Be Well. Do Good Work. Keep in Touch.
This is my new favorite way of contributing to IMWAYR, just by taking a screenshot of recent additions to my GoodReads 2013 book challenge.
GUESS WHAT ELSE I’M DOING THIS WEEK? Getting started on winter report cards. I already finished my favorite part, personal student comments. For the third year in a row, I’m running my comments through Wordle. Here’s what I’ve got this time around.
Have a fantastic week!
The BEST BOOKS of 2012 have already been covered extensively. Mr. Schu has a great roundup of Best of 2012 lists if you’d like to peruse the bulk of them. ERMAHGERD BERKS!!!
All I can really add to the conversation is to humbly provide recommendations for books I connected with this year. I’ve tried to filter out some of the great books you probably know about (Wonder, Green, etc.), unless they particularly resonated with me. Some months have more books than others, because some months I read more than others. You can tell when I was finishing my National Boards.
I didn’t consciously chose to include more nonfiction than most lists I’ve seen, but I do want to point out how important I think it is to highlight more traditional expository writing. YES, lyrical nonfiction books are fantastic, but we do a disservice to our kids when we aren’t seeking out good books of the type they’ll encounter when they’re doing research, even if they’re not as thrilling for us to read.
I owe a lot to the book recommendations from Nerdy Book Club folks who I’ve given shout-outs below.
I’ve included children’s books and adult books, and not all of them were published this year. Images were either created by me or swiped from GoodReads.
TRUTH TIME. I actually like the trailer for C. R. Mudgeon better than the book itself. Do yourself a favor and watch (or rewatch) Julian Hector’s work:
Watch me pimp out The Incorrigible Children of Ashton Place on Mr. Sharp’s Nerdbery video:
 
Phew! What a year! I eagerly await your input on these selections.
Every Monday, I highlight a book from our school bookroom along with lesson plan suggestions. I hope you find this useful, and please leave a comment with any suggestions or additions!
The First Story Ever Told, by Eric Jendresen and Alberto Villoldo
The legend is told as a story within a story, with Grandmother Fire visiting a modern-era explorer in a dream to share with him the first story ever told.
The story-within-a-story structure is elegant, but I’ve received feedback from 3rd grade teachers that it’s a lot more effective if you read the book at least twice with students.
Anyway, the lesson of the story is basically not to spend your life looking for one mythical place, because what matters most is the journey that you took along the way.
If you know me, then you know that I believe “Ithaca” is the most brilliant, lyrical poem ever written. Toby and I had it read at our wedding. And if you think your students are ready for it, it might be a great companion to this book. Listen to James Bond read it here:
The Wildwood third grade team (2012-13) used this book as a mentor text during the launch of Daily 5/CAFE, so you can talk with any of them if you’d like feedback.
There is a CAFE menu included with this mentor text, and I’ve highlighted these as suggested lessons:
Bulleted list begins. Then tell about the strategy
Bulleted list begins. Then tell about the strategy
Bulleted list begins. Then tell about the strategy
Bulleted list begins. Then tell about the strategy
Please add any lessons or supplemental materials to the book bag so future teachers can utilize your good thinking!
Comments and constructive feedback are always welcomed. Please let me know if these lessons were useful in your class!
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Every Monday, I highlight a book from our school bookroom along with lesson plan suggestions. I hope you find this useful, and please leave a comment with any suggestions or additions!
Er-lang and the Suns, Retold by Tony Guo and Euphine Cheung
Er-lang and the Suns: A Tale from China is a text from the SFA Roots program. There should be one master copy of the Roots lesson plans in the bookroom. There are check for understanding questions on post-its throughout at least one of the three teacher copies.
This is an origin story covering how the Earth finally got reprieve from its seven suns that shone nonstop. There are plenty of other origin stories to compare and contrast with. As always, pre-read these texts before sharing them with students, as they are appropriate for different ages.
The end of the book contains a brief history of China and the Han people.
As mentioned earlier, there are three copies of this book if you want to use them as a grade-level team mentor text.
There is a CAFE menu included with this mentor text, and I’ve highlighted these as suggested lessons:
Please add any lessons or supplemental materials to the book bag so future teachers can utilize your good thinking!
Comments and constructive feedback are always welcomed. Please let me know if these lessons were useful in your class!
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Every Monday, I highlight a book from our school bookroom along with lesson plan suggestions. I hope you find this useful, and please leave a comment with any suggestions or additions!
BONUS! This week also features all sorts of Common Core activity goodies! Wowie!
Bats: A Nature-Fact Book, by D.J. Arneson
At first glance, what a totally inaccessible book. The text is small and dense, there’s no organization, and the book itself is small and not ideal for a mentor text.
BUT! Each page is a different topic, so it’d be really easy to photocopy and enlarge a page, then have students break it apart. You could even do a class jigsaw, with different groups picking different sections. Look! Now you have a complex non-fiction text for students to read deeply, just like Common Core suggests!
Speaking of Common Core, why not extend this lesson and make it 23894678 times more interesting by including this story about a boy who used echolocation because he was blind. AMAZING! There’s a bunch of additional information and resources here. A gent named Dan Kish uses echolocation too:
Congratulations! Now you’ve provided your students with the multimedia resources CCSS encourages.
This book features an !!!OFFICIAL!!! FWPS lesson plan focusing on text features. The book actually doesn’t HAVE nonfiction text features, but the lesson explains that it can then be contrasted with Vampire Bats & Other Creatures of the Night published by Kingfisher. The lesson also encourages students to create their own table of contents for the book.
There is a CAFE menu included with this mentor text, and I’ve highlighted these as suggested lessons:
Please add any lessons or supplemental materials to the book bag so future teachers can utilize your good thinking!
Comments and constructive feedback are always welcomed. Please let me know if these lessons were useful in your class!
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Every Monday, I highlight a book from our school bookroom along with lesson plan suggestions. I hope you find this useful, and please leave a comment with any extra ideas or additions!
If You Are a Hunter of Fossils, by Byrd Baylor
Well, this book set off quite a bit of pondering on my part. Originally published in 1980, much has happened in the world of dinosaurs since this was created. So at what point does a nonfiction book do more harm than good in a library? You may have seen me tackle this question earlier this month.
I attempted to find a recording of the Reading Rainbow episode this was featured on. Instead:
You can SEE what I searched for! Did Reading Rainbow seriously Rickroll me???
Anyway. There are a billion and a half dinosaur links and lessons and related books I could suggest to you. So I’ll just share two of my favorites.
Sue at The Field Museum in Chicago. Sue, in my mind, is, for kids, the reason museums were made. The whole reason students clamor to go on a field trip. Sue is a beautiful, huge, wonderful, magnificent specimen that every scientifically-inclined human on Earth should go see. I haven’t met her yet. But I will.
Dinosaur National Monument. I visited the monument in 2004 reporting on the Colorado River Trips program. When you wake up in the morning, you wonder how anyone got any dinosaur-digging done because the whole area is so breathtaking.
Also, if you’d like to search for fossils in Washington State, here’s how. I priced out a Wildwood trip to Stonerose Interpretive Center, but it’s obviously out of our price range. Like, way way way out of our price range. Boo.
Anyway. Baylor’s story is a lovely piece of poetry-ish prose that celebrates the spirit of exploration and discovery. The art is OK, and it hold up well to more than thirty years of age. So I think it will stay in our library for now — it’s still absolutely relevant. (Although some new research points to Pteranodon being more bird-like than bat-like)
There is a CAFE menu included with this mentor text, and I’ve highlighted these as suggested lessons:
In a book like this, for example, am I supposed to pause briefly at the end of each line? Read it straight through? I believe the general “answer” we arrived at wasn’t really an answer at all, just to reread it a few times until it “feels” right for you. I can see this being a useful book to use in a small group with students who still believe that fluency means READ STRAIGHT THROUGH REALLY FAST.
Please add any lessons or supplemental materials to the book bag so future teachers can utilize your good thinking!
Comments and constructive feedback are always welcomed. Please let me know if these lessons were useful in your class!
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This year was the first Christmas I celebrated away from my Michigan family. Mom and dad, I missed you sooooo much! The hope was that my new husband Toby and I would be able to develop new traditions to make the holiday our own. Due to my mopiness and gross indecision, nothing earth-shattering was created, except lots of fires, tea, and reading. And mediocre Indian buffet food for Christmas dinner. And frankly, that’s just fine by me.
But now that I’m looking forward to returning to school today, I’ve been thinking about the traditions my students, colleagues, and I have been developing in the five years I’ve been teaching. Here are some things I’m looking forward to in the new year.
Mock Caldecotts. This started last year officially, although I’ve been holed up in front of a computer the morning of the ALA Midwinter Conference ever since Katherine Schlick Noe told me about the awards livestream when I was at Seattle U. My students come in early (if the conference is held on the East Coast) and enjoy breakfast snacks as the awards are announced. If it’s an award they’re not familiar with (last year I neglected to explain the Sibert award to them — MAJOR oversight on my part), they usually look to me to gauge what their reactions might be. This year, though, I think we’re pretty well-prepared to critique the official choices.
Preliminary voting on our classroom Mock Caldecotts, which were featured last year in the Federal Way Mirror, will begin the end of this week, with the final votes cast January 21 or 22. I haven’t yet decided.
Math Team S’Mores. Sometimes, traditions are started for no good reason. I can’t remember why we decided to microwave S’Mores for our math team members at the last meeting of the year, but this tradition is entering its fourth year. Our first math team competition is coming up this month at Green Gables Elementary. Whee!
Tour guide Ms. Houghton on field trips. I’m SO EXCITED to take the next step in this tradition. Every time we head up to Seattle, I put on my best newspaper reporter voice (which is also my best documentary voice-over voice) and point out relevant landmarks. Smith Tower, once the tallest building west of the Mississippi, Port of Seattle, Amazon headquarters, Starbucks Headquarters, the Convention Center that goes right over the freeway (and contributes to Seattle’s traffic woes), the U District, Space Needle, etc. My goal is for my students to take over this role on the remaining field trips we have this year. Wheeee!!!
Reading Challenges. I started my 50-book-a-year reading challenges when I was in college. You can see an early list here. This year I’ve committed to a few challenges, and created a new one. You know I love any excuse to pull out a new retro lady header.
Every Monday, I highlight a book from our school bookroom along with lesson plan suggestions. I hope you find this useful, and please leave a comment with any suggestions or additions!
You can see a preview of No Problem on Google Books.
Start typing here
There is a CAFE menu included with this mentor text, and I’ve highlighted these as suggested lessons:
Please add any lessons or supplemental materials to the book bag so future teachers can utilize your good thinking!
Comments and constructive feedback are always welcomed. Please let me know if these lessons were useful in your class!
###
Every Monday, I highlight a book from our school bookroom along with lesson plan suggestions. I hope you find this useful, and please leave a comment with any suggestions or additions!
The Three Little Pigs, by James Marshall
I’ve had this book traveling back and forth from home and school for weeks now, and I suppose it’s high time I featured a lesson for it. Especially because my David Weisner author study has been receiving a number of hits, and because Marshall was featured multiple times in an excellent post about Brian Selznick’s recommended children’s books.
See a video version here:
If you’re looking to go old-school with your traditional stories, you might want to see the minilessons for The Three Billy Goats Gruff. You might also want to rummage around for the James Marshall version of Cinderella that should be in the SFA mentor text bag for Egyptian Cinderella.
There is a CAFE menu included with this mentor text, and I’ve highlighted these as suggested lessons:
Please add any lessons or supplemental materials to the book bag so future teachers can utilize your good thinking!
Comments and constructive feedback are always welcomed. Please let me know if these lessons were useful in your class!
###
Every Monday, I highlight a book from our school bookroom along with lesson plan suggestions. I hope you find this useful, and please leave a comment with any suggestions or additions!
Narrative nonfiction following Emperor penguins and other critters through a year in Antarctica.
In honor of Pedro and Buddy’s temporary separation, I thought you might be interested in using Cowcher’s book on the southernmost continent. (Although Pedro and Buddy are African penguins, like Pierre from Pierre the Penguin, and they would probably be chilly down there without sweaters and such)
Also, there’s And Tango Makes Three.
Mrs. Burm included a pretty comprehensive social studies-link
There is a CAFE menu included with this mentor text, and I’ve highlighted these as suggested lessons:
Determine and analyze author’s purpose and support with text. I hadn’t fully pondered the deeper message of this book until I encountered GoodReads reviewer Jackie‘s comment, “The subtle message in Antarctica by Helen Cowcher comes ringing through as penguins are frightened and displaced by human machinery. Kids may not immediately pick up on the environmental message, but with a little discussion its meaning will be evident.”
Please add any lessons or supplemental materials to the book bag so future teachers can utilize your good thinking!
Comments and constructive feedback are always welcomed. Please let me know if these lessons were useful in your class!
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