The Book Search

We had our Scholastic book fair this week and there was a grand assortment of books.  There were two new ones I'd been hearing about but hadn't read, so I got to read this them this week! The first one is a picture book.  It's called "All Are Welcome" by Alexandra Penfold.  It's a story told in rhyming verse about how school is a welcoming place.  The illustrations are warm and inviting and show a range of people who look different, sound different, and worship different from me.  This is going to be a terrific book for talking about classroom and school community.  I think it would be appropriate for little kids, but I think big kids, even middle or high schoolers, could appreciate it too.  Unfortunately, Scholastic only sent me three and when I tried to reorder, they were out of stock.  I think this shows that a LOT of people are enjoying and appreciating what a good book this is.  So you need to look for it too! The second one was...

I've been doing some reading on things that I've been seeing on some lists but haven't had a chance to read and wow, now that I've read them, I'm a little sorry I waited so long, but oh well, better late than never. The first one I actually read this summer and somehow forgot to blog about it.  It's called Echo by Pam Munoz Ryan.  It's kind of a genre defying book because it starts off as a fairy tale and then has three parts of what appear to be unrelated historical fiction and then finishes as both a fairy tale and modern fiction.  It sounds a bit confusing but I assure, the story is anything but.  It starts with a boy named Otto who is wandering around in a forest and gets lost.  He is approached by three sisters who have quite a fantastic story.  They leave him back at home, a bit confused, but with a harmonica to remind him of his quest.  Then we go to Freidrich in Germany in the late 1930s.  Then to Ivy in California in 1941 and finally to...

Oh it's that time of year again and we are hosting the Scholastic Book Fair this week.  I found a couple of books there that I really liked and I can't wait to share them with the kids. The first one is a picture book.  It's called "I Wish You More" by Amy Krouse Rosenthal and illustrated by Tom Litchenheld.  It's a very pretty picture book about wishing positive intent for someone else.  It's full of little truisms like "I wish you more will than hill." or "I wish you more Woo Hoo! than Whoa!".  What's really great about this one is that you can read this one a million times for lots of different reasons.  One teacher I showed it to wanted to give it as a gift to her pregnant daughter.  One wanted to give it to her partner on their five year anniversary.  One kindergarten teacher looked at it and said it would be great for teaching beginning sounds and another teacher thought it would make a great mentor text for writing.  See wh...

I love reading chapter books from the book fair.  I've gotten to the point where I really don't want to buy books because I live in a fairly small house without tons of storage so I just don't have room for stacks and stacks of books.  The other part is, why do I want to pay $25 for a hardcover book that I might only read one time?  So I love that I can haul these books home and then tell the kids which ones are worth owning (in my opinion!). My favorite one from the book fair is called "The Fourteenth Goldfish" by Jennifer Holm. (I bought three copies for the media center and nagged several people into buying it too!) I already adore Jennifer Holm who writes with an amazing mix of humor and deep feelings.  I completely loved her chapter book called "Turtle in Paradise" about a girl who moves to Key West in the 1930s and her graphic novels that she writes with her brother Matt,  "Baby Mouse" and "Squish" are also wonderful.  Her lat...

We just finished up the book fair at school and I'm so relieved it's over with. It's SO much fun. The kids LOVE buying books and we get to see a lot of books that we wouldn't normally get to see. The kids love to look at the Guinness book of world records and the Ripley's Believe it or not books (although the guy with the snakes coming out of his nose and mouth seemed a little over the top to me) and since I refuse to buy those for the media center anymore, it's the book fair or Costco! But it is EXHAUSTING and busy and I'm so glad on Friday afternoon, I packed everything away so when I come in on Monday morning, we can go back to our regular routine. A teacher from the local university stopped in during the book fair (she supervises student teachers at our school) and she asked for books that could help with teaching behavior management. She's going to be teaching a class at our university this fall and she was looking for trade books to put on h...

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...