RAE’S READS

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This year (2025) finds me with 53 years of teaching “under my belt.” I have taught all levels from pre-K “(library lady” or “book lady”–volunteer) to juniors, seniors, and graduate students enrolled in my Advanced Writing class at the university where I have just completed 34 years. My first paying teaching job was junior high, and I spent 13 years with ages 12-13, the “difficult years.” I had some of the “funnest” experiences with this age group. When I was no longer the “young, fun teacher,” I taught in an elementary school setting before sixth graders went on to junior high, teaching language arts blocs, an assignment that was a “dream-fit” for me. After completing graduate school in my 40s, I went on to community college, then university teaching. This past fall I accepted a part-time teaching job at Apogee Gulf Coast Schools in its first year at the Alvin campus. After my Better Half died n 2022, I achieved a lifelong dream: opening a bookstore of my own, Rae’s Reads. A year later, I sold the house we had lived in for 47 years and moved into the bookstore. My goal is to circulate and repurpose books. Just as teaching is “in my blood,” so is a passion for reading, writing, libraries, and everything bookish. This blog will be open to anyone who loves books, promotes literacy and wants to “come out and play.”

  • EVEN MORE FROM MEM

    Rae Longest's avatarLiteracy and Me

    Mem Fox, well-known literacy activist and author, describes in Chapter 6 of her book, Reading Magic, what a good read-aloud session “looks” like: “When I see a read-aloud session in my mind’s eye, there’s either an adult sitting in a big old chair or on a sofa, with a child on the adult’s lap or snuggled up close, sharing a book, or an adult sitting or lying on a bed with a child tucked in, wide-eyed, as stories are being read. And the experience is always fantastic.”

    ( Fox, Mem, , Reading Magic,  Chapter Six: “And Do It Like This. )

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  • MORE FROM MEM ​, Words of Wisdom from Mem Fox, Part II/READING MAGIC

    Rae Longest's avatarLiteracy and Me

    Chapter five from Reading Magic by Mom Fox describes starting to read aloud to one’s baby. “The best time to start reading aloud to a baby is the day it is born. The lilting rhythm of a simple bedtime book on that first thrilling, exhausting day is soothing for the tremulous parents and the new child and adds to the bonding between them. It gives them something to “talk about” together. And much to the surprise of most adults, babies love books. They respond to the brightness of the pictures, to the rhythm of the words, and to the presence of a loving adult.”

    ***************************************

    “With babies, it doesn’t even have to be a children’s book that we read. One of my teacher education students had a baby she hadn’t planned who arrived at an awkward time in her college course. Obviously, this cut down on the time she had available…

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  • COMING ATTRACTIONS

    Here are some plans I have for this blog:

    1. A guest post from a first grader in a bi-lingual class (hopefully with a translation and comment about the author from her teacher.)
    2. To discontinue The Sunday (Evening) Post. Sunday is either a day of rest or the busiest day of my week; therefore it is not a good day post on. Also, there is no way I can keep up with what I have read, am reading, and hope to read.  I’m abandoning my life as a confirmed “planner,” and assuming a more spontaneous outlook to life! LOL
    3. Either a Thursday Thoughts or a Monday Musings post once each week.
    4. Some “fun” posts.
    5. A bit of poetry, not my own, but others’.
    6. If you have suggestions, let me know!

    THANKS!

  • SATURDAY MORNING FOR KIDS

    Today’s recommendation is not a book kids can read, but one which adults will love to read to their kids or grandkids.  It is 288 pages, so it should be taken on as a long-time project, but adults will be tempted to read ahead.  The Odessa Chronicles by Carolyn Shelton and Colin Chappell (a blogging friend) is a must-read for adults who remember childhood on a farm and for children who are fascinated by animals. The main characters, Oddessa, “a Barn Owl with an attitude”; Jaxton, a magical Jackalope; Dewey, a cat with”the usual cat characteristics;” and the man-servant, Joshua Pebblestone are unforgettable. The adventures that transpire are warm, funny, and provide “teachable moments” for adults and “life lessons” for children.

    I enjoyed reading the book and highly recommend it. Look for a longer review on this blog soon.

  • THE ANNE LAMOTT MINI-CHALLENGE

    I have made my own, personal book challenge, to read all of Anne Lamott’s writings. Those who have been inspired, uplifted, comforted, challenged or angered by her essays will automatically understand why I would want to do this. For readers new to Lamott, your challenge/mission (“should you accept it”) is to try one book of her essays and “pick a book, any book.”

    Our local library had Lamott’s 2007 edition of Grace (Eventually), subtitled, “Thoughts on Faith” in large print.  Who among you wouldn’t pick it up as a good place to start my challenge? The back of the book reads as follows:

    “The world, the community, the family, the heart: these are the beautiful and complicated arenas in which our lives unfold. Wherever you look, there’s trouble and wonder, pain and beauty, restoration and darkness.  Yet if you look carefully, in nature or in the kitchen, in ordinariness or in mystery, beyond the emotional muck we all slug through, you’ll find it eventually: a path, some light to see by, in other words, grace.  Here, Anne Lamott describes how she copes with the missteps, detours, and roadblocks in her walk of faith.”

    Having recently dealt with a few issues of faith, this was the book that perhaps could strengthen mine. I loved and plan to steal her description of how she taught a children’s Sunday school class using The Wailing Wall in Jerusalem as a way to write our worries out as prayer requests on a slip of paper as a way of “Letting go.” The children had many “worries” to record, and when Lamott asked the assistant teacher if she had anything to add, the assistant said, “Maybe turning things over is not the solution to everything, but…You do what you can.  Then you get out of the way  because you’re not the one who does the work.” This is just one example of something that set me to thinking in these very readable essays.

    I am undertaking other challenges and interests currently, so I am not setting a due date or a time limit on when I hope to complete my reading of Lamott; besides, she just keeps writing.

  • TUESDAY TEASER

    On Saturday Morning for Kids, I posted that I was finally reading the award-winning, Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry by Mildred D. Taylor.  Since I haven’t finished it, I thought I’d take today’s teaser from the same book, showing how well the author writes tense, action scenes. Cassie, the protagonist, and her family have heard in town that ” ‘They’ are riding tonight.” Although the children do not know who ‘they’ are, they see that their mother and grandmother are taking precautions to defend themselves.

    [In the night,]” I started to climb back up onto the porch, but froze as a caravan of headlights appeared suddenly in the east, coming fast along the rain-soaked road like cat eyes in the night… The lead car swung into the muddy driveway and a shadowy figure outlined by the headlights of the car behind him stepped out. The man walked slowly up the drive.  I stopped breathing.”

    “They” in the story have discovered that the “Logan kids” had been responsible for causing the white kids’ bus, which often deliberately splashed Cassie and her brothers to skid off the roadway, breaking an axle and making the white kids have to walk to their school too. Cassie and her brothers are not troublemakers or bad kids, but they feel fiercely the injustice dealt to them during the Great Depression in the rural South.

     

  • SATURDAY MORNINGS FOR KIDS

    Today’s choice, a winner of the Newberry Medal in 1977, and nominated for the National Book Award, is a “classic” I’d heard about and even recommended to my junior high students during the 70s. Ironically enough, I’d never read it until this week. Mildred D. Taylor’s Roll of Thunder Hear My Cry bears a cover that would attract anyone, child and adult alike.  There is a young African American girl in bib-overalls holding tightly to two younger boys as flames and fire threaten the place where they are standing, their house.

    I have just begun reading, enjoying the author’s fine writing style as she describes the three Logan children joining other children on their long, dusty trek to their first day of school.  Once there, by “showing, not telling”, she makes clear the inequality of education of the black and white students. The cover blurbs inform me that the story is set in the Great Depression in the deep South. I hope to read it tonight and tomorrow, then place it in my Little Free Library. The sun is supposed to come out Sunday after several days of cold, rainy and overcast weather. Perhaps families will be taking “after-Sunday-dinner” walks and will stop off to get choose a book for the evening.

  • LAST CENTURY PREDICTIONS ABOUT EDUCATION: HAVE THEY COME TRUE?

    Rae Longest's avatarLiteracy and Me

    I recently read a fun read titled, YourFlyingCarAwaits, by Paul Milo. It was full of predictions about what life would be like in the twenty-first century. One chapter dealt with how technological advances had already influenced education and which predictions made last century had or had not come true. After dealing with predictions made decades ago about what education and student knowledge and intelligence would be like in the twenty-first century, Milo presents some interesting developments.

    “In fact, at least in America, academic performance is, by many estimates, worse today than it was a generation ago–and it’s certainly not true to say that the typical high school junior in 2009 (year book was published) would be considered as bright as the brightest of forty years ago.

    “Nor has a university education become compulsory, although many more people attend college today than in the late 1960s. Ultimately, however, the progress…

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  • FIRST LINE FRIDAYS

    I checked out Ann Lamott’s Grace (Eventually): Thoughts on Faith from our local library yesterday and read these first lines this morning:

    Quote: “Where is the Life we have lost in living”?–T.S. Eliot

    Prelude: “There is not much truth being told in the world. There never was. This has proven to be a major disappointment to some of us. When I was a child, I thought grown-ups and teachers knew the truth, because they told me they did. It took years for me to discover that the first step in finding out the truth is to begin unlearning almost everything adults had taught me, and start doing all the things they’d told me not to do.”

    This promises to be a great set of essays from one of my favorite writers.

  • TUESDAY TEASER

    My teaser today comes from The Quiet Child, a suspense novel by John Burley, which I am reading as my “Q” title in my Alphabet Challenge.

    Both of his sons, Sean, and Danny, the younger child who does not speak and is referred to by people in his small town as “the quiet child,” were stolen/kidnapped (?) when a man stole Michael’s car when he walked into a store to pick up ice cream. Michael tells the police that he has not heard from the “kidnapper,” but borrows his sister-in-law’s car and takes off for parts unknown. As Michael, the boys’ father, takes things into his own hands, he approaches a freeway exit at the beginning of chapter 18:

    “It was eight-thirty in the morning when Michael exited the highway, turned right onto NF-742, and then left onto Butcherknife Road.  He’d spent the night in the car in Grants Pass, and drove the twenty minutes to Wilderville, as soon as he woke. He should’ve eaten and picked up supplies–a canteen and a hunting knife at least– before starting out. It would’ve been wiser.”

    Does the quiet, younger brother Danny bring on sickness and bad happenings as the rumour about town goes? Will the townspeople “do something” about the threat from the child? Who has taken the two boys, and why? Will MIchael, their father, kill whoever has abducted his sons? Will their frail mother, who has been cursed with a “wasting disease” since Danny’s birth survive this most recent ordeal?

    I am anxious to read more to answer these questions.