SHU Stories from the Heart

The incredible sessions that I attended this past Saturday focused on the importance of building representative, multicultural libraries or book lists, which celebrate the differences in our students and portray those differences without bias. This is a focus that is very important to me as an educator. As a white, female teacher, I do not need to look very hard to find plenty of stories, movies, and images that portray my experience. However, this is sadly not the reality for every student. In the first session I attended, our presenter Kori Krafick shared statistics compiled by the Cooperative Children’s Book Center: in 2015, 73.3% of books published depicted white characters and 14.2% depicted characters from other ethnicities. In 2019, 50% depicted white characters and 23% depicted characters from other ethnicities. The positive news is, things are changing in a big way, and representative, multicultural literature is becoming a norm embraced by every educator. In the second sessio

  It's now the twenty-first century and nearly every child, starting at the young age of twelve, seems to be carrying around a smartphone in their pockets. Go back ten years and you'd be lucky enough if you had an iPod that you were able to download your own music on, and not your mom's. Go back another ten years and well, who wants to go back to before we all had these nifty devices in our pockets. The thing is, because our students now have phones, it can be hard to keep their attention in the classroom without enforcing a strict phone policy. I know that in my high school, teachers were constantly asking students to take out their headphones and look up from their phones. So, what if teachers started to play music in the classrooms, instead of banishing it all together? Here is where things get interesting.  Whether you're teaching younger or older students, every age and grade will benefit greatly from hearing some music in the classroom. When children are young, th