For the Love of teaching is a podcast brought to you by teach starter. We save teachers hours each week by bringing them quality downloadable teaching resources for their classrooms to make your classroom Buzz go to teach stutter.com Megan daily is an incredible teacher. I first met Negan many years ago. When our eldest children who are now Twins were just babies on the sunny back deck of a mutual friend's place. I followed her musings about education and a passionate riding on children's literature arm on her blog children's books daily with Keen interest ever since Megan was recently awarded the Queensland teacher librarian of the Year by the school Library Association of Queensland. I sat with Megan to chat about Book raising readers and how to nurture a love of reading in our students so welcome to For the Love of teaching Megan. Thank you for joining me. Thank you for having me. It's lovely to see you here. You've been a teacher for two decades either over and a parent of Book Lovers for one. How was your oldest daughter now? My eldest is 11. Oh, yeah. So we're hitting those tween years which are a 11 is the new 13 apparently all no, don't tell me that. Yeah, it's not pleasant. But I rolling and you have some very enviable an amazing Connections in the literary world with some really noteworthy Ozzy authors. Well, I think actually them as author or authors and illustrators has celebrity. So, you know, yes, you fly all over the until and girl. Yeah, so then it seems like it's a natural progression for you to write your own book, which is exactly what you've done and raising readers is your brand-new book. Yeah. She yeah, and it's all about how to get kids to love reading and I really can't think of anyone better to write the book on that. Then yourself a teacher librarian someone who is so passionate about literature literacy kids. Your own family is a family of Book Lovers. Yeah, but you've also run your own successful blog children's books daily are many many years and what prompted you to take your writing offline and into onto the page and write a book. Well I started My blog about six or seven years ago now so my blog just has reviews and teaching tips and teachers notes for books and that sort of thing and I absolutely loved it and that has led to some speaking engagements. So I've done quite a lot of speaking for local city council libraries and have been invited into schools and childcare centers to talk to mainly to parents and sometimes to Educators about instilling a love of reading and young children and then all about Three years ago someone in the industry. I admire very very much Christina shuls who's a publisher of children's and it ya books at uqp. She came along to one of my talks and it was the worst event. I have ever done in my life bro. No horrific. I had done events all that week and there was between sort of 50 and 70 people at each of them and I turned up at this particular event and they clearly forgotten to advertise. It was for people there. Oh and and I just wanted to crawl under a rock and and they had they just had an Advertiser. So there was black literally nobody there bit like Christina Scheels was there this publisher and I knew exactly who she was I was mortified. Anyway we go ahead and at the end of the event she said, oh, that's really good. I said not once and it was horrific. She said no. No, that was really good. If you ever thought about writing a book and I said, no I said, I know I know I can't write and she said actually you can write you write a blog. Yeah. I said, yes, but that's just me. Looking into cyberspace not entirely sure if anybody is reading it that's a different thing. Anyway, we sort of left the conversation there. I kind of went and don't be ridiculous and walked off and but we talked over the next six months or so about that idea and I kept saying no, my biggest thing was despite being a primary school teacher. I am a child of my excuses. I'm a child of the 80s I learnt I went to school in the whole language phase my understanding of Grammar and punctuation is reasonably limited. My strategy with apostrophes is to throw them in a computer screen and hope some you know, it's the land. Yeah, right space. Yeah, I just kept saying don't be ridiculous. I can't write a book. But Christina assured me that that's what these editors for and she just you know continued to kind of have this conversation with me. She said she wanted my teacher librarian brain and my primary school teacher brain in a book and eventually a good friend of mine Rebecca Sparrow who is also an author. She said to me look, If you don't write this book They're going to get someone else to do it. You're not going to be happy with it and just do it and my husband and I and my father had been I've been tossing up doing a PhD and nobody thought that was very good idea. So I thought I'm going to give a book ago. So I eventually agreed and thus started the process. So yeah, and you had all of that experience amazing knowledge. The content was just probably just filled to the brim in your brain and read down to the pay, but it's very difficult. Current when you know something but you are being able to articulate that to a whole new audience is you don't know what you know until you start writing and you also don't know what other people want to know necessarily so I found the editing process and the process of working with the team at uqp really interesting. They are not teachers. So they were coming at it from the perspectives of Publishers, but also parents themselves, so What they wanted to know, I would sometimes think was common sense and then like yet, but other people don't know that so I think sometimes as teachers we don't know what we know until somebody asks us that question. Yeah, and so that can be kind of challenging you're trying to create content for a whole nonfiction 70s a thousand words. So it's quite 20,000. Oh my gosh. I've got it right here. I ripped through it because I'm a parent and a teacher and I just thought this is going to be amazing at people have been raving about it in just anecdotally from me in my Circles of friends mothers groups teachers. So highly recommend it. My favorite part of the book is the reading lists. Oh, yeah got in there because even though some of the stuff we tend to know or the theory side of things. I think with teachers you learn things you remember them for a time and then other more important things or not more important things but more current things happen. Absolutely forget the knowledge. So just a refresher. Yeah, we good. I think that's what I wanted to do. Because again as teachers, we are across particularly as I'm early childhood trying to regionally but as Primary School teachers were really across such a range of subjects and we can't be experts in all of them all of the time but I wanted my book to be it's aimed at parents and Educators and for educators. I wanted it to be a reminder of the incredible importance of instilling a joy of reading in small children. We get very caught up in the curriculum. Mmm, based, you know, which is incredibly important but we do as teachers get caught up in what needs to be covered in the curriculum in terms of reading. I just wanted my book to be a reminder that our joy around reading is also key in developing lifelong readers. And that's what we want. We want children who will leave primary school as readers so that they will go on to be adults that read because we know that those who read you know, obviously they perform better academically. There's lots of Search around Raiders performing well academically, but we also want to develop in children kindness compassion and empathy and I can't think of a better way to do that than through Reading really good quality books. So with the lists in the book, then I decided that I wouldn't include like you're not going to find The Very Hungry Caterpillar for example, which is a fabulous book on one of my all-time favorites, but everybody knows it. Yeah. So I've tried to include books in in the lists which are slightly unusual ones that perhaps teachers aren't Going to come across because for example and I hope she won't listen but we've got a teacher at school who has done space demons for many many years, which is brilliant book by Jillian Rubenstein, but I think that there's other science fiction texts, which are more contemporary and perhaps more suited to Children these days and just a little bit more current which could also be done. So I've tried to include current books, which is slightly unusual ones and I've done them in genres and I've done them in a Age groups and interest group. I love that. It's so good to even just broaden the variety. Do you think that the Advent of tablets apps smartphones BYOD schools that kind of thing has affected the literacy rate or the love of reading in Aussie kids in recent probably the last decade look I as a teacher librarian, I obviously love print books, but I also adore technology and I work I have them really fortunate to have an amazing teaching partner who I refer to on my social. Well media is hashtag best teaching partner ever and she's got a Blog called tinkering challenge. He's heavily into technology and we're a nice balance of reading and technology in our job and I actually have come to realize that if any think technology has just added to the reading landscape. So I think there's a lot of children who maybe wouldn't have become readers who have fallen into stories and fallen into words through good Technologies. Now that might be children who have reading difficulties like those with dyslexia and there's lots of dyslexic friendly fonts on tablets and so forth. You can buy different versions of books electronically or it might just be reluctant readers who for whatever reason find a tablet device more they like the interactivity of it. They like being able to make the fonts larger or smaller. And I also think that audio books have been an incredible incredible, you know. Technology to use with with young people audiobooks allowed children to hear an incredible range of vocab that they wouldn't otherwise here and our spoken language is you know, when you and I are having a conversation that's a fairly informal language. The language in books is much more formal and I think that audio books have been amazing for young children of today. So no, I don't think and you know, there's lots of research that you know, and we did see early on that. There was a bit of a decline Writing print books when e devices and e-readers and so forth came out, but now the research is saying but a lot of children and young adults are going back to print books and I've certainly seen that in my own Library, you know ebooks were just the biggest thing ever when they first arrived and now actually my not borrowed very much at all. So kind of viewing the technology as a supplement or as a side by side side by side and it's all about Balance isn't it? You know, I you know, it's about balancing our own lives as well. I have a tendency and I'm sure I've got RSI in my Instagram thumb, but you know, I know in my own life as an adult who loves to read as well. I have to make choices sometimes I'm not going to go on social media. I'm going to read instead and we as the parents and the educators of children need to make those decisions for them. We need to talk about balance of technology and print books and you know, but I think they can Side-by-side situation and I think that sometimes we want to read electronically. Sometimes we want to listen to audio. There's some great apps around books. Sometimes we might want to have a more game based experience of reading. They're all legitimate forms of reading but it's just all about balance. Yeah great and isn't that just the key to life really low out? We Educators we often teaching children to self moderate. Yes to make decisions and that kind of thing. So when it comes to Literature, I guess it's just another another channel for that. It isn't making learning. Yeah, we were just talking about with apps and tablets and things like that reluctant readers and we often get a lot of questions at teach starter. How do I engage my reluctant Learners particularly from beginning and establishing teachers who that might be a challenge in their classroom that they hadn't considered at University. Do you think that nature versus nurture comes into play when it comes to a child's disposition? Into some kids just from the get-go. Are they more open to a love of reading than others and or does it come from like the family culture the education and the the early years of their life. Look I think we can clearly say and I know from when I was teaching in early childhood, I could have pointed out to the children who were read to from birth. So it mildly oh absolutely my book sort of takes you on a journey from birth into the Young. Years of reading and I say in there that it's really important to read to children from birth and immerse them in the beauty of language just like we know that song and music is really important for babies and they love it. So to the sound of an adult a loved or trusted adult reading to a child is also very soothing and really beautiful quality writing has got a real Rhythm to it and those children who have been read to from birth. Look I I can pick them in a classroom that they do. Yeah, they just are familiar with the way books work. However, having said that I think there's some Educators out there who maybe don't know it but who have ignited a love of reading in their students. It is never too late to fall into reading and with reluctant readers. I just think that we we as Educators need to be so careful and I I know I very sadly have heard teachers over the years say things like or they're just not a reader or maths is really their strength and they don't really want to read but you know, could you find the book about you know sport or whatever they're interested in. I think we as Educators need to be really careful about how we talk about the students in our classes and how we view them. I really firmly believe that every single child deserves an identity as a reader. That doesn't mean that every child is Going to choose reading over playing soccer. But I think that the soccer player can have as an identity as a reader as much as the kid that's in the library every lunchtime and I do have a lot of those but you know, I think we as parents and Educators. We need to be very careful about how we support and nurture a love of reading in every single child. We all need to learn how to read and you know, so long as there's no diagnosed or diagnosable literacy issues every child will learn to read eventually and I think you know Educators shouldn't underestimate the power that they can have. I think it's incredibly important with reluctant readers that Educators model their own love of reading we used to do and we don't do it so much anymore because the curriculum is so crowded but we used to do, you know silent reading after lunch. Yep classroom teachers used to have a chapter. The go all the time that they would read to their classes. It doesn't happen so much anymore because the curriculum so crowded. Oh absolutely but you know, I think that there's other ways to look at it in this day and age at school. Now, we do something called mindful reading mindfulness has become such a big thing in education and we've got quite a heavy focus on it at the school at which I work and we've done quite a lot of Might talking about mindfulness as a means of brain training and a means of focusing on one thing at a time and a me. Means of having a little bit of time out from the busyness of your day. So we've actually done I'm the teacher librarian at Saint Aidan's and we have done lots of talking about how reading is a mindful activity because you can't be doing anything else and you can escape into story and we've done mindfulness activities which are little scripts that we read out and then we do some mindful reading we've now taken that into the classrooms as well and we talked about reading as a mindfulness activity. So we've gone back Almost to that idea of Silent reading but we call it mindful reading and it's an expectation that the teachers do it as well. So the teachers and I and the students all will sit and read for 20 minutes. So you have a your own taxi or reading that is of interest to you. Absolutely and they all have that's amazing because I remember when I was in Primary School silent reading it was the highlight of my day, but my teacher would use that time as like non-contact time that's easily running around. I'm trying to get everything done and you be kind of like I was the type of child that would take that into account and that's not being really mindful. You can't really get into the story line. If you're watching somebody hurry around trying to get everything there haven't done in 15 minutes done. And that's what we as teachers at school of talked about. Yeah, 22 years of teaching. I've never sat and read in front of a class and neither of any of the other teachers, but we've actually found it really great and a lot of we've had some great conversations about what the teachers have been reading often not appropriate. But you know, we've been reading things like some of the teachers were reading educated recently and they talk to the students about how they were reading a book about education and how stressful it is to be a teacher. Yeah, so it's been really good. We've had good book conversations and it has been I think we've all found it a very refreshing time and we're not taking away from curriculum time because well, I'm sorry but literacy should be included in, you know, all of you know, that's a time of literacy anyway, but also where look I'm kicking off some Boxes in our social emotional learning curriculum because we've been looking at mindfulness and you know coming down our minds and our bodies. So it's been it's been great for us at school. That sounds like a really cool use of time and reading and literacy should be kind is an overarching theme in primary education because Works its way into all of the klas. You can't teach it in a bubble or a vacuum and it's not in isolation. So that seems like a really logical Way to teach it now. I have noticed also this current trend of mindfulness because on our website where we create resources that teachers there is always a really high demand for resources surrounding mindfulness, and we have a lot of reading resources, but I have not seen actually an overlap of those which seems like a really great idea. So in your book The mindfulness chapter is chapter 12. Okay, and I worked with on that chapter a lady who runs a program called. Peace. For kids Georgina Manning wrote me some an excerpt for the book on mindfulness and how it connects with reading. So I think it apps that reading is absolutely a mindful activity anything that helps a child to find their flow whether that be gardening or reading or maybe even kicking a ball is a mindful activity. Yes, exactly. So possibly changing the mindset when it comes to mindfulness about what that can in walk and what it can look like. Yeah, you are just Full of knowledge and passion about reading and it's been so lovely talking to you. Yeah, so thank you so much for joining me clean really really nice to talk to you. I could talk about children's books and literacy and literature all day. So I really really enjoy doing things like this and I'm so grateful that there's podcasts like yours that are reaching Educators because I think that educators are so busy and it's just sometimes I enjoy the opportunity to give a reminder to everybody about the Hortense of reading. Thank you very much Megan. Thank you. Visit Megan's website children's books daily to buy the book join a course see Megan speak or book her for your own event. Thanks for listening to this episode of For the Love of teaching. Don't forget to subscribe on your favorite podcast app so that you get the latest updates on all the newest episodes.
Megan Daley is an incredible teacher. Originally qualified as an Early Childhood teacher, Megan then studied to become a teacher librarian and later attained her Masters of innovative teaching and learning. She’s currently the teacher librarian at St Aidan’s Anglican Girls School in Brisbane, Queensland.Megan was recently awarded the Queensland Teacher Librarian of the Year by the School Library Association of Queensland and is a former national vice-president of the Children's Book Council of Australia, she is on the Queensland chapter of the board of the Australian Children's Laureate and on the Publications Committee of the National Library of Australia.Megan’s also mum to two delightful girls, and has just published her first book, Raising Readers, How to Nurture a Child’s Love of Books (She says sleep is overrated).I sat with Megan to chat about her book, and how to nurture a love of reading in our students.Join us in our new For the Love of Teaching Facebook group, where we chat about the podcast, feature live vids of guests, and talk teaching!Have you subscribed to For the Love of Teaching? Don't forget! It means you'll be the first to know whenever a new episode is released.For the Love of Teaching is a podcast by Teach Starter. We make quality, downloadable teaching resources that save teachers hours of time and make their classrooms buzz! 