The Book Search

We're still in the throes of the book fair and it's always so much fun to help the kids find new books.  Today I'm looking at some of the picture books for little kids. I really loved this one called "Bear Sees Colors" by Karma Wilson.  It's about a bear and some of his friends who go for walk and see things of many different colors.  What makes this one so much fun is that there are some very fine, predictable rhymes and then each color page asks the kids to identify things on the page.  It's such a great opportunity for oral language, particularly really specific vocabulary (like the difference between a blue jay and cardinal or a poppy and sunflower).  The kids I  read it to really liked it a lot.  It would be great with an old favorite "White Rabbit's colors" by Alan Baker, which I also love because of it's lovely vocabulary. I also loved this funny folk tale called "Noodle Magic" by Roseanne Greenfield Thong.  It...

The Scholastic Book fair is at my school this week, YAY!!!  It's always a lot of fun (and a lot of work) and one of the best things is, I get to read all the new books.  This morning, I spent the morning reading some of the new picture books and there were some really good ones that I thought could be used as mentor texts for the bigger kids. One thing we find at our school is that we want our kids to do research projects, but having them write reports or give oral presentations (even using technology) seems dated and artificial.  When I read this book "Abraham Lincoln His Wit and Wisdom from A-Z" by Alan Schroeder, I thought "This is something my kids could do!"  It's all information about Abraham Lincoln but instead of being in chronological order, it's in alphabetical order.  So G is for Gettysburg Address (a famous speech Lincoln made), The Globe Tavern (where Abraham and Mary Lincoln were married), and Good Samaritan (Lincoln did kind things for o...

I've been reading some new things from Netgalley and part of why I haven't posted in awhile is because several of the books I read were real dogs.  Like " kick them to curb after 100 pages" kind of dogs.  It was a good thing to remind my students that if you aren't loving a book, you should give it a chance but there is a point of no return.  If you find yourself reading and not caring about who you're reading about, it's time to go.  Happily, these books were better than that! The first one is called "Weird" by by Erin Frankel.  It's part of a series of books about self esteem and bullying.  It's a picture book and the pictures are lovely pen and ink drawings with splashes of color to draw attention to the main character.  The main character, Luisa, is being bullied by a girl named Sam.  When Luisa does things (like speaking to her dad in Spanish or raising her hand in math class) Sam calls her weird.  Luisa tries not doing those thing...

As a school librarian who teaches 8 classes each day, I need to have a certain tolerance for repetition. I certainly COULD read different books to each class each day, but after awhile, I'm bound to hear "You already read that one".  So for me, it works better to read the same book to the same grade level all week long.  What I have come to understand is that there are some books you can read a million times in a row and never be sick of and some that after the third day you want to hide behind the reference books and never look at ever again.  It occurred to me that parents of small children might feel the same way (except that you might be hiding the books behind the couch instead of the reference books).  So here's a short list of some the books that I don't ever get tired of reading. The one that made me think of this post was the one I was reading this week.  It's kind of a funny little book that apparently didn't get much press when it was publishe...