On Monday, we honor all the men and women who lost their lives fighting for our country, remembering that they were not faceless soldiers but members of families, friends, colleagues.
Our BLOODLINES series follows a family through multiple wars, tracing their bloodline as different family members fight.
Let’s take a 2-minute, 21-day challenge together. And I’m not talking about the latest workout, read-a-thon, diet or detox. I’m talking about sparing a couple minutes out of your day to:
What’s the magic formula?
It’s having a positive outlook on life.
According to Shawn Achor, a psychologist and CEO of Good Think Inc., two minutes is all it takes to become a more productive and positive person.
Achor says that “90% of your long-term happiness is predicted not by your external world, but by the way your brain processes the world.” If you raise your positivity level, your brain experiences what he calls a “Happiness AdvantageTM,” meaning it performs significantly better than it does in a negative, neutral or stressed state.
When you’re in a positive mindset, your brain releases dopamine which makes you even happier, and turns on all of the learning centers in your brain.
“If we can find a way of becoming positive in the present, then our brains work even more successfully, as we’re able to work harder, faster, and more intelligently,” Achor says.
We first learned about Achor’s work from the Reading Horizons Happenings blog, which discussed how this positive psychology could help students succeed, specifically struggling readers. “These students feel defeated, self-conscious, and demotivated. Getting them to feel happy and positive is crucial for their success.”
The blog went on to say that positivity “help[s] them understand new material at a faster rate, helping boost their self-esteem and maintain a positive attitude. If you can help your struggling readers get in a positive mindset before your instruction, their cognitive abilities can be boosted by an average of 31%.”
So how can you train your brain (and your students’ too!) to be more positive? Achor recommends:
It’s just that easy. Let’s retrain our brains to be more optimistic and take the two minute challenge!
Check out Achor’s entertaining and insightful video in which he discusses the happy secret:
So let's be honest. When we were in elementary and middle school, nonfiction books were boring. The great majority of them gave names, dates, and places but lacked that storytelling quality that makes a book really engaging. These are the books that gave nonfiction the stereotype it has today—boring, dull, no-fun-to-read books.
But now it's time to break that stereotype. For years Capstone has been pushing the boundaries to create captivating, exciting, engaging nonfiction books that kids will actually love to read. Our new Spring 12 books are out, and they are packed with incredible stories, interactive mysteries, and engaging activities. I can't highlight them all here, but here is just a sample. I promise it's not the kind of nonfiction you remember!
Equipped for Battle
Spanning the wars from the American Revolution to the Iraq War, this series provides the details military enthusiasts are looking for. It also gives a great new way to explore these historic wars.
Invent It
Get inspired with this incredible set. These books invite readers to imagine, design, and engineer their own projects. The projects are attainable for kids, but more importantly the projects are FUN!
Destined for Space and Giant Squid
These two titles were created with our partner Smithsonian! Kids will be enthralled with the incredible imagery and mind-boggling facts that are packed into these titles. Even adults won't be able to put them down! (I know because I spent a whole day proofing the Space title. I just kept going back to the beginning and reading it again. I hope my boss doesn't read this. :)
Seriously True Mysteries
Smash together Encyclopedia Brown-style mysteries and real-world content and you have this set. These are so fun, kids (and adults) won't realize they're learning.
Happy nonfiction Monday!
Jen Besel
Senior Editor
We’re lucky. We often hear from librarians, teachers, and parents about how one of our books changed a child’s life – giving him or her the confidence to pick up another book, and another, and another. We even receive emails and letters from kids themselves sharing their stories.
We recently received one such email from Susan Grigsby, a middle school teacher-librarian from Georgia who wrote to us about her experience of finding the right books for one special, hard-to-reach child. She met with one of her classes and spoke about reading and how she didn’t believe that anyone could not like to read, only that they haven’t found the right book. She shared with the class a selection of books by Michael Dahl and gave particular attention to the Library of Doom and Dragonblood series. One of the students chose three books from the series to read. A few days later, Susan received this letter from him:
Dear Mrs. Grigsby,
Thank you for helping me find some interesting books now I know that reading can be fun now!!! Now when I go in the library, I know what to pick out now. I found three fantasy books. When I go home I can read it to my little brother now and when he gets to middle school he'll want to read books a lot too. I'm learning a lot from the books I got from the library. Every one in my class loves their books!!! You lighten my life now it was dark when I hated reading. Like they say out with the old and in with the new!! For this I say thank you.
Sincerely,
Ryan
It’s always gratifying for us for us to hear such heart-warming and inspiring stories, bringing home the bigger picture of what we do each day. Thank you Susan for sharing your story with us and allowing us to share it with others!
(Tony Hawk pops a Backside Ollie at DaGeDar Presents Stand Up For Skateparks, benefiting the Tony Hawk Foundation, 10/2/11, Beverly Hills, CA. Photo by J Grant Brittain. Copyright © Tony Hawk Foundation 2011.)
Over the weekend I had the opportunity to attend the Tony Hawk Stand Up for Skateparks benefit in Beverly Hills at the home of billionaire Ron Burkle. Let’s just say the experience was pretty surreal. It’s not every day that I’m at the home of a billionaire, in the midst of celebrities like Tony Hawk, Mark Wahlberg, Jamie Lee Curtis (who looks fabulous!), Jon Favreau, Olympic Gold Medalist Shaun White, NBA All-Star Bill Walton, and even the famous skateboarding bulldog Tillman, to name just a few.
A crowd of 1,000 guests, consisting of celebrities, athletes, fans, and friends, gathered to show their support at the carnival-style, family-friendly event. Tony and top skaters and BMX athletes performed a Vert Demo on Hawk’s personal ramp, indie rockers the Black Keys played, and live and silent auctions took place, featuring one-of-a-kind items like a Tony Hawk Edition Customized Ford Explorer.
The benefit raised $755,000 for the Tony Hawk Foundation’s mission to build free public skateparks in low-income areas. The skateparks provide local, at-risk youth an opportunity to participate in a fun, safe, and healthy new activity. As we all know, physical activity is more important than ever with the epidemic of childhood obesity in the United States. To date, the Tony Hawk Foundation has helped fund 493 public skateparks, serving more than 3.5 million youth annually.
Kids attending the benefit, including youth from Canoga Park, California, one of L.A.’s most challenged communities, left with backpacks filled with tons of swag, including the first book from our Tony Hawk’s 900 Revolution series Drop In. We set up a coloring/draw your own comics station in our tent area. With all of the activities going on elsewhere, I was surprised that kids were completely content to camp out in our tent and just color and draw. Two adorable little girls stayed for nearly an hour!
It was truly an exciting and rewarding experience to be a part of such a great cause. Here are a few more pics from the benefit:
(My fellow Capstone colleague Heather and I at our tent.)
(Youth from Canoga Park, CA join Tony Hawk on the Red Carpet. The Tony Hawk Foundation is supporting a skatepark project in Canoga Park. Photo by Jody Morris. Copyright © Tony Hawk Foundation 2011.)
(Tony Hawk and Jamie Lee Curtis. Photo by Jody Morris. Copyright © Tony Hawk Foundation 2011.)
I heard a concept that was foreign to me last week while watching a training video. It said that opposed to what many people believe, our own traits as children stay with us forever. That each trait is something that we’ll never grow out of and is so engrained to our personality that it only gets stronger with age. The video explained that deep inside we feel the same way we did when we were kids and if anything, it makes you more passionate about what you do, about your “super powers” as I call them, or “strengths” as everybody else does.
That thought brought me back to my childhood. I was an introvert, but yet I loved to tell stories and draw them out. I wanted to be able to tell the story more accurately to help other people get it. When I grew bigger, I started talking to my friends about what I’d dreamed the night before. I would paint scenes and color with pencils for hours, softly so there wouldn’t be any lines on the paper. I didn’t wanted people to get distracted by the lines, but to take the scene fully in. Then at age 17 I started to write. I had a stack of white paper under my bed and I would turn my light on right after my parents went to bed. My pages were fully handwritten, and my friends would borrow them to read the next day so that we could decide where the story was going from there on.
That was me as a kid and now that I think of it, that’s exactly me now. This year I got an amazing opportunity. I’m an art director, so my responsibility is the look and feel of the books, but yet, one of the people I look up to when it comes to writing, asked me if I would co-write something with her.
Beth and I came up with a super cool concept while having tea in our afternoon break. A hi-low series for girls. A story about two best friends, girls who are opposites. They fight over a boy, and one wishes the other away. We hammered out all of the details over cups of tea and coffee. And that is how Fairieground was born 9 months ago.
Beth and I have been writing, editing, art directing and designing these books together. They have some of the best parts of both of us mixed and entwined together for kids to enjoy for years to come.
Here is the cover of one of the four books, all illustrated by Odessa Sawyer. Sincerely, I would say childhood and adulthood have gone full circle. What is your story?
Kay Fraser
Art director
What are kids reading these days? Well, apparently a lot of Capstone titles according to Renaissance Learning’s 2011 annual survey “What Kids Are Reading: The Book-Reading Habits of Students in American Schools.” The survey examined the reading habits of more than 6.2 million students in grades 1-12 who read more than 192 million books over the 2009-2010 school year. Wow, that’s a lot of books!
For the third year in a row, Capstone titles dominate the lists for struggling readers! We nabbed 38 out of the top 40 spots for grades 4-5. That’s more than 30,000 struggling readers in grades 4-5 reading more than 70,000 high/low books and choosing Capstone titles more often than all others! Capstone titles also have a strong presence on the grades 6-8 and 9-12 top 40 lists for struggling readers.
So which of our titles were the most popular with struggling readers? Titles from our…
Horsepower series
Library of Doom series
That’s Disgusting series
To the Extreme series
Graphic Spin series
U.S. Armed Forces series
You can read Renaissance Learning’s full report here. If you want to learn more about our newest titles for struggling and reluctant readers attend our free webinar on Tuesday, Sept. 13th. We’ll cover all of the highlights from our fall list, plus attendees will receive 1,500 bonus points for their Capstone Rewards account (enough for a free book!).
Kids are rather self-involved by nature. We have to play peek-a-boo with them to demonstrate that the world persists even when their eyes are closed; it takes them years to understand that they can’t always get what they want; and they often play by pretending to be animals, other people, or cartoon characters.
That nature is the same reason kids gravitate toward Saturday morning cartoons and Disney movies: the characters are drawn simply so that the viewer can more easily put themselves in the character shoes. Why? Scott McCloud explains the concept in terms of identification with a smiley face: “Like the atom, great power is locked in these few simple lines… releasable only by the reader’s mind.” The simplest form of representation is there—but it’s up the reader to fill in the details.
Kids love to imagine; they love to fantasize; they thrive in situations where reality and fiction blend. Through play and imagination, they learn who they are. The more we encourage kids to exercise their creative energies and indulge in flights of fantasy, the more well-rounded they become.
Here at Stone Arch Books, we take into account the appearance and style of our illustrators when we create our graphic novels. We know that a pre-teen will identify more easily with a character like Zinc Alloy where the bare necessities of identity are present in the lines; like a coloring book, kids are impelled to saturate the character with their own ideas. We create safe comic books where kids are free to exercise and expand their minds.
Comics make it easy for kids to get interested in reading—because they can see themselves between the lines. That’s what I think, anyway. But don’t take my word for it—here’s what the New York Times best-selling author of A Game of Thrones has to say about comics…
[When I was young,] Comic books were my salvation. I read all of them I could get my hands on, and my reading got better and better, and my teachers soon began to marvel that I read with such “expression” while the rest . . . of . . . my . . . class. . . read . . . like . . . this. I could have told them the reason. You need a lot more expression for, “Aha, Superman, now my red kryptonite will turn you into a BOILED EGG!!!” than you do for, “See Spot. See Spot run. Run, Spot, run.”
- George R.R. Martin
You can lead a kid to the library, but you can’t make them read. But we strive to make it as simple as possible for kids to see themselves in our books.
Sean Tulien
Editor, Capstone Fiction
Hello everyone! I hope you’ve all been having a terrific summer and have been able to keep cool. (Careful, it’s hot out there!) Here in the Chicago office, we’re all very excited about our JUST RELEASED Fall 2011 list. Below is a round-up of some of our favorites. Get ‘em while they’re still warm off the press!
Animal Spikes and Spines
The youngest readers will love learning about different animal body parts and why they’re important to the animal’s survival in this super-cute addition to the Acorn brand.
Day in the Life: Polar Animals
Take a peek into the lives of our Arctic animal friends as you follow them around for a day. When you think about, who doesn’t want to read about (and see pictures of) baby seals, penguins, foxes, and polar bears?
Landform Adventurers
This amazing series for young reluctant readers (grades 2-4) hits on two key topics: science careers and landforms. With wonderful photography and a fun design, these books will change readers’ opinions on what it means to be scientist. It’s not boring work in a lab or library, it’s an adventure!
We’re very excited about introducing our massive countries series for grades 3-6. These beautiful, modern, and colorful books offer comprehensive coverage with an emphasis on up-to-date information and newsworthy events. Each title covers society, culture, history, economy, government, and other important information. Also included is some basic vocabulary and recipes. There are 24 titles available this season with many more to follow!
First Nations of the North America
This addition to the popular InfoSearch brand for intermediate readers offers in-depth coverage—culture, customs, ways of life, interaction with settlers, their lives today—on the first peoples who lived in various regions of the continent. All books include fascinating primary source material.
Inspiring stories of heroism and amazing courage under horribly dangerous conditions are told in these accessible, high-interest books for intermediate readers. It’s not only soldiers and pilots who are discussed, though. Children and animals get their due, too! Each book includes case studies, biographies, and statistics.
Children’s True Stories: Natural Disasters
Unbelievable yet true, these stories of real kids surviving various natural disasters will inspire and fascinate intermediate readers at any reading level. Each of the 6 titles covers survivors of a certain natural disaster. This series is part of Raintree’s accessible Perspectives brand.
Is space exploration a good value? Are planets and stars always visible? What is the Goldilocks Zone? These questions and many more are answered in this fascinating and engaging series on space. These are part of our Freestyle brand, accessible middle school curriculum content in high-interest, magazine-like package.
The Earth, Space, and Beyond series is also available in Express editions that offer the same curriculum coverage, design, and images but with differentiated text that’s been carefully tailored to a 3rd grade reading level.
Ethics of Food
A sophisticated, cross-curricular series that introduces and explains the big business of food, and how making choices at the grocery store can keep things as they are or affect real change. Each of the five books takes a look at a different aspect of the food industry and discusses the different models of production, the health, safety, and animal welfare issues involved, and what is and what is not sustainable.
This sophisticated, yet accessible series for teens covers major, often global, issues in the news. The issues explained are not always easy to figure out what’s right and what’s wrong. Real case studies on people, organizations, and company appear throughout the books and feature boxes ask tough questions that are designed to encourage debate and critical thinking.
Adam Miller, Senior Editor at Heinemann-Raintree
We’re here to give you the inside scoop on Capstone from the unique insight of editors and designers who create our books and digital products to the marketing folks who promote them and our executives who provide leadership and direction along the way. Our blog is a dialogue between you and us, and we know you’re full of a lot of exciting ideas, so please let us know what you think!
We have daily posts from different perspectives within our company:
