TMT's Book and Bookmark Swap Fun!

Jen and Kellee over at Teach Mentor Texts (TMT) always have such fun ideas. I knew we would have a great time with their Book and Bookmark Swap. It was cool looking for books and making bookmarks for my buddy. I also had a fantastic time opening my box of goodies.

My buddy Beth Robertson completely spoiled me. She added a few extra treats like tea and teeny tiny notepads. A really unexpected bit of fun was that she included treats for my dog. He was over the moon!

I have already finished the excellent novel that she sent, Navigating Early, while sipping some lovely tea and have looked through the knitting projects in the quick knit book. I can't wait to try one of the projects in there. I couldn't have asked for a better buddy. 

It was so nice because I was busy and had just been out of town to visit my son. I got home to a box and couldn't even figure out what it was. I had forgotten that it was time for the book swap books to arrive. What a wonderful surpresent! I love that word from True (...Sort Of) by Katherine Hannigan.

To Jen, Kellee and Beth Robertson (an awesome book buddy) -

Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!

A Couple of Videos with Love as a Focus

I meant to share this around Valentine's Day, but completely forgot. So, here is some love for everyone about a month late. :)

Book Love

I cannot believe I did not know about this fantastic video before! Very fun.


Love in Many Languages

Tuesday Trailer

In which we learn to "listen to our inner gosling." Looks like another fun one from Mo Willems.

It's Monday! What Are You Reading?

Jen & Kellee over at Teach Mentor Texts host a meme every Monday that invites people to share the children's and young adult books they have been reading over the past week and what they plan on reading the following week.

You may find more complete information about what I am reading at Goodreads or by clicking on the Goodreads widget along the side of my blog.

The Past Week:

Pipestone was the memoir of Adam Fortunate Eagle. He shared about his time at the Pipestone Indian Boarding School. It seemed that part of the reason he wrote it was as a response to those people who have shared primarily negative experiences of the residential schools. He tried to present a balanced view. He shares positive things about his time there such as the love and care from some of the staff members and camaraderie with other students. He also shares negative things like some of the events that resulted in the deaths of students. This is definitely a young adult or adult book as he pulls few punches and life was sometimes pretty raw. One thing that  stood out to me was that back then there was a whole different style of taking care of children and not just at these schools. Parents and caregivers of all kinds were much less aware of what children were up to and gave children a lot more room to experiment and be unsupervised. Times have certainly changed in that regard. I would say the percentage of helicopter parents is definitely much higher now than back then. Overall, I appreciated this perspective.

Speaking of memoirs, My Friend Dahmer was another, but in graphic novel format. From my Goodreads review, "I feel like I need a shower for my brain. On the one hand, this must mean that the author did a good job. I felt the book. On the other hand, I just want to say, 'Ick, ick, icky, ick, ick.' This was an incredibly sad book. Too many lives were ended or royally screwed up. The author did a good job with research and giving an even handed view of what happened for the most part, but this was just a sad twisted life to report." I had horrible dreams after reading this and still shiver with ickiness thinking about it. It also just seemed somehow wrong to be hearing details from someone who claimed to be a friend of Dahmer, but yet by my definition, he wasn't actually a friend. I was uncomfortable with this book on many levels. The research details at the end added a lot and definitely helped explain some of the things that happened. You might want to skip the whole thing entirely if you want to sleep peacefully.

Astronaut Academy was fine, but not really my cup of tea. I am still a comparative newbie to graphic novels and have not read nearly as many of them as required to be considered any kind of judge so perhaps this one is awesome and I am missing the reasons. I felt like I had to meet too many characters in a short amount of time so a lot of space was taken up with many brief intros and not a lot of content. Maybe a lot of first volumes are like that when there is a large cast. I think that there are several students at my school that would enjoy the action and creativity though.

I really enjoyed Navigating Early. I would say it was my favorite this week. It was a beautiful story of friendship, grief, and the strength of family love. It had an intriguing mystery type of feeling to it. There were many scattered pieces that slowly began to click together. The only thing keeping me from giving it five stars is kind of related to the "fitting together" though. There were  many times when I just stopped believing that all of these connections were even possible. They made sense at the end for the most part, but I still couldn't completely suspend my disbelief throughout. It honestly reminded me of The Life of Pi and how I felt like it was a cool story, but a little on the tall tale side.

The Long, Long Journey, a non-fiction picture book, was another wonderful look into the lives of migrating birds in a shorter & more simple format than Moonbird. It would be great paired with excerpts from Moonbird and/or the novel Wild Wings.

I enjoyed the picture books from this week, but was strangely underwhelmed by Up, Tall and High. It seems that I was a little hard to please this week. I might just be in an extra picky mood.

The Coming Week:

I am still reading the YA biography Charles and Emma with my ears and am also finishing up the fantasy/sci-fi/adventure The Cloak Society. I still have a few books from this week's pile that I didn't get to: Almost Home, Ichiro, and several others. I will hope to have time to read those and maybe a few surprise picks too. What will you be reading? I hope you have a great reading week!

Getting in the Mood for Poetry

I was so happy to stumble across several great poetry videos. The one above may be found on the YouTube Channel of Renee LaTulippe. She has created a fantastic collection of videos of various authors reading their poetry. She also has a website called No Water River with poetry resources.

Another great source of poetry videos is The Poetry Foundation. I enjoyed seeing a sign language presentation of Emily Dickinson's "Hope is the Thing with Feathers" and Mary Ann Hoberman reading her book I Like Old Clothes. I especially loved "April Rain Song" written and read by Langston Hughes. 

Reading Rockets also has some fantastic links and resources for poetry. I can tell April will be awesome!

Read Across America and World Read Aloud Day

Read Across America Fun!

Reading to students in MA

Our students read Mr. Brown Can Moo! Can You? to students all around the United States and we had others read to us too. It was a great day of reading. We connected with students in Maine, Massachusetts, Maryland, Oklahoma, and Wisconsin.

We even had a Mystery Skype with a school in Oklahoma and then they read to us too!

With one class in Maryland, we even took turns reading a digital book aloud. Soooo fun!

Many of our students also read Dr. Seuss with each other.

We also connected with some students from a school within our own county.

World Read Aloud Day

We had Skype visits from three different authors on World Read Aloud Day. Erica Perl, on behalf of  First Book, started us off with her fantastic book Ninety-Three in My Family. It was so much fun!

It was a book that can be sung so we got to sing and clap too!

She also showed first grade her awesome hats that go with her books Dotty and Chicken Butt. We loved them and want to try to think up a great hat for her book When Life Gives You O.J.

Of course, the students talked her into reading Chicken Butt before she was through.

Sarah Albee met with one of our third grade classes. We had video issues, but at least we could hear each other. She answered a lot of questions from students. We enjoyed hearing about her writing life. We have met quite a few fiction writers, but haven't talked with many authors of non-fiction so that was a new experience. We had read a bit from her book Poop Happened! beforehand.

We had a great time with Sarah Albee!

Our final author on Wednesday was Mina Javaherbin. She shared her book The Secret Message based on a poem written by Rumi many hundreds of years ago. It was neat to learn about her home country Iran and talk to her about her writing life. All three of our second grade classes were able to visit with her.

Our final author visit was on Friday with Abby Klein. She is the author of the Ready Freddy series. She read one of her books to us and I read an Elephant and Piggie book to her kindergarten students. We found out that she writes mainly in the summertime since she is a teacher. 

Abby Klein answered many great questions about her writing.

We finished off our World Read Aloud Day celebrations on with Shannon Miller from Van Meter in Iowa. She shared Same Same but Different and showed us the cool website that the author has for kids. I can't wait to read the book myself now. It fit perfectly with a non-fiction book we had read earlier this year One World One Day. It was an excellent way to end a week celebrating reading.

I loved the chance to connect with so many authors and classrooms around the country. We have another fun time to organize coming up in April for Poem in Your Pocket Day. I can't wait.

I am so thankful that people were able to connect with us and I am glad that Matthew Winner and Sarah (@pageintraining) helped to coordinate this fantastic event through Skype in the Classroom and a googledoc that held all of the plans for so many people. Thanks to all who added to our learning this week!

Diverse Literature

I was happy to stumble upon the #diverselit chat yesterday. Finding diverse literature to share with my students is something very important to me. I have been purchasing diverse literature for our library, but I also want to find ways to let people know about the quality books that I am finding. One way I am doing that is through this blog, but I feel like there could be more to do.

This is something I will be pondering over time. How do I spread the word? Is there anything one person can do to help support diversity in publishing - aside from making my own purchases? I thought of this last time there was a #titletalk. We were discussing historical fiction. What I noticed was that this was an opportunity to mention diverse titles. I also realized that I would like to find more titles to share.   I also wondered if it was a bad thing to have an agenda as I was listing titles. These are the kinds of thoughts that have been bubbling around in my head. 

If you have ideas about how I can find and promote diverse literature, let me know. Happy Friday!