This blog post was written by NCTE member Nichole Folkman. It is part of Build Your Stack®, an NCTE initiative focused exclusively on helping teachers build their book knowledge and their classroom libraries. Build Your Stack provides a forum for contributors to share books from their classroom experience; inclusion in a blog post does not imply endorsement or promotion of specific books by NCTE.
Imagine for a moment a child who lives in a rural area. They cannot ride their bike or walk to their nearest neighbor’s house, let alone a town. Even if they get into their rural town, the only public entity is the post office or school. There is no library. No community center. What does this kid do all summer? What do they do over breaks? Where is their book access? Not only was this my life in my community 30 years ago, it is still the situation my students and many others face today.
Four years ago we were all suddenly trying to figure out how to be teachers from home. I was trying to figure out what it meant to be a school librarian with no access to my libraries or digital resources (or budget for them). We don’t live in a public library district, so I couldn’t connect my students with their digital resources. What could I do? I started contacting publishers and book distributors—anyone I could find an email for—and requested books to give my kids. Overstock, old Advance Reader Copies (ARCs), stuff meant for conferences that now weren’t happening. I wanted to do porch delivery of books my students could keep—birth to the seniors. The first time, it was a book or two for every kid. But as I did later deliveries, sometimes kids got as many as four books each! After five porch deliveries over about two years, I moved on to other ways of giving books to students and the larger community. A community member built Little Free Libraries (LFLs), which I keep stocked with books. I started visiting neighboring towns to stock their LFLs. I even started hosting tables at community events like 3rd Friday or Pride to give away books to people of all ages.
Since then, I’ve given away nearly 8,000 books to the community. This has been possible, in large part, to connections I have made within the NCTE community and with vendors and publishers through both in-person and virtual conferences with NCTE. Recently, through my membership and connections at NCTE and my state affiliate, Illinois Association of Teachers of English (IATE), NCTE donated nearly 3,000 amazing books to my book giveaway program which I call “Book Harts.” Many of these were ARCs that I not only give away, I also use for lessons with my library students.
One such lesson was for my third–fifth graders. They all received an ARC of Twins by Varian Johnson and Shannon Wright. ARCs are not only a great way to teach students about the publishing process, graphic novel ARCs are especially wonderful for the creation process as well. In a graphic novel ARC like Twins, students can see pages in various stages of completeness, from finalized, pages ready for coloring, and pages that are basically sketches. This invites students into the creative process and lets them see that revision is not just something teachers tell them to do. When you can compare an ARC to a finished copy, it’s all the more powerful. Getting to then keep the ARC and practice your own graphic novel creating skills from what you’ve learned? Immeasurable.
When I do community events, I get a lot of opportunities to talk to adults about their successes and concerns with their children’s reading. Seeing titles like Babysitters Club Little Sister: Karen’s Roller Skates by Katy Farina and Ann M. Martin and Animorphs: The Graphic Novel by KA Applegate, Michael Grant, and Chris Grine being adapted to graphic novels not only opens up conversations about reading nostalgia, it also provides an opportunity to discuss concerns about the reading of graphic novels that their kids do. “Are graphic novels really ok?” “Aren’t they simpler?” “Why do they need to change these books I loved when I was a kid?” I can reassure them that the brain science is very positive when it comes to reading graphic novels and that it requires more of the brain to read them. Since their kids are growing up in a digital world that requires a lot more visual literacy, graphic novels and comics are good ways to practice those skills.
I also share with the kids and their adults that novels in verse are having quite the moment now! (I hope it doesn’t stop soon!) I talk about books like Flooded by Ann E. Burg and We Are All So Good at Smiling by Amber McBride with them. Many adults fondly recall historical fiction from their own childhoods. Being able to book talk to their kids about how they can use these books to see into an event in history they may have never known or to see into a life or perspective that may not be like their own is so powerful. In a time when adults are hearing so many scary messages about books, being able to have one-on-one conversations with someone about what’s going on in books and publishing can seem like too small a thing, but every single conversation counts. Not only does their kid get to grow their library and read an amazing new book, maybe now that adult will remember that conversation when they’re at a school board meeting or at the coffee shop or on socials.
If you’d like to donate books or just learn more, feel free to email me or reach me on Instagram: @NicholeReadsTheLibrary.
Nichole Folkman teaches at the same school from which she (and many family members) graduated. It’s a rural school where she serves as the librarian for ECE–grade 12 and has been working to read the entire elementary library collection. She also serves as the Readers’ Choice Chair for Illinois.
It is the policy of NCTE in all publications, including the Literacy & NCTE blog, to provide a forum for the open discussion of ideas concerning the content and the teaching of English and the language arts. Publicity accorded to any particular point of view does not imply endorsement by the Executive Committee, the Board of Directors, the staff, or the membership at large, except in announcements of policy, where such endorsement is clearly specified.