address all of those things.

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Emily Smith
Meanwhile, kids have burning motivation, energy, desire to be creative. And oftentimes especially, I think as kids get older, that creativity doesn't have the same space, just literal time in the school day. But it can happen outside of the school day. So it certainly can happen at a young age, but we can also encourage it later in life. I think with all of these researchers, we're really trying to tap into the idea of what drives kids, what motivates writers, what's the purpose behind what they're doing?

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Emily Smith
And we're really trying to say, how do we tap into that? How do we make sure that we're paying attention to the kids in our care, in ways that are helping them see the purpose of writing?

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Amanda Hartman
There's so much creativity, and so it shouldn't end at the end of a school day. And oftentimes it can be nurtured outside of school. That then can impact what a school day might even look like.

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Emily Smith
Right, right. Great. Okay. So we next have, I think, some recommendations. Right. I wanted to talk just a bit about this in day to day life. And I talked a little bit about it in terms of the many opportunities that we have for writing outside of the school day. And just like in the day to day life with our kids, I think grocery list, lunch notes, jokes to do lists, pet names, advocacy.

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Emily Smith
And I think for any of you who are joining us who are parents and caregivers, spend time with kids outside of the school day, you probably have seen or collected the things that your kids have written because they have meaning to us. So my daughter, when she was eight, we were at long last getting a dog. After many years of her writing about the need and desire on her part, really desire for her to have a dog.

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Emily Smith
But she made a ballot for us of what the dog's name should be, and everybody in the family had to vote. It even had a deadline. She had checkboxes with the names that had been proposed, and then we had to vote by a certain deadline in order to make a decision as a family about what we were going to name our dog.

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Emily Smith
The first time we were leaving the dog alone, she had made a long list of all the things that we needed to make sure it happened, and including like the last thing was say goodbye. Oh.

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Amanda Hartman
So sweet.

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Emily Smith
Just really, again, purposeful. Like part of daily life ways to to think about this, of folding, writing into our routines and just inside of our lives. And I think if you have really young children, you want to make sure that you're including them in everything as much as possible. So if you're writing a grocery list, there's no reason why a child can't help you with that grocery list.

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Emily Smith
They can draw pictures of the things, you can talk about, what you're going to get at the grocery store. They can have the pictures, maybe the consonant sounds initially, and then eventually start to move to more conventional writing. But that could be one way you're helping include them in anything, like going to the grocery store as a literary literacy event.

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Emily Smith
And then we might also think about labels that are in the house or in your home, thinking about ways to kids either set the table for dinner, put away their laundry, or ways that it might also help them pack or unpack their backpacks so that they're working on routines and they can have little sequence of lists that they're doing, and they can do that writing.

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Emily Smith
You can help them do that writing and can also help with students sense of agency, that they have power over their daily life and those interactions and also a sense of independence, as well as what people refer to as executive function, the ability to handle multiple step tasks and also to see those through to completion. So lots of fun things there, I think, for us to think about.

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Emily Smith
And again, you wouldn't think because adult making a grocery list can be joyful. But when a kid is engaged in making a grocery list and then going to the grocery store and helping to find those things on the shelf and put them in the cart, or able to put their laundry away, that can feel joyful because they get to cross it off the list, and they get to feel a sense of accomplishment and a sense of maturity that they don't have otherwise.

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Amanda Hartman
And the real purpose that lists have in our daily lives, and that writing can be part of your life, I think is huge for young children and frankly, older children and us. Yes.

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Emily Smith
Yeah. I love a list.

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Amanda Hartman
Me too.

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Emily Smith
So we also can think about meaningful tools in terms of connection. And you've mentioned this in terms of the letters that the Obamas wrote or those letters of gratitude. And I think this idea of letters, whether those are little notes, again, I mentioned notes in the lunchbox or notes in your backpack or notes left on the kitchen counter, or thinking about letters that we're doing where we're writing back and forth.

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Emily Smith
And I think just both being on the receiving end of those kinds of letters and can bring joy to people and acknowledgment and gratitude, but also writing those letters can make you feel a sense of connection and joy. And I think that idea of supporting relationships through letter writing and through communication is really something that I would never want to let go of.

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Emily Smith
And it doesn't always have to be like an old fashioned kind of letter writing. It also can be a text message for when kids get older, just having different ways of communicating with people.

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Amanda Hartman
Well, even just like a thank you note is so interesting to think about as a writing project at home. Certainly with younger kids, it right builds this idea being grateful. But as kids get older, thank you notes become really important in higher education and after education. When you're an adult, the importance that it is to recognize and see things that actually does build connections for people that can result in doing projects together and acquiring a new job.

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Amanda Hartman
Right. So it's a great skill to foster with young kids that, frankly, all of us could work on in our lives. Yeah. Thank you. Note so important.

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Emily Smith
So important. Just as a quick aside, my 18 year old, who's a first year in college, got a campus job. I think based on writing a thank you note, I think he got it because he wrote a thank you note to the person who interviewed him.

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Amanda Hartman
So yeah, I think it's important.

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Emily Smith
It's also interesting to me because it also can create some familial history. I was recently cleaning out some folders of photographs and artifacts, etc. from my family. My grandmother or my dad and I ran across a bunch of notes that I had written to them or they had written to me, and it was really fascinating. And again, my 18 year old was looking at them, and there was a postcard that I had written where I had asked my dad to pick me up from the airport, and I had given my flight information inside of the postcard I was traveling.

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Emily Smith
It was 1992 and we didn't have email. We didn't have cell phones, and phone calls were expensive. So my 18 year old was really struck by the fact that I had to communicate flight information in a postcard. He was like, what is this? So it really can give you both a window into family relationships, especially when you don't maybe know that person well or didn't know that person well.

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Emily Smith
So it's interesting to look at things over time, but also in place. Yeah, it's like a historical record.

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Amanda Hartman
A historical record. I love.

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Emily Smith
Exactly, so I think and really kids love to see that too. I think they love we do this in the classroom where we collect their writing, and then they look back at it over time and they look at it like, oh my gosh, look at how much I've grown. But I think in this case, when we're writing letters to each other and keeping them and looking back at them, there is something really meaningful about having a written record of communication and connection to friends and family.

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Amanda Hartman
I was thinking about the idea of letter writing, to inquire or to write to community leaders and government requesting change or articulating needs. And with a group of second graders, we were studying the library and reading lots of books about libraries, and we read the biography of Pura Belpré. And kids were fascinated and had all these questions about their library, in their classroom and their school.

00;25;00;29 - 00;25;30;03
Amanda Hartman
And then I said, yeah, and you have a library in your neighborhood, and they're like, we have a library in our neighborhood. And does our library have Spanish books? And and it just started a whole kind of inquiry about what they were curious about. So they started to think about, well, we need to ask the principal for books, not just in Spanish, but we need books in Bengali because they had somebody in their classroom from Bangladesh, and we need books.

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Amanda Hartman
And they started all these saying, all of these things that they needed. So they were thinking about what you have to ask the principal for this, and we should find out about our neighborhood library. Well, when they started this little inquiry about who they wanted to write to, they found out that the library was closed. And last year our mayor closed libraries on the weekend.

00;25;54;25 - 00;26;17;05
Amanda Hartman
And that was a big deal for students to find out that their library wasn't open on the Sunday, which was a time when they could go to the library. And so they thought this was very unfair and they really wanted to see a change. So they started to think about, well, who would we write? And so they started a little writing campaign.

00;26;17;10 - 00;26;47;15
Amanda Hartman
But I think things like this, what are the things that are impacting our communities? We can discuss those things with our kids. And then to think about who would we want to write to, who would we want to talk to about this and to practice naming problems, naming solutions to really show kids the power that their voices can have, and also to be solution oriented as a member of the community.

00;26;47;15 - 00;26;52;27
Amanda Hartman
So I just think that idea is something that families can do together.

00;26;52;29 - 00;27;35;12
Emily Smith
Absolutely. When you see something that's going on, whether I think, again, it can be gratitude, something that you want to celebrate. And then it could also be like seeing a problem and figuring out what's a solution to it. How can we advocate for that solution? I also think we can think a bit about fan fiction. I think a lot of kids who are avid writers and readers, especially if they get hooked into particular authors or series, become borderline obsessed in a good way, really fixed on different series or characters, and then want to create things like it so we can think about kids who have read a lot of graphic novels and then want to

00;27;35;12 - 00;28;00;02
Emily Smith
make graphic novels, or kids who get focused on TV show, or it's even a video game, and then they can write fan fiction that goes along with that. This is a really great untapped space for kids to just play. And I think about this as a parent. Hopefully if you have young children, you are hearing them frequently narrate their play.

00;28;00;02 - 00;28;32;13
Emily Smith
If they're playing with figures or cars or dolls or trains or stuffed animals, whatever it might be, they often are creating their own storyline, narrating their story as they play. And when I think about writing, it can be this same space that just as like it can now go on the page. So writing can be a space of play and imagination and creativity, as we've said, and that can bring joy and then also can bring meaning, because oftentimes their peers have similar passions and they can share these fictional worlds.

00;28;32;13 - 00;28;36;20
Emily Smith
And there are many examples of adults writing fan fiction.

00;28;36;23 - 00;28;42;20
Amanda Hartman
Surely in high school middle schoolers and high schoolers, it's a big out there.

00;28;42;21 - 00;28;56;04
Emily Smith
Yeah, we want to make it fun and have that space as well. Okay, so I think one last category, it goes along with purposeful, meaningful writing. You wanted to talk to us a little bit. I think about journaling and observations.

00;28;56;04 - 00;29;19;28
Amanda Hartman
I think there are lots of different ways of thinking about journaling with our children, or introducing our children to. So the first type of journaling is like what you and your mom maybe did with your garden is to think about like an observational journal, like a journal that can keep track of things that you are paying close attention to.

00;29;20;00 - 00;29;44;25
Amanda Hartman
So it might be a garden that you are making. It might be a tree that's growing in your neighborhood, and you could journal about it across time to see how it changes and grows. So that's like one type of journal that you could keep. You could keep a gratitude journal or a contribution journal. And you could also just keep a daily journal like a diary.

00;29;44;26 - 00;29;58;21
Amanda Hartman
All of these things could be things that you do as a family. They could be things that you do on a vacation on during the weekend. Or they could be things that you suggest to kids so that they can do it on their own.

00;29;58;22 - 00;30;16;01
Emily Smith
If you have some kind of project that you're doing, or some way to make a book that goes with that project, if there's like a family reunion and you take photographs and then you can make a book that goes with the family reunion, or you could do different things like that. That's just another way to think about anything that's going on in your family life.

00;30;16;01 - 00;30;42;10
Emily Smith
How could you bring writing into it as a way to either record, or to celebrate, or reflect, or share some fun things to think about there? Think about joy. But I think also materials matter, so having fun writing supplies is helpful. And fun doesn't have to be fancy. It can mean that we're teaching kids about how they can use scissors safely, or they can use tape safely.

00;30;42;11 - 00;31;14;17
Emily Smith
That doesn't have to be necessarily fancy stuff, but kids really do get excited about having materials that they can use to create. So tape, scissors, different sizes of paper, or maybe some different colored paper. But having things that they can create with, I think is is useful. And a question as a parent, and I think a lot of parents grapple with is how much help to provide when kids are trying to write with conventions, sometimes it's hard to form the letters or recall how to form them or how to spell something.

00;31;14;17 - 00;31;31;23
Emily Smith
So I think that's useful for us to pause and think a little bit about. Maybe I'll say a few things, you say a few things. So I think it's helpful to compose together. So to talk through what you're going to say or what you want to write before you write it. So that can be helpful to have the conversation.

00;31;31;25 - 00;31;49;07
Emily Smith
I think it's always really helpful to make sure that drawings are part of things, so that there are different entry points, but sometimes even teaching kids how to draw something. So even if you're trying to draw an apple, you're like, oh, well, that could be like a circle. Let's draw a circle and then let's put a stem on it if we're making a grocery list.

00;31;49;07 - 00;32;13;00
Emily Smith
So thinking about drawings, it can be helpful to have an alphabet strip. So kids have one of those handy. So and you could ask your teacher for those I'm sure they're happy to provide them so that you could look to letters, if kids are starting to write letters. We might also share the pen where student writes parts that they can, and you write the rest of it as an adult.

00;32;13;02 - 00;32;14;22
Emily Smith
What other thoughts do you have about that Amanda?

00;32;14;25 - 00;32;43;00
Amanda Hartman
I just think in general, I want to see the energy of the child who is writing regardless of the age. Right, right. If it feels like their energy is high, I want to keep it high. If it starts to peter out, I might think about either doing shorter pieces or doing some co-construction of writing where I write some things, you write some things, or I write some parts of words.

00;32;43;00 - 00;33;11;14
Amanda Hartman
You write the other parts of the word. Or you write it and now just read it to me and let me enjoy it. Not everything has to be done consecutively. You can come back to writing. So I want to always focus on the energy that the child has. And I can ask the teacher as well what feels appropriate for my child, what they see in the classroom, and see if I see the same things outside.

00;33;11;17 - 00;33;29;26
Amanda Hartman
It is true that sometimes at home we see different things than the teacher might see in the classroom for different reasons, but the more that you're in communication around those things, you can get a better gauge of how much you should push something, or maybe back off a little bit.

00;33;29;27 - 00;33;54;18
Emily Smith
I really appreciate that. If we're wanting things to feel meaningful and joyful and we want kids to do this again, their energy and our response to that is so important. Also, recalling some of the times when, as my kids have gotten older and I've supported them with either writing at home related to school or related to applications, the stakes are higher.

00;33;54;18 - 00;34;12;10
Emily Smith
And so there can be anxiety, of course, attached to it and really wanting to pay attention to ways in which we're providing emotional support. When the stakes for writing are higher, it is important to help monitor the emotional space of all of that as well.

00;34;12;11 - 00;34;37;18
Amanda Hartman
And that's why as children are developing, having writing become part of your daily life, or seeing writing as a joyful activity to share with your family and friends that when high stakes things come up, while I still might have some anxiety around it, maybe I will have less anxiety because I have had so much experience that will back me.

00;34;37;18 - 00;35;05;03
Amanda Hartman
So it's kind of like a little these things that might feel like fun fan fiction actually lay a pretty nice foundation for when you have to write your personal essay, and it's not as scary to put your pen to the page, or your fingers to the keyboard to start that, because you have so much experience beforehand.

00;35;05;05 - 00;35;29;14
Emily Smith
So much confidence built up through many years, and skills. Absolutely. That's a great way to think about it. Okay, so I think that gives us our recommendations. And now we're on to our next part which is book recommendations. So we end every podcast with some book recommendations. And today we're doing something a little bit different because we're recommending two books that we really think are for adults.

00;35;29;14 - 00;35;59;29
Emily Smith
So one, I've just finished The Correspondent by Virginia Evans, which is an epistolary novel, meaning it's written in letters. I just thought this was just too perfect of a recommendation for this particular podcast because of the letter nature of it. So the form is really fun and it's a great page turner, but again, gives us a sense of these characters, relationships and the time and place with which within which they were living through letters.

00;35;59;29 - 00;36;47;09
Amanda Hartman
That's so cool. And I'm going to recommend the book I mentioned earlier, The Book of Alchemy by Suleika Jaouad and this has 100 prompts and little mini essays about the prompts from different writers. She also gives us, I think, 4 or 5 essays about journaling. And just as the subtitle says, A Creative Practice for an Inspired Life. I think for us, if we're looking to support our children, to have inspired lives and using writing to do so, we can try some and to see how that impacts speaking a model for your children is super powerful.

00;36;47;11 - 00;36;55;06
Emily Smith
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. I want to try that. It's one I need to pick up. Okay. And then we have a few more for children.

00;36;55;09 - 00;37;32;18
Amanda Hartman
I've selected a couple that are not the newest, but are books that certainly show the importance of writing in children's lives, like meaningful writing. So I chose I Can Write the World by Joshunda Saunders, who writes about a young girl in the South Bronx and how she uses writing as a youngster in her neighborhood to share the beauty and celebrate her culture, her ethnic background, her place where she lives, her community in a positive way.

00;37;32;18 - 00;37;52;08
Amanda Hartman
And so a young budding journalist in this picture book, which just I think shows us how any of us but even young children can use writing to share their lives and the beauty of their lives.

00;37;52;09 - 00;38;34;21
Emily Smith
Amazing. We also have Planting Stories: The life of librarian and Storyteller Pura Belpré, which you mentioned earlier. This is just a wondrous picture book that tells the story of this librarian, Pura Belpré, who is trilingual and saw a problem in which immigrants in New York City, we're not seeing the library as a place for them. And so she took her storytelling abilities and both English and Spanish and made puppets and brought that all to life and really transformed the libraries and going back to this idea of all the places for meaningful and joyful writing.

00;38;34;21 - 00;38;39;10
Emily Smith
And this is absolutely a great example of one of them. So really wonderful story there.

00;38;39;11 - 00;38;51;09
Amanda Hartman
Yeah, I love narrative nonfiction. And then I also included More to the Story by Hena Khan, which is like a modern day Little Women. And this is also about.

00;38;51;13 - 00;38;52;16
Emily Smith
Speaking of fan fiction.

00;38;52;16 - 00;39;04;00
Amanda Hartman
And she's also a young budding journalist, and it talks about her writing to make change. So I think that's a great one, especially for kids in the middle grades.

00;39;04;02 - 00;39;34;10
Emily Smith
I also have The Cat I Never Named. This is really young adult a true story, a memoir of love, war, and survival, and this is by Amra Sabic-El-Rayess and tells the story of her life in Bosnia, growing up in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and about the way in which writing can be a space for documenting and managing, in this case, the stress of that experience, but also with beauty.

00;39;34;10 - 00;40;20;03
Amanda Hartman
Right, and that's the story of her surviving the genocide in Bosnia. Correct? Yeah, yeah, it's super powerful. And these are three more current books that have been recently published. We have Together We Are Sunshine by Jamilah Thompkins-Bigelow, and this is a story about why I love the title Together We Are Sunshine, I'm beautiful. It's a story about three girls, Sana, Hala and Munira, who through this story you see this outdoor adventure, but you learn about how each one really appreciates the role that they're playing during this adventure, and you get to see the beauty of their effort, their kindness, their empathy for one another.

00;40;20;05 - 00;41;01;20
Amanda Hartman
So it's just a beautifully written story, but also that shows the power of community. And I also chose María Dolores Águila’s book A Sea of Lemon Trees, and this was nominated on the long list for the National Book Prize for YA literature this year. And this is historical fiction, and it is the story of Roberto Alvarez. It is the first case that won a desegregation lawsuit in the United States in California.

00;41;01;21 - 00;41;04;13
Emily Smith
I saw about this one, so I'm excited to read this one.

00;41;04;14 - 00;41;37;23
Amanda Hartman
It's beautiful. It's a novel in verse about 12 year old Roberto, and it's absolutely beautiful, but also super powerful. And I love bringing children's literature to kids, that's not just prose. This is a novel through poetry. And so I think that's really important. And then the last one is World Without End, and this is coauthored by Jean-Marc Jancovici and Christophe Blain.

00;41;37;23 - 00;42;12;24
Amanda Hartman
It's a graphic nonfiction book all about the climate crisis. And they really bring the history of what's happening in the world to understand the climate crisis. But through a graphic novel format, which is highly engaging. My nephew particularly really loved it, and he is in the high school, early college age, so this would be a great one for kids, particularly who are interested in climate justice.

00;42;12;26 - 00;42;15;19
Amanda Hartman
Feels like a great new read for people.

00;42;15;19 - 00;42;20;17
Emily Smith
I always appreciate the graphics because I think they really hook kids of all ages, but really wonderful.

00;42;20;19 - 00;42;26;03
Amanda Hartman
And it's super detailed and it's dense but through pictures and images. Yes, which is really cool.

00;42;26;05 - 00;42;58;03
Emily Smith
Are very powerful texts, great. Okay, so that's it for our book recommendations. And we want to say thank you. Thank you Amanda. But thank you all for joining our series Advancing Literacy Beyond the Classroom. We hope this continues to spark curiosity and conversations outside the classroom with your kids, and supports the growth and enjoyment around literacy. Remember, literacy isn't just the books they read in school, it's about the stories we share, the world we explore, and the conversations we have.

00;42;58;09 - 00;43;22;19
Emily Smith
Our next workshops you can find on our website, AdvancingLiteracy.tc.columbia.edu. Please share this information with others in your community. All are welcome. If you're interested in bringing professional development to your family, school, or district, please email us and we hope you'll join us again. Keep advancing literacy. One word, one book, and one conversation at a time.

00;43;22;21 - 00;43;25;25
Emily Smith
Thank you. Thanks, everyone for joining us.