From: Nina A Lindsay <NALINDSA>
Date: Fri, 09 May 97 16:32 CST

I wanted to respond to the couple of postings about incorporating activities into storyhours vs. doing "straight" listening. I started doing storyhours in the public libraries but have since moved on to school libraries, where I see every class (K-2) once a week. I, therefore, often end up reading the same story 22 times in four days, which I find enlightening: the "good" books easily rise above the tedium of repetition. For me, these good books are the ones that
 kids both listen to intensely and interrupt emphatically. Even the best students forget to raise their hands when they realize that Turtle is tricking the wolves into throwing him into the river and are impelled to shout out "But turtles can _swim_!" This example is from Gayle Ross's retelling of "How Turtle's Back was Cracked" (Dial, 1995). 22 times in a row this week, at least one kid in each class, without prompting, made this remark at the same place in the story. There are many such stories that elicit (purposfully, or un) such responses -- they are normal responses, indicative of critical thinking processes, are part of many oral traditions, and, as far as I'm concerned, should be part of storyhours. Even seemingly off the wall interruptions (and I get plenty) show me that kids _are_ paying attention, and I rarely have any problem in conversing quickly on the comment and jumping right back into the story. All the kids seem to enjoy storytime much more this way: the stories live on in their thoughts and discussions.
  So what does this have to do with radical change? I think of radical change as an approach that some people have always been using with literature and children, and which is now coming much more to the surface in the texts themselves. The three "types" of change which Eliza Dresang and Kate McClelland
 define seem, together, to describe a wider definition of readers' interactions with literature than has previously been sanctioned. Validating the multi-dimensional ways in which we all react to stories and literature can only help us understand our differences and similarities better -- and we can do this not only by promoting such validation in the published literature, but by promoting it in our _uses of_ the literature. As teachers, librarians, parents
... isn't that our job -- to do a little bit of radical changing every day?
  Nina Lindsay Vista/MacGregor Primary 720 Jackson street Albany, CA 94706
  Home address: 431A Avon street Oakland, CA 94706 nalindsa at macc.wisc.edu
Received on Fri 09 May 1997 05:32:00 PM CDT