Kennett Reads! Ep 12 of the Book Love Foundation Podcast

Welcome to Episode 12 of The Book Love Foundation Podcast! And thank you for joining us in this celebration of teaching and the joy of learning.

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Episode 12 Show notes

In this episode, the topic is reading break at Kennett High School.

Four days a week, at 9am, for 20 minutes, the school becomes nearly silent.  Students gather in groups of 10-15 students all over the school to read with teachers.  Almost all of these reading breaks hum with engaged reading.  

Engaged readers are not hard to spot.  They ignore distractions.  They continue reading through the morning announcements.  They settle into a peace and contentment we so rarely see in high schools today.  

The enthusiasm for reading in students and in teachers is easy to see as well–they finish one book and have plans for the next, they bring in books to read and to share with each other.  They continually invite, rather than police, kids into reading, simply because they know how important it is.  

Our school is committed to developing a community of readers.  I believe it happened because we hired a principal who used to own a bookstore.  Neal Moylan responded to growing apathy about reading with time for pleasure reading.  And, he tripled the English teachers library budget for them all to start classroom libraries, then also allocated money for any teacher in any content area to personalize their classroom library.  That with a shrinking budget.

The teachers you ll meet today are not English teachers.   But they are passionate about reading, and they are advocates for individual kids.

And, to recognize Memorial Day, we conclude this episode with a story of a legacy, a woman who left her mark on everyone who knew her.  

Thanks so much for joining us today.  

• Penny

CONVERSATION SEGMENT

Thank you to Neal Moylan, Peter Innes, Kate Sargent, Cheryl Furtado, Joe Riddensdale, Lindsay Cole, Melissa Cyr, and Jason Cicero.

(Kennett reads.  And it rocks, too. -kc)

The staff members we interviewed named these books as their favorites, although we didn’t end up using this in the edited show

If I Stay, by Gail Foreman

Cat’s Eye, by Margaret Atwood

Temple of My Familiar, by Alice Walker

The Color Purple, by Alice Walker

Possessing the Secret of Joy, by Alice Walker

An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth, by Chris Hadfield

The Endurance, by Earnest Shackleton

Gulliver’s Travels, by Jonathan Swift

Roots, by Alex Haley

The Odyssey, by Homer

Crime and Punishment, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Don Quixote, by Miguel de Cervantes

American Sniper, by Chris Kyle, Jim DeFelice, and Scott McEwen

Lone Survivor, by Marcus Luttrell and Patrick Robinson

Athletes Wanted, by Chris Krause

White Like Me, by Tim Wise

Black Like Me, by John Howard Griffin

The Hunger Games books, by Suzanne Collins

The Maze Runner, by James Dashner

Pop, by Gordan Korman

THE MAN CLUB SAMPLER

The Car, by Gary Paulsen

The Rifle, by Gary Paulsen

Trapped, by Michael Northrop

Alabama Moon, by Watt Key

Dirt Road Home, by Watt Key

A Long Way Gone, by Ishmael Beah

Snitch, by Allison van Diepen

The Talk-funny Girl, by Roland Merullo

Caged Warrior, by Alan Lawrence Sitomer

Homeboyz, by Alan Lawrence Sitomer

Boot Camp, by Todd Strasser

Hole in My Life, by Jack Gantos

BOOK TALK

from Lindsay Cole (biology):

The Harry Potter series, by J.K. Rowling

The Resurrection of the Romanovs, by Greg King and Penny Wilson

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, by Rebecca Skloot

The Family That Couldn’t Sleep, by D. T. Max

from Melissa Cyr (World Studies):

First Crossing (Anthology)

The Kite Runner, by Khaled Hosseini

Unbroken, by Laura Hillenbrand

from Jason Cicero (math):

Enumeracy, by John Allen Paulos

The Visual Miscellaneum, by David McCandless

books by Roald Dahl

These books are all available at The Teacher Learning Sessions Book Store.

Browse By Category / Book Love Foundation Podcast / Episode 11

Purchases through the TLS Book Store support The Teacher Learning Sessions.

“In Lieu of Flowers…,” by Kevin Carlson

Written in memory of Suzanne J. Rood, 1935 – 2007.

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