Showing posts with label letters. Show all posts
Showing posts with label letters. Show all posts

Wednesday, February 22, 2017

When ELL Teachers Give Their Students a Voice



One Good Thing About America
by Ruth Freeman
illustrated by Kathrin Honesta
Holiday House, March 2017
review ARC received at ALA Midwinter

Ruth Freeman works in the ELL department of an elementary school in South Portland, Maine. She acknowledges in the author's notes that hers is an outsider's perspective of what it's like to be a refugee or asylum seeker. Until this generation of refugee children grows up to write their own stories, the best we've got are stories from some of the people who know them best -- their teachers.

Anaïs is a refuge of Congo. Her grandmother, father and brother are still there. Her father and brother are on the run from the government. It is her grandmother to whom she writes, and her grandmother who encourages her to tell "one good thing about America" in every letter. Sometimes that's hard for Anaïs because, though she was top in her class in English when she left Africa, there is so much about American English and American culture that baffles and frustrates her. Her voice is very authentic, starting with broken English and readable misspellings mixed liberally with French words, and smoothing out throughout the course of the book and her ten months of learning. In the back of the book, there is a list of words and phrases that are Anaïs is hearing (such as a silum and playd) paired with "the spelling she will learn" (asylum and played). Such wonderful respect for our English Language Learners!



Messages from Maryam
by Lauren Pichon
illustrated by Kendra Yoder
lulu.com, January 2017
review copy provided by the author

Like Freeman, Lauren Pichon is an ELL teacher. Her self-published picture book is also a story told in letters.

Aila and Maryam are Iraqi girls from Mosul. When Maryam and her family immigrate to the United States, she and Aila exchange letters throughout the long process of waiting in a refugee camp, flying to New York, driving to Virginia, starting school with no English, and adjusting to life in a new country. Eventually Aila's family makes it to Virginia as well and the girls are reunited.

In the author's notes, Pichon acknowledges that the exchange of letters from a refugee camp is fiction -- people in refugee camps cannot send or receive mail. As with One Good Thing About America, the letter format is, nonetheless, an effective way to let the reader experience the loneliness, isolation, and frustration of the refugee experience. The contrast between Maryam's new life in America and the description of her life in Mosel and her and Aila's time in refugee camps will give American readers a better sense of what their new classmates have gone through.


Thursday, December 08, 2011

Numbers and Letters
























City Numbers
by Joanne Schwartz
photos by Matt Beam
Groundwood Books, 2011
review copy provided by the publisher

I'll admit, I'm a little surprised to be reviewing this book. Photographs of numbers around you in the city? Big deal. The book starts with 000. Not much of a surprise. Next up is... 1/2 ?? Hmm... Then 1, and... 2nd (second). That's exactly how long it took me to be hooked -- as soon as I wasn't sure what was going to happen on the next page, I was eager to see what number came next and where it was found. (Each two page spread has the photo on the right, and on the left, the number, in digits and words, and the location and media. 2nd is "Printed on paper, pasted on steel. Electrical box." Besides cardinal and ordinal numbers, the book includes decimals, percents, prices, and one iconic number: 007 ("Double-O Seven").

Two things happened when I read this book.

1. I said to myself, "I can do that." And then a half a heart-beat later, I said, "I'm going to do that!!" Here is my theme for my photos in 2012: I am going to look for numbers in my environment in all varieties of  media, location, and form. Suddenly, I feel reinvigorated to continue my personal Project 365 for a fourth (FOURTH!!!) year.

2. I wanted to get this pair's book City Alphabet and see what they did with letters and words in a similar format. I will not limit myself to numbers next year, I will also look for words and letters. Maybe. Maybe I need to be patient and stay focused on one theme at a time...hmm...stay tuned for a decision on that one.



















E-Mergency!
by Tom Lichtenheld and Ezra Fields-Meyer
Chronicle Books, 2011
review copy provided by the publisher

Which letter in the alphabet is used with the most frequency?

E!

What happens when E comes down the stairs too fast and breaks her leg?

An E-mergency! E is taken away in the ambulance and A assembles the rest of the alphabet to discuss how they will proceed without the letter E. "Someone is going to have to take the place of E while she gets better. O, you're the obvious option because you're so well-rounded."

This is a VERY punny book. If you don't get that from A's choice of replacement letters, check this out:




I can't wait to share this book with my students. I'll put it under the document camera and we'll study every page for visual and verbal puns. And we'll all laugh when we solve the mystery of why E is not recovering: Who is STILL using Es, even though they've been forbidden so that E can rest and recover??? (oops--so that E can rost and rocovor...)

EDITED TO ADD (in the voices of my students)


This book was really funny!
We enjoyed the book!
The pictures were funny!
The book was really good!
We figured out who was using the letter E!
E never learned her lesson!
The letter O is used for E in this book and that makes the words hard to figure out sometimes.
It's funny that the characters are letters and they sometimes do what their letter says (like...P)!!
The letters sometimes spell funny words like ROAD when they were getting ready to go on a trip or EGGS and OJ when it was breakfast time.
I like how O fills in for E. If that really happened, our names might change!