Today is the Big Day!

Today is the day that many of us who work with children's literature wait for with much anticipation all year...the day that the American Library Association's Youth Media Awards are presented.  To be on a committee such as the Newbery or Caldecott would be a DREAM, but I don't know if I'd like all the pressure.  And the fact that you have to choose just one as the best of the best...I'm not sure I could do it as there are so many great books out there!

Having said that, I'm going to be bold and make my predictions as to what books I think would win the Newbery and Caldecott if it were up to me! 

For the Newbery Award, I am hoping that Kirby Larson's The Friendship Doll  takes this honor.  This book was a pure joy to read.  I laughed, I cried, I cheered for the girls and this is a book I HAVE to order for my own school library.  It was a beautiful book and I hope author Kirby Larson gets the recognition she so deserves.

For the Caldecott Award, I know there is a lot of buzz about Me...Jane being the runaway winner, but I'm really pulling for Balloons Over Broadway by Melissa Sweet.  I learned so much from this book and as is the criteria for the Caldecott, the illustrations just blew me away!  I absolutely loved this book and have shared it with my elementary students and they have loved it as much as I have.

The winners are being announced in under two hours and I can't wait to hear who gets the awards!  So glad we have a 2 hour delay for school this morning so that I can hopefully catch the live stream here at home before leaving!

Good luck to all those authors out there waiting for the call this morning!

And Our Next Read Is...

My 6th grade book club met today and discussed the book Esperanza Rising as the students just finished it up over the weekend.  Most students really enjoyed this book and I must admit, we had some great discussions on this novel.

While I was looking forward to today's discussion, I was most excited to see what the girls would choose for their next read!  Last week at our meeting, they were tossing around such titles as Maximum Ride: The Angel Experiment, It's Raining Cupcakes and Al Capone Does My Shirts.  I gave little book talks on all the books and told the girls to take a week to think it over & we'd talk about it this week.

Well, after much debate, the girls decided on a title and our next read is...Al Capone Does My Shirts!  I'm so happy that the girls chose this title because it really is a great book.  I have read it numerous times and even though I know how everything is going to turn out in the end, this book never gets old for me.  Characters like Piper, Moose and Natalie are ones that I've never forgotten since my first read of the story.  They are characters that resonated with me and I'm hoping the same for my students.

We have our next meeting on Wednesday and I'm so excited to hear what the girls have to say about the book.  I have already had one student comment tonight on our Edmodo site that she really loves the book, so that's great to hear!  I'm hoping we can arrange a Skype visit with author Gennifer Choldenko as that would be a great experience for my girls to hear how she chose this topic to write about, how she came up with the ideas for the characters used and so many other things.  Connecting with authors is a great way to promote reading!

We All Have Scars

I have been reading rave reviews of the book The Scar by Charlotte Moundlic over the past few months, so I decided to interlibrary loan the book so that I could take a look at this book for myself.  I was thrilled to get the call from my public library the other day telling me the book was in! 

For those of you who aren't familiar with the book, here is the summary from Indiebound.org.

"A little boy responds to his mother's death in a genuine, deeply moving story leavened by glimmers of humor and captivating illustrations.

When the boy in this story wakes to find that his mother has died, he is overwhelmed with sadness, anger, and fear that he will forget her. He shuts all the windows to keep in his mother's familiar smell and scratches open the cut on his knee to remember her comforting voice. He doesn't know how to speak to his dad anymore, and when Grandma visits and throws open the windows, it's more than the boy can take--until his grandmother shows him another way to feel that his mom's love is near. With tenderness, touches of humor, and unflinching emotional truth, Charlotte Moundlic captures the loneliness of grief through the eyes of a child, rendered with sympathy and charm in Olivier Tallec's expressive illustrations."

The book is really well done.  You could feel the emotions the little boy was going through on every single page.  I was crying after reading the first page and did a lot of thinking about "scars" I, myself, have and how they have made me a stronger person for them.

Perhaps the biggest scar I carry with me every day which can't outwardly be seen is the scar of divorce: my parents'.  This happened to me when I was 5 and still at the age of 40 it affects me.  It's the reason I dated my husband for 4 years before we even talked about getting married.  It's the reason I want my boys to see their parents together having fun because I never saw that.  And this scar is the reason my husband and I would fight tooth and nail for our relationship because we never want our boys to go through what we did as children of divorce.

Of course, I have physical scars, too, which remind me of various events in my life: the malignant breast tumors I had removed, the scar across my stomach from two c-sections.  Both were very painful at the time, but I wouldn't trade them for the world because I'm better for having them.

As the little boy in the story moves on with his life, so must we all, but the scars are a reminder of what we've been through to make us the people we are today and I, for one, wouldn't trade my scars for the world.

Choices...Choices...Choices

My 6th grade book club is nearing the end of their first read, Esperanza Rising, so now they will collectively need to make a big decision.  What book are they going to choose to read next? 

I have purchased quite a few books for my club over the years and I've read almost all of them, but I'm trying to guide the girls to pick a book that is going to work for them.  They are typical tweens: they like stories about girls with just a hint of romance, they like reading about students their age, and they like the book to include a lot of action to keep them reading.  Keeping all of these things in mind, I've suggested the following books for them:

Set in 1935, when guards actually lived on Alcatraz Island with their families, Choldenko's second novel brings humor to the complexities of family dynamics.

(Description via Indiebound.org)

Twelve year old Isabel is dying to get out of Willow, Oregon (population 39, 257) and experience something other than her small town. It seems that everyone gets to travel except Isabel--even her best friend, Sophie. When Isabel's mother decides to open up a cupcake shop across town, Isabel is once again stuck in Willow for the summer as she tries to help her mom get the shop up and running. But when Isabel learns of a baking contest where the finalists get an all-expense paid trip to New York City, she realizes this is her chance to finally get out of Willow. Except there are two major roadblocks to this plan: Sophie, who also is entering the contest and is always the best at everything, and her own mom, who wants her to enter the contest on her terms.Can Isabel manage to finally do something for herself, without losing her best friend and further straining her already tenuous relationship with her mother? In this sweet coming-of-age story from popular teen author Lisa Schroeder, Isabel discovers that it's not about where you go in life as much as it is about enjoying the view wherever you are.

(Description via Indiebound.org)

In James Patterson's blockbuster series, fourteen-year-old Maximum Ride, better known as Max, knows what it's like to soar above the world. She and all the members of the "flock"--Fang, Iggy, Nudge, Gasman and Angel--are just like ordinary kids--only they have wings and can fly. It may seem like a dream come true to some, but their lives can morph into a living nightmare at any time...like when Angel, the youngest member of the flock, is kidnapped and taken back to the "School" where she and the others were experimented on by a crew of wack jobs. Her friends brave a journey to blazing hot Death Valley, CA, to save Angel, but soon enough, they find themselves in yet another nightmare--this one involving fighting off the half-human, half-wolf "Erasers" in New York City. Whether in the treetops of Central Park or in the bowels of the Manhattan subway system, Max and her adopted family take the ride of their lives. Along the way Max discovers from her old friend and father-figure Jeb--now her betrayed and greatest enemy--that her purpose is save the world--but can she?

(Description via Indiebound.org)

The girls have a week to think their choices over as we're going to vote next Monday when we have our next meeting.  So, if you were in our club, what book would you want to read next?  I can't wait to see what the girls pick!

It's Monday! What Are You Reading? 1/9/2012

This past week was my first week back to school after Christmas Break and my #bookaday challenge on Twitter.  I'm sorry to say that my reading definitely slowed down this week.  It's amazing how work, school and family commitments can get in the way of our reading! :-)

While I wasn't able to read as much as I wanted to, I was able to finish up a great read, Amelia Lost.  Wow!  I'm not normally a lover of non-fiction reads, but this one kept my attention from start to finish.  I love how the author alternated chapters with information from the day she went missing and then back to her biography.  I felt like I knew quite a bit about Amelia before reading the book, but I definitely learned a lot more!  This book even made me want to find out other information about her, so I figure if it got me interested in the subject, this book definitely did its job!



Seeing as I'm participating in the Caldecott Medal Challenge called #nerdcott on Twitter, I figured it would be a great week to start getting my hands on those Caldecott Medal and Honor Books that I haven't seen/read before.  I had to do quite a bit of reserving at the public library, but it has been interesting to compare books that won many years ago to some of those most recent wins.  I must say that I'm partial to those newer titles.  For some of the books that I have read, I wonder if there were very slim pickings the year this or that title won the award as the illustrations really weren't anything that special.  Some of those that I've read this week include the following:

This week I'll be concentrating again on the #nercott challenge with more Caldecott winners due to arrive for me.  The books I plan on reading this week include but are not limited to:



My 6th Grade Book Club

Last year, I had some 5th grade girls approach me about forming a book club that would meet during their lunch hour.  I was ecstatic that they wanted to read for fun in addition to the work that they were doing in their classrooms.  We ended up reading some really good books including Kate Messner's Sugar & Ice and some of The Shadow Children series books by Margaret Peterson Haddix.

With this year came a change for those students:  middle school!  They moved upstairs in our school building and started having new classes, new teachers, and involvement in extra curriculars that weren't available to them last year.  I never said anything to the girls about continuing on with our book club now that they were in middle school because I know things change and they were now busier than they have ever been.

Well, it seems they hadn't forgotten about our club!  A few weeks before Christmas Break, two of the students approached me and asked if we could start our book club up again.  Imagine my excitement!  They told me that they missed reading books together and talking about them.  I did, too, and I told the girls that.  We set up a meeting during their lunch and I had 9 girls interested in being in the club.  That is the perfect number for a group like this!  We talked about when they'd like to meet, books they like to read and fun things like that.

The girls decided on reading Esperanza Rising for their first book and they are really enjoying it.  We had a book club meeting yesterday and it was so interesting to get their take on Esperanza and her mother's journey to California after leaving Mexico.  While the girls don't always share the same view on the books, they are willing to listen to each other and agree to disagree.  It's fun to see them interact this way.

We're almost finished with our book, so it will be interesting to see what book the girls want to read next.  No matter their choice, I know for sure that we'll have fun reading it!

It's Monday! What Are You Reading? 1/2/2012

This morning I was reading my Twitter feed and noticed quite a few tweets entitled, "It's Monday!  What are you reading?" so I decided to check those out.  I learned from reading the Teach Mentor Texts blog that this is a weekly posting where people sum up the books they read the previous week and talk about those they'd like to read this week.  Seeing as I'm new to blogging and always looking for topics, I figured, "This is definitely something I can do!"

I have been on Christmas Break since December 23rd, so I've been reading a lot lately and it has been so nice!  I hope to continue this even after school is back in session tomorrow and I start taking classes again at the end of January.  Reading time is so precious and it's time I can share with my two boys or by myself, depending on what I'm reading.

Books I read last week and really enjoyed:

and my favorite book of 2011...



Books I will be reading this week:



I am also participating in the #nerdcott challenge, so I will be reading a variety of Caledecott winners this week, but I'm not sure which ones yet.  I have to see which ones are in my school library before I order them through my local library system.

Now, off to do some reading!