This post originally appeared on the Engage/Teacher to Teacher blog in October 2011.

October has always had a certain charged energy for me. It’s a month of change and of hidden things. In a New England October, change is right in your face; we vault from shorts weather and a vivid re-greening after August’s heat to a riot of colored leaves, and from there to bare branches poking at a gray sky.

The beginning of October is summer; the end is nearly winter. It’s a condensed soup of seasons. There’s something which awakens you, makes you alert, the way the shift of wind before a thunderstorm does. Maybe this is the instinct of ancient humans who had better have plenty of food stored away by now, or be on their way to warmer places.

But for me, all through the month, October’s change and alertness are tuned to the holiday of hidden things: Halloween.

When I was a boy, we plotted our Halloween costumes for weeks—how do you build an extra set of arms that will move along with your real ones? Can I walk three miles on homemade stilts? Does this look scary? Friends competed to come up with the most creative costumes—ones that would completely erase their identities. Look—is that an old man? No, it’s Tom! The more wildly creative you were with your costume, the better.

Halloween night was the rustle of frost-crisped leaves underfoot in the dark, our faces damp with hot breath behind masks, and tiny eyeholes which limited our sight. It was a swinging, candy-heavy pillowcase—not a paper bag, because dew melted the bottoms of paper bags as we crossed dark yards to get to the next pool of light at the next front door. Then we’d have to fish around in cold, wet leaves for all of our fallen treasure, and we knew we’d miss some.

Halloween was the uneasy moment of meeting a group of strange and unearthly characters out on the road somewhere, away from the safety of our homes, with each group asking the other, “Who is that?” We’d laugh with relief when we found out: It’s just them.

Halloween seemed to be a kind of demarcation line between exciting things and dreary things. The Jack o’ Lantern morphed from a toasty-smelling fantasy one night to a slimy, sagging wreck the next.

After Halloween came November, gray November. As squirrels fabricated masses of leaves high in trees in which to over-winter; we went indoors. There was a feeling of settling in for the cold season, of digging in to our own burrows. Cold nights and heavy blankets. Indoors to me also meant burrowing farther into my own thoughts. It was a nesting time, a settling in time—and a settling in to what?

A good book, a good story to think about, and time to sketch and write.

Like most children, I liked finding places to hide: a makeshift fort built of couch cushions and sheets, a fantastic new structure, or the tight space under the bed. I burrowed in my bedroom closet, dug down deep into piles of pokey-cornered toys, stuffed animals and clothing. I often took a book with me. In these hiding places, nobody knew where I was. By myself alone, there were no distractions, no parents asking about my day, nobody trying to get me to do something. I was free to disappear between the covers of the book into the story and explore by myself. Hiding with a book is ownership of that book—my place, my book.

The siren calls of the computer, television, iPod, and iPhone has been discussed to death, and hiding away from them is hard. But how can you explore Narnia while car ads blare at you? Who can focus on learning Quidditch while the computer or cell phone bings to tell you a message has arrived? A trip into a book is usually a solitary journey, and having a solitary place to read seems to make the crossing over into another world that much easier.

So it behooves us to let kids read where they want to. Whether it’s on the floor, hanging over the side of the bed upside down, blood rushing to their faces, or curled up in a cardboard box with a book. My local elementary school library has fostered the hide-and-read urge by building a wall with nooks or cells in it, and students can climb inside to read. It’s a great way to encourage reluctant readers. You don’t get to go into the wall unless you take a book with you.

As adults, I think it’s still important to dedicate some space, away from life’s distracting things, only for reading. Just as when we were kids, a special reading place makes our transition into a story easier. We can slip lightly between two realities, and join the book’s characters as an invisible companion in their adventures. Nobody in that place knows who we are, or even that we’re there with them. It’s kind of like the freedom of running through the night with a bag of candy in your hand.

But unlike Halloween, reading’s charged magical energy can continue all year long.

Brian Lies is the award-winning author-illustrator of the New York Times bestsellers BATS AT THE BEACH, BATS AT THE LIBRARY, and BATS AT THE BALLGAME. In addition, he has written and illustrated more than twenty books for children. Visit him online at www.brianlies.com.

A few years back, I found myself in a small town in Illinois, visiting an elementary school in which every single student, from the kindergartners to the fifth-graders, had read my first novel, THE THING ABOUT GEORGIE. As the librarian shuttled me through the hallways early that morning to prepare for my first presentation, I noticed an amusing trend.

One after the other, the students I passed on their way to their classrooms—children who had clearly been told repeatedly that “The Author” would be visiting their school that very day—stared at me, the stranger in their school carrying her large cup of coffee, and whispered to one another about whether or not I might be Her. And without fail, one by one, each group of students decided that, nope, I wasn’t it. Couldn’t be. Even if I did sort of look like the lady on the back of the book.

Why, you wonder? How could hundreds of children independently come to the same faulty conclusion, based on pretty much zero evidence? Easy: Because Georgie, the main character in my novel, was a dwarf, and I (at 5’10’’ without heels) clearly was not.

This sort of thing happens nearly every time I visit a school to talk about THE THING ABOUT GEORGIE, and it never fails to make me laugh. Because, of course I don’t need to be a dwarf to write about someone (a boy, at that!) with dwarfism. I rely on things like research, and introspection, and my own imagination to make a character very different from myself come to life. As an author, that concept seems very clear.

But as a reader, well, I must admit I often find myself making the same assumptions about authors and their protagonists. Every time I reread THE GREAT GILLY HOPKINS, I want to believe that Katherine Paterson must have some of Gilly’s stubborn spark in her, because otherwise how could she write the character so brilliantly? And Gary D. Schmidt clearly had a bit of a troubled childhood, and found a teacher who helped turn him around, or how else could OKAY FOR NOW’s Doug Swieteck feel so real? And don’t even get me started on Harper Lee and Scout Finch…

Obviously, I’m aware that these are works of fiction, whose plots and settings and details have been carefully crafted for the sake of good storytelling. And I understand that even in autobiographical novels, such as TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD, no fictional character can be an exact representation of the author. Thoughts, feelings, events, and beliefs must all be tweaked and manipulated to work within the larger whole of a protagonist’s story.

But when I’m inside a delicious novel, none of these truths about crafting fiction seem to matter. When I’m reading a story—a really, really good one—and connecting deeply with a character, it feels like there’s absolutely no way the writer could have created someone so real, so affecting, if he didn’t know his subject, well, personally.

As readers, we develop meaningful bonds with our favorite protagonists. We read as the main character—we walk around in his shoes, see the world from her eyes, for those few hundred pages until the story ends. We cheer when our hero achieves a great victory, and swoon when the heroine finds her true love, and weep when our now dear friends receive some injustice. When a character with whom I feel a bond makes a decision that I know will ultimately spell disaster, I am quite literally angry with him. “How could you do that to yourself?” I want to shout through the pages—when perhaps what I really mean is: “How could you do that to me?” One need only poke a head inside the still-raging debate over the romantic choices of Bella Swan or Katniss Everdeen to understand that readers—passionate, vocal, occasionally crazed readers—tend not to form opinions about potential love interests based on which matches would be right for the character herself, but rather on their own personal ideals (for the record: Team Jacob, Team Gale, no contest).

As an author, however, I don’t write with that sort of fierce connection to my characters. Oh, I adore them. I find them at turns interesting, frustrating, and downright curious. But I don’t write as them. Even while working on my third novel, UMBRELLA SUMMER—my only book to date inspired by events in my childhood—I never once felt that the protagonist was a representation of me. In that novel, the main character, ten-year-old Annie Richards, has developed a rather extreme hypochondria, and worries in turn about everything from smallpox to gangrene to runaway zoo animals, and at one point even suggests that her best friend’s hamster might have seasonal affective disorder. To put it quite simply, Annie is a worrywart.

I, like Annie, was a bit of a hypochondriac when I was a child. And, like Annie, my hypochondria stemmed from a traumatic experience. When I was nine years old, my older brother suffered severe kidney failure, and spent about a month in the hospital, close to death, until he ultimately recovered. (At this point in the story I always feel the need to let people know that my brother, unlike Annie’s in the novel, survived his illness, and is now a healthy adult.) But my hypochondria took a very different form than Annie’s, as did my path to wellness. And while I was mostly a shy, straight-A type at that age, Annie’s character is much more boisterous, and impetuous than I could ever dream of being. (At one point in the novel, infuriated with her former best friend’s lack of understanding, Annie makes the curious decision to hose down her entire Junior Sunbird troop at their annual Fourth of July car wash fundraiser.) So really, despite our shared experiences, it feels like quite a stretch to say that the character of Annie and I are much of anything alike at all.

However, if a person’s life could be said to have themes, in the way a novel does, Annie and I would share a big one: The realization that grief and worry are no substitute for a life well lived. So in that regard we are extremely similar. So too do the themes of my other protagonists’ stories mesh with mine. Like Kansas and Francine (the dual protagonists of my most recent novel, DOUBLE DOG DARE, who simultaneously battle in a high-stakes dare war and attempt to cope with the divorces of their respective parents), I have struggled to make sense of an occasionally unfair hand I’ve been dealt. And even like Georgie, the ten-year-old dwarf from THE THING ABOUT GEORGIE, I have in my own way felt out of place in the world.

I once had a student ask me, during a school visit, if I ever felt guilty for putting my characters in bad situations. And my answer surprised even me a little: No, not in the slightest. In fact, I like putting my characters in bad situations, because conflict is the root of good story, and we can’t learn anything about a character at all if we don’t see what she’ll do when faced with real challenge. So I don’t need to write a character who would only do the things I would do, or who only holds beliefs I hold, because I already know how that character’s story would turn out (and quite frankly, it would be a fairly dull read). I enjoy exploring new characters, foreign ones, and seeing what they will do and say and think.

Really, it’s only after a story is finished—written, rewritten, edited, copyedited, and published—that I tend to see myself in it. At that point I begin to discern, bit by tiny bit, which aspects of the character were pulled from my own personality, and which struggles, hopes, and worries we share. Because, yes, there is quite a bit of me in every single character I write, good or bad. Girl or boy. Dwarf or hypochondriac. But perhaps the most important skill a writer can have is to blindfold herself to those similarities, and to write from imagination—even if what she is imagining turns out to be nothing more than a different version of herself.

Lisa Graff grew up in a small California ski resort town. She earned a degree at UCLA and went on to receive an MFA in writing for children from the New School in New York. She is the author of THE LIFE AND CRIMES OF BERNETTA WALLFLOWER and THE THING ABOUT GEORGIE, which was named to nine state reading lists. Her most recent novel is DOUBLE DOG DARE.

In September of 2011, Lesley Morrow wrote the following post that analyzes and asks questions about six primary covered by the Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts. The response was overwhelming; nearly 9,000 people worldwide not only read this past IRA president’s words, they talked back.

Last week, IRA issued its Literacy Implementation Guidance for the ELA Common Core State Standards. So, we thought it was the perfect time to give this post a second look. We hope you do, too.

The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) are an attempt to coordinate the education of the children the United States. So many families move from one place to another that we need continuity in the teaching of reading throughout the country. The CCSS raise questions of concern that deal with how to implement them and are their goals really the right goals for the children we teach.

One of the elements I like very much about these standards is that they are manageable. They don’t involve a list of hundreds of skills to acquire in one school year. The standards are like a spiral staircase. That is, a standard in third grade builds on the same one in second, first and kindergarten. You can see a definitive continuum. Skills and strategies are repeated but at a more complex level as one goes up the grades.

The ultimate goal of these standards is for students to become critical thinkers about what they read. Text becomes more complex and therefore the child is asked to engage in higher order thinking. The standards ask that the teacher expose children to varied types of text with equal emphasis on informational literature, and narrative literature. The standards guide children to read magazines, poetry, novels, newspapers, and more.

The CCSS are also intended to help children learn information and increase their vocabulary in many areas of the curriculum. To do this, the standards put an emphasis on integrating the use of literacy strategies into content areas such as social studies and science. Using themes for learning will help to achieve that goal. The standards also emphasize the need to be literate with technology.

Although there aren’t any Pre-K national standards just yet, I believe there will be. Many states have Pre-K standards for literacy already. Therefore, it is important to include Pre-K in the discussion of the CCSS. At this time, we can adjust them for four-year-olds.

Most importantly, the standards suggest that every teacher is a teacher of reading and writing. That is, every teacher is teaching reading and writing whether it is during language arts, science or social studies.

The standards discuss six areas which include (1) Narrative Literature and (2) Informational Literature. In each of these two standards there are anchor standards that are the same and they include: Key Ideas and Details, Crafted Structure, Integration of Knowledge and Ideas, Range of Reading, and Level of Text Complexity.

The next major heading is (3) Foundational Skills. The anchor standards in this area are Print Concepts, Phonological Awareness, Phonics, Word Recognition, and Fluency for Kindergarten through Grade 2. In Grades 3 to 5, they are Phonics, Word Recognition, and Fluency.

Writing is given a prominent spot in these standards. (4) Writing is thought about carefully and given the importance it should have. In Writing, the anchor standards are Text Types and Purposes, Production and Distribution of Writing, Research to Build and Present Knowledge, and Range of Writing.

The next standard is (5) Speaking and Listening; the anchor standards in this category are Comprehension and Collaboration, and Presentation of knowledge and Ideas.

The final standard is (6) Language, and the anchor standards are Conventions of Standard English, Knowledge of Language and Vocabulary Acquisition.

Based on what has been discussed so far, and the manner and order in which the standards are listed in the document, the skills in Narrative and Informational Literature, which focuses on comprehension, is emphasized. Foundational skills such as phonological awareness and phonics have been emphasized for early literacy as coming before comprehension in the past, but the opposite is listed here. This is not a bad thing but one hopes that the instruction needed in phonics will continue.

Writing is given a prominent spot in these standards and is finally getting the emphasis it should receive. The last two standards, Speaking and Listening and Language don’t seem to get the emphasis I think they should have. Oral language is an important skill our children need, and vocabulary is crucial to success in comprehension, yet it’s listed all the way at the end.

What many states are doing at this time is looking at their own standards and comparing them to the CCSS to see how they match. They are finding that their own state standards have many more required specific skills to learn, whereas the CCSS are more interested in depth rather than breadth. I am very much in favor of the fact that the CCSS are not as packed with an enormous numbers of skills that can’t be accomplished. Teachers and children are overwhelmed about what they need to teach and learn in a given year and most children aren’t given the time to really learn them all. The CCSS have a spiral effect and build on fewer skills but over a longer period. The same skill however requires more complex thinking as it goes up the grades. For example in writing under “Anchor Standard Research to Build and Present Knowledge,” one of the kindergarten skills is:

a. With guidance and support from adults, recall information from experiences or gather information from provided sources to answer a question.

The exact same skill is listed for first grade:

b. With guidance and support from adults, recall information from experiences or gather information from provided sources to answer a question.

In grade two this standard is to:

c. Recall information from experiences or gather information from provided sources to answer a question.

The only difference here is that it does not involve guidance and support from an adult. For third grade it is:

d. Recall information from experiences or gather information from print and digital sources; take brief notes on sources and sort evidence into provided categories.

For fourth grade:

e. Recall information from experiences or gather information from print and digital sources; take brief notes on sources; take notes and categorize information, and provide a list of sources.

For the fifth grade it is:

f. Recall information from experiences or gather information from print and digital sources; take brief notes on sources; summarize or paraphrase information in notes and finished work, and provide a list of sources.

You can see the continuity between grades and the addition of one more element that makes the task a bit more complex but with time to keep practicing the task.

There are suggestions for creating units of study in social studies and science that include the CCSS as well as the content in these areas. This is an important idea but one that will require teachers to be engaged in professional development to learn how to do it. If this is done then reading will be taught all day long in school, which is a necessity. Reading is a skill, not a content area. When we read we can learn information from other fields.

The question that arises in my mind is this: should the content such as social studies and science be a part of the language arts block when explicit literacy instruction takes place especially in the early childhood grades? When reading in small homogeneous groups for skill development, should there be little books about a science theme such as hurricanes or volcanoes, and different levels of little books be created for the different achievement groups? On one hand it would give a purpose for reading. On the other hand, one might argue that it will detract from the explicit instruction.

My other question has to do with complexity of text. How complex should we require texts for children to be so they are considered proficient and fluent readers? How complex should we require texts for children to be so they are considered ready for college or to pursue a career that doesn’t require college?

In the previous paragraphs, I ask questions to which I don’t know the answers. I do believe that we are dissecting reading into too many skills and we need to select the precious few we really need. Sometimes less is more. Being able to do fewer skills proficiently might be better than doing more but not doing them very well. I do feel strongly that reading and writing need to be emphasized all day long in school through content areas, as it is the only way our children will become critical readers.

Lesley Mandel Morrow holds the rank of Professor II at Rutgers University’s Graduate School of Education where she is coordinator of the literacy program. Her area of research deals with early literacy development, and the organization and management of Language Arts Programs. Dr. Morrow has more than 200 publications that appear as journal articles, chapters in books, monographs and books. She received Excellence in Research, Teaching and Service Awards from Rutgers University. Dr. Morrow was an elected member of the board of directors of International Reading Association (IRA) and served as President of the organization in 2003-2004. She was also the recipient of the IRA’s Outstanding Teacher Educator of Reading Award, as well as Fordham University’s Alumni Award for Outstanding Achievement.