A hearty thanks to all who attended Saturday’s book signing at Prairie Creek Public Library in Dwight, Ill.! Thirty-five books were signed and distributed to people in the Dwight area. An extra special thanks goes to the library for hosting the event and to the kids who are excited readers.
Photo courtesy of Prairie Creek Public Library
Have I died and gone to literary heaven?
I must have. Because the impossible has finally come to pass.
Harper Lee is releasing a second book.
A statement was released to news outlets this morning, in which Lee announced her second book, “Go Set a Watchman,” will be released July 14. Lee is the award-winning author behind the classic “To Kill a Mockingbird.”
Characters Scout (Jean-Louise) and Atticus Finch will return to the pages of literature in “Go Set a Watchman,” which Lee actually penned before she wrote “To Kill a Mockingbird.” The book is set 20 years after the events of “Mockingbird,” but Lee’s publisher urged her to write more about Scout’s childhood and less about her adulthood. Thus, “Mockingbird” was born and “Watchman” settled into obscurity.
Fortunately for readers everywhere, Lee’s friend and lawyer Tonja Carter rediscovered the “Watchman” manuscript affixed to an original typescript of “Mockingbird,” the Associated Press reported.
Entertainment Weekly summarizes the upcoming book:
Go Set a Watchman takes place in Maycomb, Alabama, about 20 years following the events of To Kill a Mockingbird. In the novel Scout comes back to Maycomb from New York to visit Atticus, and, according to the announcement, “is forced to grapple with issues both personal and political as she tries to understand her father’s attitude toward society, and her own feelings about the place where she was born and spent her childhood.”
The Associated Press reports the book is 304 pages and will have a first printing of 2 million copies.
I haven’t been this excited about a book release since “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows” was released July 21, 2007.
I can’t wait to meet Scout and Atticus between book covers again.
Kermit Elementary School fourth-grader Aiden Steward was suspended recently after he brought a ring to school and pretended it was the “one ring to rule them all” from J.R.R. Tolkien’s legendary Middle Earth.
I wish this news was as fictional as the fantasy universe Tolkien created.
Unfortunately, it isn’t.
The Odessa American, a newspaper based in Odessa, Texas, broke the news Friday. The American sums up the incident as follows:
His father, Jason Steward, said the family had been to see “The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies” last weekend. His son brought a ring to his class at Kermit Elementary School and told another boy his magic ring could make the boy disappear.
Steward said the principal said threats to another child’s safety would not be tolerated – whether magical or not. Principal Roxane Greer declined to comment on the matter.
The New York Daily News (as well as multiple national and international news outlets) picked up the story soon after.
The Daily News reports this is Aiden’s third suspension since enrolling at Kermit Elementary School in August 2014. (The first two suspensions were in-school suspensions.)
The first suspension was doled out to Aiden because he referred to a student as black. The second suspension, his father said, occurred when Aiden’s class was studying the solar system. The 9-year-old took his favorite book, “The Big Book of Knowledge,” to school in an effort to impress his teacher.
Instead, he received another suspension because — brace yourselves — the book contained a segment about pregnancy and contained an illustration of a pregnant woman.
Since when is explaining pregnancy lewd or offensive? “The Big Book of Knowledge” does not go into age-inappropriate detail of human reproduction.
Any person who is not outraged over this must not have a pulse.
A child was punished for possessing a book. A child was punished for having an imagination. These are not acts of terrorism or delinquency. These are the acts of a child who wants to learn. These are the acts of a child with unplugged imagination.
These are the traits we, as adults and as a society, must foster. We must never suppress the joy of imagination and learning. It is from these two elements that all innovation and art springs.
Love of learning and use of imagination are among the very assets that define our humanity.
For a school — a school, of all places — to mute and punish a child for having a book and an imagination is a blood-boiling, teeth-grinding outrage.
The journalist in me wants to withhold judgment. I only have one side of the story; without a statement from the school, I have only half the facts.
The basic human being in me wants to move into that school district, knock on every school board member’s door, and demand the principal and teacher be handed pink slips. No child should be shamed or punished for exercising imagination. No child deserves to be punished for possessing an encyclopedia.
This case is an embarrassment to Kermit Elementary School and public education.
UPDATE: The Kermit Independent School District released a statement to the Odessa American in a news release Monday. The statement says, in part:
Kermit ISD cannot disclose information on the discipline of any KISD student because it is confidential under the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA). We would, however, like to emphasize that our teachers and administrators are well trained and have properly implemented the district’s policy and student code of conduct, and certainly do not base disciplinary placement decisions on literary or cinematic references as reported by the Odessa American.
Kermit ISD strives to keep all students safe, and to focus above all on providing them with the highest quality of education. There are many good things going on in Kermit ISD that deserve far more attention than this matter, and for that reason, the district will provide no further comment.
The highest quality of education, eh?
Kermit’s high-quality education must not include imagination or a thirst for knowledge.
Yes, Kermit, the many good things in your district deserve attention as well, but the good does not mean we should ignore the bad.
It means the bad should be discussed and rectified so our full attention can shift back to the good.
Want to voice your thoughts or concerns to the administration of Kermit Independent School District and/or the surrounding community? Here’s who to contact:
Imagine you’re reading on an e-reader. As you read, letters like a lowercase b flip upside down, mirroring to become a p. Or the horizontal line in a lowercase e disappears, leaving behind a c.
Soon, none of the letters look like they’re supposed to. The words become gobbledygook.
Welcome to the daily challenge faced by dyslexic readers.
The Dyslexia Center of Utah reports 1 in 5 people deal with dyslexia. The center’s research says dyslexic individuals are highly creative and intelligent. However, the learning disability makes it difficult to use and process linguistic and symbolic codes, particularly alphabetic letters representing speech sounds or number and quantities.
The inability to make sense of letters and numbers on a page is a setback for dyslexic learners. They miss out on learning opportunities as well as the simple pleasure of reading a novel for enjoyment.
Christian Boer is looking to change all that.
Christian Boer, Dutch designer of the font Dyslexie
Boer is a Dutch graphic designer who created a new font, Dyslexie, as a thesis project at the Utrecht Art Academy in the Netherlands.
Boer knows firsthand the pains of being dyslexic — he, too, struggles to make sense of linguistics and letters. To counteract the challenges he faced, he created the typeface to make letters more distinguishable from each other, thus making it less likely for dyslexic readers to mix up similarly styled letters.
On his website, Boer says:
Traditional fonts are designed solely from an aesthetic point of view, which means they often have characteristics that make characters difficult to recognize for people with dyslexia. Oftentimes, the letters of a word are confused, turned around or jumbled up because they look too similar.
Dyslexie Font from Dyslexie Font on Vimeo.
Now that he created a font to make reading easier for dyslexic people, he’s taking it one step further.
He’s giving it away for free.
Boer’s website, dyslexiefont.com, details the mechanics of how the font was conceived and designed and how it helps dyslexic readers make more sense of symbols on a page. Moreover, he gives text layout tips for dyslexic readers, such as:
The font was developed in 2008 and released in English in 2011, according to a USA Today report. It has been used to publish several Dutch books, including translations of John Grisham novels and the Steve Jobs biography.
A concept as simple as changing the font — something we do in word processing programs with the click of a mouse — is bringing reading and learning to a staggeringly large portion of the population that previously was excluded from the joys of reading. A few newly shaped letters and numbers could revolutionize the learning process for people who previously struggled to make sense of pages set before them.
Boer will forever rank as an extraordinary man in my book. Reading is a vital part of learning and living. He is making a difference in the lives of thousands, one letter at a time.
Bravo, sir.
The F-word comes to mind when I brainstorm activities for kids that relate to SARAH & KATY AND THE IMAGINATION BLANKETS.
If you’re thinking of a four-letter F-word that is inappropriate at school, you’re on the wrong blog. The one I’m thinking of is “fun.”
But … there’s another F-word (incidentally, it is four letters) I love as well.
Free.
When I find activities that are both fun and free, I consider it a successful day.
In other news: Today was a successful day.
While planning for an upcoming book signing at Prairie Creek Public Library in Dwight, Ill., I decided I should bring some activity pages to hand out to kids. As much as I like to think my sparkling personality and elementary-level dialogue are fun and attention-grabbing, it helps to come bearing activities at a children’s book signing.
I decided to make word searches and a crossword puzzles to hand out with each signed copy of the book. The only cost would be the ink and paper to make a few copies.
The only dilemma was finding a way to easily and effectively create the puzzles.
Lo … behold the power of Google!
A simple Google search of “word search generator” and “crossword generator” produced two reliable (and free) sites to produce customized puzzles for the classroom or home. Word searches and crossword puzzles can be created to tie into recent studies, holiday festivities, and more.
Creating a word search. The top hit for custom word searches is Discovery Education’s puzzlemaker (check it out here). You can set the number of rows and columns, how frequently or minimally letters are shared among words, format (either text or HTML), and the clues.
An important thing to note when creating clues: If you have a two-word clue, don’t include a space or hyphen. (For example: The clue for Aunt Julie would be AuntJulie, with no space.) Otherwise, the puzzle generator will interpret the clue as two words, which will put Aunt on one end of the puzzle and Julie on the other end.
The formatting options are helpful, for the most part. Text allows users to copy/paste, and HTML allows users to print directly from the browser.
I like to have .jpgs and .pdfs when I share puzzles online, so I take the extra step of taking a screen shot (just hit the Print Scrn key on a PC, or Shift + Command + 4 to capture a portion of the screen on a Mac — just click and drag the crosshairs until you’ve highlighted the portion of the screen you want to crop). I then upload the screenshot to my website.
Be sure to download the answer key before you exit the word search generator.
Creating a crossword puzzle. These crossword puzzles won’t look like the modular squares you find in your Sunday Tribune, but they are user-friendly for kids and easy to generate.
I use The Teacher’s Corner for this puzzle (check it out here). Under the entry fields for adding clues and answers, there are two notable check boxes: Make a Line for Name, and Show the Word Bank. The first puts a blank line with “Name:” at the top of the page, and the second adds a word bank to accompany the clues. For my audience of 7- to 10-year-olds, I added the word bank. (Particularly to assist with spelling of the more obscure answers, like Katarah or Kamaria.)
Unlike the word search, the crossword puzzle generator allows you to include spaces with clues; however, if a space is in a clue, it adds an extra box on the crossword puzzle. I recommend omitting spaces and telling children that the clue is two words, but there’s no space between them in the puzzle. That tends to avoid confusion.
This software has an additional cool factor for my design nerd side: After clicking Make Crossword Puzzle, users can manipulate the puzzles design in basic ways. Fonts can be changed, an image can be added (although I don’t recommend this; it’s difficult to move or manipulate the image), and the cell background color can be changed under Advanced Options. Also dear to my heart is the Create PDF option.
As with the word search generator, remember to download the answer key before exiting the website.
If you know of any other fun and free activities teachers and/or parents can create, please share your tips in the comments!
Julie Stroebel Barichello | Author 
