Emily Dickinson said, “We turn not older with years, but newer every day.” Whether you agree with this sentiment or not, 2023 is the rearview mirror, and 2024 is here, bringing with it new possibilities. With all of this mind, PW connected with teachers and librarians about their new plans for the new year.
Caitlin “Cait” O’Connor is an eighth grade ELA teacher at Hommocks Middle School in Larchmont, N.Y. She recently received an Educator Award at the NCTE Conference for her outstanding language arts and literacy work. These efforts include her curriculum building and involvement with after-school clubs, from the Gay Straight Alliance, to Anti-Bias and Racist Education, and the American Sign Language Club. O’Connor has always been passionate about social justice inside and outside her classroom. And it’s not a surprise that she found herself in eighth grade again.
“Eighth grade was simultaneously the worst and the best year of my life,” O’Connor said. “It’s no accident that I landed here as a teacher, because I’ve been given the chance to be the same teacher that saved my life. It’s such an honor to be that person for a kid who’s going through hell.”
This upcoming year, she said she’s especially “stoked” about where she’ll be taking her social justice unit. “The unit is called We Are Our History, and is seen from the lens of James Baldwin’s quotation, ‘We carry our history with us. We are our history!’ We talk about how history lives inside of each of us, and how the generational stories we carry can teach us how to do better—and to treat each other better,” O’Connor said.
She has built the unit around To Kill a Mockingbird, and will be adding other texts, including The Life and Crimes of Hoodie Rosen by Isaac Blum, a contemporary title addressing antisemitism, and others that will help her book clubs frame conversations on racism, Islamophobia, ableism, and queerphobia. “These books will show us what work we still have to do,” O’Connor said. “I’m looking forward to the expansion of titles that respond to social injustices in real time and that encourage my kids to think—but not in silence.”
Another of her passion projects for the new year is a unit of study for teachers about ways to promote body acceptance in their classrooms. “I’m teaching a crash course on how the diet culture, anti-fat bias, and weight stigma influence our school communities, and the ways that that bias may be pervasive in our own classroom spaces, whether or not we are aware,” O’Connor said.
Her awareness of this issue comes from a personal place. O’Connor has experienced weight fluctuations, been treated differently because of her size, and dealt with anorexia. She hopes to pass along her lessons to help teachers support their students, just as her teachers did for her. “Ultimately, what teachers and students need to learn is that no matter whose stories we’re studying, whatever you think about how a person got here, or who they are, where they come from, what they did, or what you think they deserve, they are a human being. And, at the end of the day, that is how you should see and treat them.”
As a librarian with the Orland Park Public Library in Orland Park, Ill., Fanny Camargo helps kids, parents, and families through her reader advisory and family and bilingual story times. She’s always looking for new books and creating displays, program ideas, activities, and craft kits to help promote reading in her community. Camargo believes that all of this innovation starts with the careful curating of books and other resources, meeting her readers’ needs, and anticipating them, too.
In 2024, she’s especially looking forward to creating a “mysterious” book list for her early elementary readers and their parents. “Over this past year, there have been a lot of parents asking about what books they could read aloud as the Mystery Reader in their children’s classrooms.” Camargo said, “I’ve always suggested some books, and parents have come back to say that the students loved the book, their kids were so happy, and thanked me for such great recommendations. So, I got the idea to pull together a list of books and plan a rotating display available throughout the year.
To make her new list, she’ll take into consideration the age, attention spans, and interests of her younger readers, and chooses titles that are highly interactive for these parent-led storytimes.“My favorites include Duck! Rabbit! by Amy Krouse Rosenthal and anything by Mo Willems,” Camargo said.
She also makes sure to include diverse books, social justice titles, and books by local authors for her family and bilingual storytimes. In addition, she has multiple copies on hand of engaging board books so parents and babies can snuggle, read, and bond together.
Another project on Camargo’s 2024 calendar is a collaboration with the local Girl Scout troops on their summer reading project. As a scout leader, Camargo will be tying in the new year’s Girl Scout cookie program theme, “Own Your Magic,” and its axolotl mascot by helping them find books about unusual animals, the environment, and conservation.
“Several troops will be working on their Outdoor Journey Badge, which will include studying animals, animal habitats, and how to protect them,” Camargo said. “The Girl Scouts do so much wonderful work, and our library is definitely a place where we can support them and help them find the resources they need.”
The library’s upcoming summer reading program theme, “Read, Renew, Repeat,” will integrate some of these topics, too. She looks forward to seeing the scouts make new discoveries that might open up their hearts and minds to help animals, their habitats, and the planet. “With books and the library, there is always something new to learn,” she said.
Camargo believes that new ideas and initiatives are essential to the library and the community’s growth. “As our readers grow and our world keeps constantly changing, the library has to be a dynamic environment where we’re always coming up with new ideas and finding new resources to offer. That’s because it’s one of the last places where you can find free information, resources, and education, and one of the only places where you can learn and grow.”
Steve Tetreault is a veteran teacher and current school media specialist as well as a seventh-grade gifted teacher at William R. Sachs Middle School in Holmdel, N.J. He couldn’t wait to make the switch from the classroom to the library because of his deeply held belief about libraries. “The library is the best, and maybe, the last place for authentic learning in schools, because students are there to engage in inquiry and aren’t being forced into taking tests or following a particular curriculum,” Tetreault said.
As part of his seventh-grade gifted inquiry seminars, he’s always ordering new books and adding new resources to the library and putting new spins on lessons that he hears about while hosting his podcast or researching the blog posts he writes for fellow school librarians, and devising new lessons of his own.
He’s especially excited about his lesson on creating hexaflexagons,
a paper hexagon that is folded from strips of paper. He got the idea from a student who brought in a video about them. “It’s basically a way of folding paper into a flat hexagon shape that you can twist, turn, and rotate in such a way that one side becomes the other side; but if you have enough triangles, and turns, and folds, you can make one that has three sides!” Tetreault plans on introducing the concept by first having his students research what a hexaflexagon is, who invented it, and then he’ll “give them a pile of paper and let them go!”
Another of Tetreault’s goals for the new year is to switch up his book talks by using “weird and unusual” nonfiction titles. He was inspired by a school librarian friend, Christie Holcomb, who has used Does It Fart? by Nick Caruso and Dani Rabaiotti with her students. He also plans on using engaging science, history, and sports books—as well as more serious nonfiction titles, too. “I’ve been doing quite a few talks about books on Japanese incarceration camps. There’s a huge selection of graphic novels on the topic right now,” Tetreault said. “Books like these allow kids to think about different perspectives and see things in different ways, because that’s how we build empathy, which we need a lot more of these days.”
This is why he believes kids need to be encouraged to read widely and deeply, and for teachers and librarians to focus less on what’s “age or school appropriate” and more on what he calls “developmentally relevant” books. “A lot of kids develop at different rates,” Tetreault said, “and some kids have really tough things going on in their lives. These books let them read to see how other people deal with these situations, find themselves, and know that they are not alone.”
Tetreault said he looks forward to supporting his students along the road ahead. “The new year is a great chance to start something new, to give the kids, and teachers, a new way to look at school and to do something different that will kick us off into the year that is rolling towards us.”
