The Book Search

New books!  New books!  New books!  It's so exciting to get new books!  I just got a big box of new books for our library!  I don't even remember how I chose them, but here are some of my new favorites. The first one is called "My life in pictures" by Deborah Zemke.  It's a short chapter book about a charming girl named Bea (short for Beatriz).  Bea likes to draw and has a very annoying little brother that she calls "The Big Pest".  She has a best friend who lives next door named Yvonne and they have marvelous adventures together until Yvonne moves away to Australia.  A new family moves in and guess what?  They have a child the same age as Bea!  Except he is a monster.  Bea draws to work her way through this problem and it has a great ending.  This one would pair up well with "Like Pickle Juice on a Cookie " by Julie Sternberg-it has the same short chapter format, as well as a similar art and writing style.  The kid...

The Scholastic book fair starts this week at our school.  I wish I could describe to you how excited the kids are by the book fair, but imagine a fifth grade boy (they tend to want to play things really cool) rushing up to you as a truck pulls into the parent up driveway, shouting "The book fair is here!"  Just saying, at our school, the book fair is a BIG DEAL. Scholastic generally offers a good supply of books at reasonable prices and I'm SO happy that my students think that books are fun and exciting.  I read some research somewhere that kids who have books in their homes are more likely to be good readers (they had to do research about that?).  The magic number of books (according to this research) was 50.  50 books that kids selected themselves in their homes and that would help them down the path of being good readers.  Really?  So in my way of thinking, I need to do whatever I can to help them get books into their houses, not just into their h...