The Book Search

Many people like to look back at the year and categorize things from the year... ok, well, I read a lot, so here are a few of my favorite fairy tale books. My favorite picture book fairy tale is called "Elephant Joe, Brave Knight!" by David Wojtowycz.  This is a very funny little fairy tale where the brave knights (a very cartoony elephant and his side kick, the pig) are called upon to rescue a princess from a dragon, BUT things are NOT what they seem.  This would be a great book to talk about elements of fairy tales (after you've read some of the more familiar ones) and then use this as a springboard to writing your own fairy tales.  It's so much fun.  Here's Mrs. Frenzel reading it!  I just read one I really liked. As a disclaimer, I really like fairy tales. This fairy tale was well written, has great characters and some very interesting plot twists. It's called Jinx by Sage Blackwood. The main character is Jinx who lives with his stepmother and st

We have been waging a losing battle with the weeds in our backyard. We live in South Florida and our yard is too small for a pool (we have power lines on our backyard line and regulations require that a pool be at least ten feet from the power lines so you don't electrocute yourself cleaning the pool. It doesn't seem unreasonable to me!) and while I like the look of grass, I apparently have not been offering the grass what it wants because the weeds have proliferated and the grass... not so much. We also had a problem with the rain running off the patio roof killing some of the grass. So my husband said, "Why don't we just pull up all the grass and plant bigger plants?" Ok, that seems like a good idea. So we drew some pictures of what we had in mind and laid out our garden hoses so that we could see what a path would look like and my vision was that we would start on this during our winter break (when it isn't 90+ degrees with a million percent humidity)

The Booksearch app is an awesome little app that allows you to search for books based title or author, just like a card catalog, but what makes it different is that it also allows you to search by the skill you are teaching.  I know what you are thinking... "Big deal, you can use ANY book, to teach ANY skill". Well, yeah, you can, but this is sort of like pushing an easy button.  It gives you a list of books (most of them are books you probably already own or are in your school or public library) and skills you could teach from them.  It also has connections to other books with similar skills or themes.  It's meant to save you time. So here's a little video to show you how it works.