College Ready

Sharing strategies for student success, college readiness and academic coaching

Tag Archives: books


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Books, Bedtime and Beyond: Why Family Reading Rocks

Even MORE reasons to read to a child. Reading aloud “builds a child’s WANT to read.” Think your kiddo is too old for you to read to them at bedtime? Think again. Check out the difference in a child’s interest in reading between Kindergarten and Fourth Grade! What was the key difference? Parents stopped reading to kids.

By 12th grade-only 19% of kids asked said they were interested in reading! When you consider that higher levels of college readiness are linked to reading skills, I have just one word for that statistic: Noooooooo….but what can you do about it?

One thing our family started last summer was family reading time. We picked a classic-The Wind in the Willows-and each of us would read a few pages at a time. We read it together each night and enjoyed the simplicity of the words, the comfort of the timeless message and the beauty of the illustrations. Yes, even my Minecraft lovin’ middle school boy unplugged long enough to take part! He loved doing accents and really cracked up at Toad’s antics. So get silly, have fun, and share the joy of reading at any age!! What types of family reading do you do with your kids?

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This beautiful infographic was produced by usborneusa.com and Nancy Ann Wartman

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The Fear Chronicles: Ray Bradbury and Getting Things Done*

Ray Bradbury always inspires.

Prairie L. Markussen's avatarToday's Author

Type “Ray Bradbury and quotes” into any search engine and what you’ll get is pure inspiration. From the famous sci-fi author of Fahrenheit 451 and The Martian Chronicles, you’ll find quotes about love and reading and living and rebellion and getting on with things. Quotes about imagination and exploration and dreaming.  Quotes that bring tears to the eyes with their genuine enthusiasm for life and literature.

Try these on for size:

“You must write every single day of your life… You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads… may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world.”

and

“Love. Fall in love and stay in love. Write only what you love, and love what you write. The word is love. You…

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Easiest Flowchart Ever

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This post “4 Tools to Avoid Summer Learning Loss” from Edudemic lists four tools for stopping the “summer slide.” Check it out and help kids stay on track this summer.

“Combatisummerreading1ng learning loss over the summer for young readers is a challenge that many teachers face. The amount of time it takes to assign summer reading along with the lack of face time to keep students up to date with their reading and comprehension can make summer reading seem like a less-than-useful task.”

These apps might just make the summer reading less of a chore. What do you think?


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1 Easy Way to Be a Hero

Be a Hero. Mentor a child.

Did you know…the presence of at least one caring, supportive adult in a child’s life can make all the difference?

I’m passionate about student success and educational equality. Sometimes, we look at our education system, and all we see are the broken pieces the media reports on, so we toss up our hands and say, “well what can I do, I’m just one person,”  absolving ourselves from the whole thing. But, that’s exactly right–you are ONE person and ONE person is all it takes. That’s the Power of You.

Research shows that when adults get involved to mentor and work with students, they have the power to help kids increase10573321855[1] academic achievement, stay on track, think more positively about themselves and increase their opportunities of going on to college.

Think you’re too busy to get involved? Mentoring doesn’t take as much time as you might think. It is as simple as signing up to read to a child for an hour a week. This can make all the difference in the life of an at-risk child, because statistics show us that a child that can’t read well by the end of third grade is FOUR times more likely to drop out of high school.

So, the easy way to earn your Super Hero cape? Sign up as a mentor. Help close the opportunity gap a little bit. And the funny thing is–you will end up feeling like you’re the one that was given a gift. That’s right! By helping someone else move forward a little bit…you move yourself forward.

If you don’t know where to start, try your local library or the United Way. If you already volunteer as a mentor, leave a comment and tell us what you’re involved in. If you think you might want to mentor a young person, but haven’t made the leap, what’s holding you back? I’d love to hear from you.

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Source: Double Jeopardy: How 3rd Grade Reading Scores and Poverty Influence High School Graduation

This is true!

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This is true!

Books are like oxygen.

To me, they are nothing short of life support.

Some of my favorite books to read lately are Children’s Literature. I’m rediscovering those sweet tales, and they’re the perfect reminder of all the good in the world. Books like Charlotte’s Web and The Wind in the Willows. They also remind us, that even as adults, it’s ok to smile, to have fun, to take care of your friends…and

…to Dream.

So, what are you reading?


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Always Learning

Day one. We begin.

I’m a gal from New Jersey, now located on the West Coast–teaching, raising a family, & living my dream.career passion

The theme for this blog is “Always Learning.” I’m a college English instructor and although it’s my name on the schedule where the instructor is listed, each day I learn from both my students, and my colleagues. Add in the wider academic community (ie, all of you!), via my Twitter PLN, Pinterest, teacher blogs on Tumblr, and well…the access to information, learning, and new ideas is endless. Family, friends and life are also all great teachers. I’m always learning and I love it!

For a while now, I’ve been determined to start a blog to both reflect on my own teaching, learning, writing, and reading, and to share content and ideas with others.To give back. To model the openness that is so vital in our profession. I’ve been doing this on other social media channels, and even blogging with my students, but I came late to setting up my teaching blog. (Ok, truth be told this blog has been in the planning stage for over a year! A year! Wow!) No more. Summer, sunshine and time off have given me the burst of creativity that I needed to envision and launch this new site. And here it is.

I’m passionate about student success, literacy, and educational equality. I believe in education to empower people of all ages and backgrounds,  and to save & change lives. To teach is to be a small part of this and that to me, is living my dream.  In my next post, I’ll explain how I named this blog…but here’s a hint. I’ve taught college English for 16 years in a student-centered classroom.

I’ll try to keep future posts short and sweet and end with something useful each time. Today, it’s this link to “15 Young Adult Books Every Adult Should Read.” I plan to read Feed next. How about you-have you read any of the books on this list? Which would you recommend?

Happy Summer. Happy Reading.

~Lisa