Carolee Dean
AUTHOR

Carolee Dean

Children's Audiobooks
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My combined experiences as a young adult fiction author, poet, and speech-language pathologist working with students of all ages and ability levels have taught me the importance of using narratives as a teaching tool. Everything we want to teach, from vocabulary and sentence structure to empathy and resilience, can be found in a good story. When my focus as a therapist shifted to working with students with dyslexia, I realized very quickly that there was a lack of age-appropriate and engaging decodable books for older readers. I started creating my own to give my students reading practice with whatever specific skill they were working on at the time. Those stories evolved into the HOT ROD DECODABLE BOOKS series and supplementary resources to accompany the books on my website at https://wordtravelpress.com/. Because of my extensive experience using narratives to teach a large variety of skills, I have also created STORY FRAMES FOR TEACHING LITERACY: ENHANCING STUDENT LEARNING THROUGH THE POWER OF STORYTELLING (Paul H. Brookes Publishing, 2021). This book shows teachers how to teach plot structure and get kids to think about stories the way authors think about stories. My educational resources combine my years of experience with struggling learners with my love of writing and my perspective as a young adult author. See information about my young adult titles below. My first novel, COMFORT, is written from the point of view of a teenage boy in Comfort, TX from a dysfunctional alcoholic family who competes in Poetry Interpretation in the UIL (University Interscholastic League). His mother makes him quit everything else (band and football) to work day and night in the family cafe. There is a beautiful, older girl encouraging him to get involved in poetry, so that is a big motivation for him to join the UIL, but in the end he must rely on a courage deep within himself to find his voice. TAKE ME THERE is about a boy, Dylan Dawson, who flees from Southern California (running from the law and a violent gang) to go looking for his father who is in prison in Texas. Dylan can't read or write, but he dreams of being a poet and carries around a thick book of poems by William Butler Yeats to hide the fact that he is illiterate. The story highlights the disturbing correlation between incarceration and illiteracy. I'm fascinated by the fact that many talented and well-loved writers (including Yeats) had difficulty with reading and writing when they were young. Many still struggle, but their love of stories helps them to overcome their difficulties. FORGET ME NOT is a novel in verse about a girl suspended between life and death after trying to take her life. Or did she? There are certainly others who want her gone. She gets trapped on an abandoned hallway in her high school with other lost souls in a place resembling Dante's Purgatory. As she watches the lives of her classmates continue on, she must decide whether she has the courage to face life or stay on the hallway forever. Spending many years working in a variety of high schools has shaped my life and my perspective. People often ask me if I write about my students. To be honest, I write about myself, but because I have spent so much time around teenagers, I have many reminders of the pain, angst, heartache, and hope of those formative years. They inspire me to remember what it was like. Those are the stories I love telling most. My work with younger students has inspired me to find a way to keep their passion for stories alive before struggle, self-doubt, and school failure convince them they have no voice. All of my students have inspired me in very different ways, and it is to them that I dedicate everything that I write.
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