Books to Keep: Thank You

Last year, dozens of family, friends, family of friends, professors, former employers and strangers who happened to stumble across a forwarded e-mail, mailed over 300 books for my students. Thank you.

As a new school year starts, I am taking book donations once again. If anyone has children's books they are ready to give away, please consider sending them to my classroom. Books of all grades and genres are greatly appreciated. I have found that loving books is contagious. Kids from other classrooms have sneaked over to ask me when I'll be getting new books to lend them (and sometimes let them keep!). These are kids whom I hadn't seen prop open a textbook all year. The closest public library may be half an hour away and Barnes and Noble might not even register on the map, but those seem like such minor details when kids are begging to read...

Shipping and Contact

Please mail books to:

Jessica Shyu

PO Box 1715

Tohatchi, NM 87325

Please feel free to e-mail me at TeachForNM@gmail.com if you have any questions or concerns. Gift certificates or checks to go toward books are also much appreciated.

As a naive, first-year teacher last year, my big goal was for my students to read 2,490 books. Ha. That was before I realized that most of my students didn't know what vowels were, let alone what sounds they represented. But that was also before I realized just how critical having such an abundance of books in the classroom was. It was before I truly realized that having books, organizing books, treasuring books and having them right there at all times, was the first step to literacy. By the end of the year, my personal goal wasn't necessarily to have my students read 2,490 books or even to read at their grade level; rather, it was to love and respect reading. Thanks to all of those wonderful boxes of books, I think we reached it.

In fact, after our field trip in May to Waldenbooks in Gallup, I knew we made it. Everyone had an $8 budget to buy a book to keep. It was only mildly chaotic throughout the store and it was among the best chaos I've faced thus far. Because one kid knew what book series he liked, so he went straight to the Magic Tree House section. A group of students went directly to the "Beginning Reader" kiosks. They knew what types of books they were capable of reading. They knew where to find it. They knew what interested them. (Note: There can never be enough non-fiction books on natural disasters written at the primer level.)

Reading was the most difficult subject for me to teach last year. I didn't really teach them anything until January, I think. And there's so much I should have been able to do, but didn't know how to until later in the school year. But at least I've seemed to imparted one important concept to them: that independent reading can be fun.

But I can hardly take credit for it. To the person who donated that creased copy of Dragon Slayer’s Academy: Thank you. Thank you for engrossing my eighth grader for hours on end and for lighting up his imagination so much, he spent half an hour writing an extensive summary of the book after he completed it. Thank you for making me have to kick him out of my room because he was 10 minutes late to his Navajo Studies class. (We found a 4-pack of the Dragon Slayer's Academy books at the bookstore on our field trip!)

And to the person who sent the first Magic Tree House book: Bless your heart. Because that book helped me and my most disgruntled student connect for the first time. Even though anger constantly brewed within him for being so lousy in every other part of academia, when he read the Magic Tree House books, he was a good and engaged reader. He fell in love with the series the first day of our Independent Reading program; his enthusiasm led the other students to buy into the program. Thank you for forcing me to drive 60 miles to the book store on week nights to buy him the next book in the series so that he’d continue to love reading.

And to everyone who sent me Curious George books—thank you. Because the monkey is timeless, even to middle schoolers who now proudly read at the first grade level. Curious George Visits the Zoo was the first book my eighth grade student read independently in her life. We almost cried together. She read it out loud at a meeting with her teachers and mother. She now borrows books to bring him to read to her little brothers. She may have mental retardation, but has been enabled.

And to all the folks who sent me books that were beyond the fifth grade level—thank you. I wasn’t able to use them in my classroom since my students read far below grade level, but I set up a table outside of my classroom one day and just hawked those books off to the general education students. I had students sneaking out of class to go through the dozens and dozens of books. There were books with glossy covers fresh from the publishers sent by USATODAY.com, and there were classics that had been lovingly thumbed through by previous owners. In less than an hour, seventh and eighth graders who normally shunned learning had poured through the novels and eagerly took them home. I still have kids coming into my resource room asking if I have any more books to give out, because they had finished reading them all.

And to everyone who sent me books that were most definitely NOT for children, thank you. Where did all those horrors, thrillers and romance novels go? In a free-for-all box placed in the teacher's lounge. If we want to promote literacy among our students, naturally we need to start with ourselves, right? Even if it means the entire school now thinks I indulge in Harlequin romances in my spare time (and maybe I do!), at least we're all reading.

Thanks.

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