The Book Search

It's been so hot out that I've been spending a lot of time indoors reading.  Hooray for awesome new books to read!   These two realistic fiction books could not be more different, but I thought they were both terrific.  The first one is called Thirst and it's written by Varsha Bajaj.  It's about Minni, who lives with her loving family in one of the poorest parts of Mumbai, India.  Her dad runs a tea stall, her mom works as domestic worker for a rich family, her older brother works in a restaurant and Minni goes to school, but it's hard!  One of the things the family has to do each day is wait in line for water.  There is a tap not far from Minni's house, but it doesn't operate consistently or very efficiently, so sometimes they wait a long time and other times, not as long.  Sometimes the water is discolored or bad smelling and they are told to boil the water before drinking it.  One day, Minni's brother gets invited for a ride in a friend's ...

I've been reading a lot of different things this week.  I ordered some new books from our book fair and those were awesome!  The first one was the Caldecott award winner this year (for best picture book) by Dan Santat.  It's about an island where imaginary friends live, waiting to be called.  One of the little guys gets impatient and decides to go and look for his friend.  It's not an easy journey, but he perseveres and becomes Beekle.  It's a great little story about friendship and persistence.  I'm planning to read it to my little kids this week and I can't wait.  Here's the book trailer: The second one was also highly rated by a number of people and I can totally see why.  It's called "How to read a story" by Kate Messner.  It's a picture book that describes in many steps, how to read a story and it gives great advice.  Lest you think it might be boring, let me disabuse of THAT right away.  I got my new box of books j...

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...