Unleashing Readers

It’s Monday! What Are You Reading? #IMWAYR 1/20/20

January 20, 2020 by Kellee

It’s Monday! What Are You Reading? From Picture Books to YA!

It’s Monday! What are you Reading? is a meme started by Sheila at Book Journeys and now hosted by Kathryn at The Book Date. It is a great way to recap what you read and/or reviewed the previous week and to plan out your reading and reviews for the upcoming week. It’s also a great chance to see what others are reading right now…you just might discover the next “must-read” book!

Kellee and Jen, of Teach Mentor Texts, decided to give It’s Monday! What Are You Reading? a kidlit focus. If you read and review books in children’s literature – picture books, chapter books, middle grade novels, young adult novels, anything in the world of kidlit – join us! We love this meme and think you will, too.

We encourage everyone who participates to support the blogging community by visiting at least three of the other book bloggers that link up and leave comments for them.

Tuesday: Bedtime for Sweet Creatures by Nikki Grimes

Thursday: Teaching Thursday: Book in a Bag

**Click on any picture/link to view the post**

Kellee

Sorry for still being away from the blog, but with the ALA Youth Media Awards right around the corner, I am deep in my reading for the Schneider Family Award, so I will be back after the ALA YMA on the 27th.

Ricki

Isn’t Jen Wang amazing? I loved her new novel Stargazing. It is thoughtful and teaches wonderful themes. This is a great staple for your classroom library, and it would also make a wonderful read-aloud.

Just Ask! by Sonia Sotomayor is a great book about engaging with people with different disabilities. It offers a plant metaphor and also discusses the wide variance of disabilities that people have.

Ricki

I’ll likely be rereading Piecing Me Together this week to prepare to teach it in Methods. I am also still enjoying the Harry Potter illustrated novel with my kids.

Tuesday: The Fountains of Silence by Ruta Sepetys

Thursday: Explorers by Matthew Cordell

Link up below and go check out what everyone else is reading. Please support other bloggers by viewing and commenting on at least 3 other blogs. If you tweet about your Monday post, tag the tweet with #IMWAYR!

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Teaching Thursday: Book in a Bag

January 16, 2020 by Ricki

Typically, our teaching-related posts fall on Tuesdays, but today I feel inspired, so it’s Teaching Thursday! I can’t say enough good things about my son’s kindergarten teacher. She’s so good at her job that she inspires me regularly. Whenever I volunteer in the class, I am fascinated with the ways in which literacy instruction is similar and different for kindergarten.

One of the things she does is called “book in a bag.” All of the kindergarten team uses this method/idea and maybe this is an idea that is common for this age level, but it makes my son very happy, so I thought I’d blog about it from a parent’s perspective! The children each have a bag that is labeled with their name. They bring home a book to read in the bag. Their job is to reread it as many times as they need until they can master the book. The teacher stressed that this should be fun. If the children get frustrated or aren’t having fun, then the program is not serving its purpose.

This is what I love about my son’s kindergarten teacher. She has them doing data analysis on mittens and gloves and she makes learning fun for my son. He looks forward to going to school every day. For me, this is what I want for him—I want him to love school as much as I do. Also, this is differentiation!

So my son excitedly brings home his book and slowly reveals it from his backpack for the whole family to see his next book before dinner. He taps at the door when I am feeding his baby brother and whispers, “Can I read my book in the bag to my baby brother? He’s the only one who hasn’t heard me read it yet.” And he holds up the book to us as he reads it, so we all can see the pictures. The repetition is helping him, and this is rereading at its best. So before we hop into bed to read, he pulls out his book one last time for the day to practice the words and to proudly show off his reading skills. As a parent, I love how happy this makes my kid, and the ownership feels with his book makes him enjoy reading even more. <3

Bedtime for Sweet Creatures by Nikki Grimes

January 14, 2020January 14, 2020 by Ricki

Bedtime for Sweet Creatures
Author: Nikki Grimes; Illustrator: Elizabeth Zunon
Published January 1, 2020 by Sourcebooks Jabberwocky

Goodreads Summary: It’s bedtime. But Mommy’s little one is not sleepy.

He growls like a bear, he questions like an owl, he tosses his mane like a lion. He hunts for water like a sly wolf, and hides like a snake.

Mommy needs to wrangle her sweet creature in bed so that the whole family can sleep. From tigers to squirrels to snakes, the little boy dodges around his bedtime, until he is tired enough to finally sleep. His imaginative animal friends weave their way through the illustrations, eventually joining him in curling up for the night.

My Review: The rhythm of this book is palpable. As a mother of three children six and under, I identified whole-heartedly with the mother of this book. She just wants her child to go to bed. As the child attempts sleep, he morphs into different animals (a lion, a tiger, an owl!). The book displays bedtime in ways that parents will identify with. Teachers will love using this book to teach metaphor and sound in story.

My three-year-old’s review: “I like the squirrel and the koala a lot! I liked all of the aminals. [sic]”

My six-year-old’s review: “I like how his mom and his dad are trying to get him to sleep at night. I like how it is night-time in the book and the colors of the book make it feel like it is night-time.”

Teachers’ Tools for Navigation: The ways in which Grimes uses sound and metaphor is very intriguing and quite teachable. I spent a significant amount of time thinking about the almost-anthropomorphism of the text. The animals are given human characteristics of the child. But the child is actually given animal characteristics. This is zoomorphism, right? I would love to have this kind of study and debate with students. So cool!

Discussion Questions: What animals does the child act like? How does the author choose qualities of the child to connect them with animals?; Choose another animal not within the book. How might the child act like this animal at bedtime, too?

We Flagged:

Read This If You Loved: Penguin and Tiny Shrimp Don’t Do Bedtime by Cate Berry; Twenty Yawns by Jane Smiley; Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown; Goodnight Songs by Margaret Wise Brown

Recommended For:

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It’s Monday! What Are You Reading? #IMWAYR 1/13/20

January 19, 2020January 13, 2020 by Kellee

It’s Monday! What Are You Reading? From Picture Books to YA!

We encourage everyone who participates to support the blogging community by visiting at least three of the other book bloggers that link up and leave comments for them.

We were on vacation break last week, so we didn’t post!

Kellee

Sorry for still being away from the blog, but with the ALA Youth Media Awards right around the corner, I am deep in my reading for the Schneider Family Award, so I will be back after the 27th.

Ricki

I adored Bedtime for Sweet Creatures so much that I’ll be posting a longer review this Wednesday! It’s a very charming picture book that has many teachable qualities.

My son really loves these MathStart books. He found them at his school’s library, and he keeps bringing them home. This one, Earth Day—Hooray! by Stuart J. Murphy—teaches the math concept of bundling by tens, hundreds, and thousands through a can collection. The story reads like an extended math problem. It is very exciting for my son to read (he is in kindergarten), and my motto is: “Let them read what they love!”

Matthew Cordell’s newest picture book is a hit in my house. Explorers tells the story of a boy who finds a homeless man fashioning origami birds outside of a museum. The origami bird brings together two families in a way that is magical—or is it? This one made me think a lot, and I like books that make me think.

Ricki

I’ve never been a huge fan of the Harry Potter series, but reading the books to my sons is making me think I might actually like the series. They are so thrilled by the books that it makes them much more magical and special to me. The illustrations in these versions are stunning.

I am also rereading a few books for a teaching chapter proposal this week!

Tuesday: Bedtime for Sweet Creatures by Nikki Grimes

Thursday: Teaching Thursday: Book in a Bag

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It’s Monday! What Are You Reading? #IMWAYR 1/6/20

January 6, 2020 by Kellee

It’s Monday! What Are You Reading? From Picture Books to YA!

We encourage everyone who participates to support the blogging community by visiting at least three of the other book bloggers that link up and leave comments for them.

And we hope that the return back to school goes well for all of those going back this week!

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It’s Monday! What Are You Reading? #IMWAYR 12/30/19

December 30, 2019 by Kellee

It’s Monday! What Are You Reading? From Picture Books to YA!

We encourage everyone who participates to support the blogging community by visiting at least three of the other book bloggers that link up and leave comments for them.

and

It’s Monday! What Are You Reading? #IMWAYR 12/23/19

December 23, 2019 by Kellee

It’s Monday! What Are You Reading? From Picture Books to YA!

We encourage everyone who participates to support the blogging community by visiting at least three of the other book bloggers that link up and leave comments for them.

Tuesday: Blog Tour with Educators’ Guide: The Treacherous Sea by Christopher Healy
**Congratulations to John S. the winner of The Treacherous Sea giveaway!**

Sunday: Author Guest Post: “Making Crazy Contraptions” by Laura Perdew, Author of Crazy Contraptions: Build Rube Goldberg Machines that Swoop, Spin, Stack, and Swivel with Engineering Activities for Kids

**Click on any picture/link to view the post**

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