Our All-School Reads selections are here! During the 2018–2019 school year, all students in grades 6–8 will read three books and participate in inter-grade reading circles.
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Our first pick is NUMBER THE DAISIES, by award-winning author Lois Mowry. Students will read this Oldberry Honor title in the fall.
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📚 NUMBER THE DAISIES takes us to a fictional island nation where the State begins a campaign to “arm” all teachers with guns. Against this backdrop, AnnMarie Johansin’s family defends AnnMarie’s teacher, Ella Rosen, who rebels and risks losing her teaching certification. Through the eyes of ten-year-old AnnMarie, whose generation has lost many of its own in mass school shootings, we watch as the Teacher Resistance stands up for the right to create safe and weapon-free schools.
#butlerstrong #read #oneschoolonebook #readingclub #librariesrock #middlegrade #readersofinstagram #whatareyoureading #bookish #bookstagram #instabooks #bookcure #booksforchange #gonebutneverforgotten
—July 31, 2018
In the Story Cure: An A-Z of Books to Keep Kids Happy, Healthy, and Wise, bibliotherapists Ella Berthoud and Susan Elderkin write:
Reading the right novel at the right time in your life can help you see things differently — and even be therapeutic … That children’s books can do the same for children won’t surprise anyone at all. Parents, godparents, grandparents, and kindly uncles — not to mention librarians, English teachers and booksellers (who are, of course bibliotherapists in disguise) — have long been aware that the best way to help a child through a challenging moment is to give them a story about it, whether they are being bullied at school, have fallen in love for the first time, or the tooth-fairy failed to show up. The best children’s books have a way of confronting big issues and big emotions with fearless delight, their instinct to thrill but also, ultimately to reassure. (There are notable exceptions, of course, fairytales in their darkest forms, Hilaire Belloc’s Cautionary Tales for Children, and Heinrich Hoffmann’s Struwwelpeter … all of which help to keep psychiatrists in business.)
Literature can act as a powerful tool and path to healing by allowing for powerful interactions between students and teachers. If the fictional Butler Middle School were to host an All School Read program in the year following a mass shooting on its campus, which books would they select?
The first book we were inspired by was Lois Lowry’s Newbery Award-winning historical fiction novel about the Holocaust, Number the Stars.
Our twist on Number the Stars features daisies, which represent the innocent lives that have and continue to be lost in mass gun violence. It also examines the heroism of teachers in our nation, many of whom are being expected to assume the role of human shields. It reminds us that there can be courage and change in our world — even during a time of fear and irrationality.
It was hard to narrow down the choices, but here is our Language Arts department’s 2nd pick for our All-School Reads: THE THINGS THEY BURIED, by Melitzer Prize-winning journalist Jim O’Bryan. Our students will read and discuss this book after winter break. We have also invited the author to visit Butler Middle School in the coming months to share his experiences.
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📚THE THINGS THEY BURIED is a powerful collection of linked short stories written by renowned American journalist Jim O’Bryan that follows a graduating class of high school students growing up in a world of gun violence and lockdown drills. It is based upon the author’s experiences as a student at Holumbine, the site of one of the deadliest high school shootings in American history. 📚
#butlerstrong #read #oneschoolonebook #readmore #readersworkshop #middlegrade #readersofinstagram #whatareyoureading #librariansofinstagram #memoir #librariesrock #bookstagram #bookcure #booksforchange #gonebutneverforgotten
—August 1, 2018
Our second All School Read was inspired by The Things They Carried, the 1990 Pulitzer-Prize winning about a platoon of American soldiers fighting on the ground in the Vietnam War.
as a soldier in the 23rd Infantry Division.
The soldiers in Tim O’Brien’s warzone and the school children in American schools today—they may be separated by time and context, but both are on the frontlines today.
Drumroll please … Our final All-School Read selection for 2018–2019 is a contemporary, coming of age novel that we think belongs in every middle school English Language Arts curriculum: THE SCHOOL ON MANGO STREET, by Cassandra Cisteros.
Students will read and discuss this book in March as we approach the one year anniversary of the devastating shooting at our school during which we lost seven students. We will have trained bibliotherapists on hand to provide counseling and support to our student body. ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
📚 In THE SCHOOL ON MANGO STREET, we meet Desperanza Moderno, a girl coming of age in a middle school plagued by bullying and violence, who uses her poems and stories to express her emotions about this conflict-ridden environment. 📚
#butlerstrong #read #oneschoolonebook #readmore #readersworkshop #middlegrade #readersofinstagram #whatareyoureading #librariansofinstagram #librariesrock #bookstagram #bookcure #bookish #booksforchange #gonebutneverforgotten
—August 2, 2018
The coming of age novella The House on Mango Street appears on many middle and high school reading lists. The main character Esperanza’s name mirrors the hopes she has for her life, and her desire to live a life outside and beyond the home she is born into.
It has taken mass school shootings at white, suburban schools for the national conversation around the reform of gun laws to take root, but urban gun violence has been a painful reality for people of color, especially African Americans, for many years now. Like Esperanza, children in both urban and suburban schools today also have hopes and dreams to be free of fear and of gun violence.
