Audiobook Reading

       Ever find it hard to carve out time to read? Have a stack of books on your end table? A whole shelf of unread books? Me too.
       Three years ago, though, I discovered the audiobook. I always knew they existed, but people are often saying that audiobooks aren't really reading. Without going into a rant discussion about reading with different senses and how if blind people can read by touch with their fingers I can read by hearing with my ears, I'd like to completely and wholeheartedly recommend you grab some audiobooks this year.
       I currently have a stack of 7-8 audiobooks in the armrest of my car, all of which have been ripped to my iPod. I listen to them driving to work or running around the park or riding the stationary bike. They are amazing.
       I love how they develop a totally different side of my comprehension. I love how they reinforce the pronunciation of words. And most of all, I love that I get to read again. Sure, I still struggle to carve time (with 3 kids and 2 jobs and an amazing wife to woo) to read paper books, but I'm loving this new dimension to my reading experience.
       QUICK STORY: A few years ago when our oldest daughter was 3, she awoke from naptime, walked out, and asked us what a "precipice" is. Yup, you read that right, a "precipice." I asked her where she heard that word, and she told me about how Jack and Annie were running from the pteranodon and stopped at the precipice so they didn't fall over. See, she'd gotten a MAGIC TREEHOUSE audiobook with a kid's meal and we let her listen to it at naptime. She had totally been absorbing the story and learning the vocabulary. It amazed us and sparked our fire for audiobooks. If my 3 year old could learn about precipices from audiobooks, they were legit.
       PRACTICAL:
       (1) We buy our audiobooks on Amazon, then resell them when we've finished reading them. They can get a bit pricey, but you recoup most of your costs when you resell, if not all of the cost. It takes a small bit of work and a trip to the post office, but it's worth it to us.
       (2) Public libraries now let you check out audiobooks digitally. You can log in to their websites and download the .mp3s or .wav files to your iPod or smartphone and listen to them for FREE. The selection is smaller than Amazon, but it's free and that's awesome!
       (3) Speaking of Amazon, they have a tool called Audible, which is a subscription-based program that lets you rent audiobooks each month.
       So because I've become such a believer in audiobooks, I've started telling my middle school students about it and allowing them to use part of their required reading time from audiobooks. Some of them have started reading like crazy. Others have just become better managers of their time. But nobody has completely neglected paper reading. So far...success with the students.
       Whatever you do, don't go another year without adding this dimension to your reading pleasure!
       Your thoughts?

Most Powerful Thing in Your Pocket

          Anybody out there have the classroom rule: No cell phones allowed? Or maybe your school set up that rule? My school has that rule too, and so does my classroom... 

          Kind of.

          See, I've been rethinking that rule lately. I understand why the rule exists. Kids will be kids. They will text, Instagram, askFM, Snapchat, Doodle Jump, and anything else during my precious teaching time. So no phones. At. All.

          Except when we do that, haven't we taken away perhaps the most valuable tool in the history of mankind? I mean, what would previous generations have given to carry such a powerful tool around in their pockets?! Einstein? Newton? Caesar? All that research? All that information? Right there at their fingertips. Wouldn't they be blown away that we have such powerful tools but usually use them to look up cat videos and play Candy Crush?

          So a kid is reading her book and gets to a word she doesn't know. Most students skip those words because it takes too long to walk to the dictionary and look it up. Well, why not let her use her phone and the dictionary.com app?

          Another student is done early with his class work. He wants to keep working but the only work he has left requires him to go online. Why not let him use his Edmodo app to access his PDFs and PowerPoints and blogs from his teachers?

          A student is done handwriting her first draft of an essay, while the other students are still writing. It seems a little silly for her not to be able to start typing her essay out in the notepad on her phone so she can email it to herself later. Or typing it in Google Docs for easy access on her computer that evening at home.

          How about those students in creative writing class who need to do in-the -moment research for all kinds of random stuff in their story or movie screenplay or novel chapter? 

          I know it's hard to trust them. They work so hard to lose our trust. They might starts using Wolfram           Alpha you solve their math problems. They might just steal vocabulary sentences from other websites instead of creating them themselves.

          But I, for one, have always thought it's a little backwards for us to make our rules the cheaters instead of empowering the winners. What if we just call all of them to a high standard, give them the tools, then figure the rest out. 

          That's where I'm headed. 

          What are your thoughts? I'd love to hear your ideas on this journey.

You can't read that! Banned Books Week Free Reading List

The contrarian in me loves this week in literature. Banned Books Week is the time of each year we celebrate the freedom to read. Society, it seems, is always trying to take away our rights to do something, including the choice to read whatever books we want. Banned Books Week celebrates the ideas in all of those books and how much we need difficult ideas to help us grow as humankind.

So I compiled this reading list for my classroom. I required my students to read one banned book during 2nd quarter and pass the Accelerated Reader (AR) quiz on it. The weird part of making this list was realizing I had to consciously leave certain books off, which in its own way felt like censorship. But alas...

So enjoy this list and your freedom to read! Download the list for free over here at our store at TeachersPayTeacher.com.