A Book for All Readers

I Kill the Mockingbird
by Paul Acampora
Roaring Brook Press, 2014
review copy from the public library, but I'll be buying a copy so I can transfer all my dog-eared pages



We rarely review YA books, but exceptions can be made.

This is a book for book lovers.

Three good friends on the brink of high school hatch a fake conspiracy to ensure that everyone will actually read their summer reading assignment -- To Kill a Mockingbird.

There's a romance subplot, a cancer subplot, and a poke-mild-fun-at-Catholics subplot. There are literary allusions to children's literature right and left (the three good friends are, and have always been Readers).

Oh, and there's a teaching subplot. Mr. Nowak, Fat Bob, has these words of wisdom before he dies of a massive coronary:

"It's not enough to know what all the words mean," he continued. "A good reader starts to see what an enritre book is trying to say. And then a good reader will have something to say in return. If you're reading well," he told us, "you're having a conversation." 

I raised my hand. "A conversation with who?"

"With the characters in the book," said Mr. Nowak. "With the author. With friends and fellow readers. A book connects you to the universe like a cell phone connects you to the Internet."

Mr. Nowak's the one who inspires the three culprits who hatch the I Kill the Mockingbird plan. And in the end,

"All the teachers are talking about it...If you're a teacher, you dream about having students who will try to change the world someday because of something you do or say in the classroom."

Indeed.

If you don't get it, a kid might...

I wasn't quite sure what to make of the picture books I received from McSweeny's McMullens recently. Not trusting my adult sensibilities, I took them to school and had some kid-readers give me their opinions.

Recipe
by Angela Petrella & Michaelanne Petrella
illustrated by Mike Bertino & Erin Alther
McSweeney's McMullens, 2013

The first thing my readers did was to take the jacket off the book for ease of reading and discover that it opened into a huge two-sided poster. As they studied both sides of the jacket-poster and the end papers, they speculated and made predictions.

My adult self was not willing to believe the story of a mother who lets her daughter cook whatever she wants (boiling water+bag of marshmallows+hotdogs+tofu+burnt fries in a pile on a tarp), but the kids were delighted by the ridiculous fun of it. And they wanted to try the recipe on the last page for a dessert treat you heat up by running it (wrapped in foil) through the dryer to heat.

Hang Glider and Mud Mask
by Brian McMullen & Jason Jagel
McSweeney's McMullens, 2012

I have a whole collection of books whose stories dovetail in the middle, so I was predisposed to love this one, which "is uniquely constructed with two front covers, two spines, and a Z-shaped binding that links the two sides of the story." --Amazon Description

But hang glider? Mud mask? Intriguing, but not enough in the 20 pages of sparsely-worded text on each side of the book to populate my inferencer.

It was all worth it to see the two students who were offering opinions sit opposite each other, each reading her side simultaneously with the other, then flipping the book to read the other side. Then exclaiming in surprise as the two stories came together in the middle. Then filling in all the gaps (for me) with imaginative and probable explanations. Clearly, I didn't work hard enough on my reading. The two girls "knew" it was their job as reader to make sense of the story. I, lazily, waited for the book to do all the work.

Crabtree
by Jon and Tucker Nichols
McSweeney's McMullens, 2013

At least for this one I wasn't too far off my students' evaluation: they thought it was a fun book to look at inside ("This guy has a LOT of junk!!") and out (it is another with the signature McSweeny's McMullens dust jacket fold-out two-sided ginormous poster).

They totally missed the story of Mr. Crabtree looking all over his house for his lost dentures and going for a cruise in the end when he finds them! They were too involved in looking at the pictures!

This might be fun book for a picture reader who likes to pore over every detail of every picture, or who likes to sort and categorize his/her toys.

In the Classroom: Responding to Writing

Last week, in writing workshop, we started a short cycle on response groups in writing.  This is the beginning of our work with responding in peer groups so a few lessons are helping us get started.

I began the lessons by sharing my own experiences as a writer.  I shared this photo with my students. It was taken at the Choice Literacy Writing Retreat this summer. It is a photo of the group of us who got together to write and share and respond. I talked to them about the experience and about how twice a day we would share our writing and get feedback on it to help us make our writing better. I explained that sometimes I was the writer and sometimes I was the responder and I shared a few specific examples of pieces I worked on while I was there and the ways in which the other helped me to make my writing better.

Then we revisited a video we watched earlier in the year as part of a minilesson cycle on community.  The video shows the power of peer response and we talked about how the responses from Austin's classmates were what helped him create a better drawing. The same was true for writing.  Response matters.

We started a chart early in the week that we will build together over the course of the minilessons.  Then we'll clean it up a bit to synthesize our learning about response groups.

The first experience with response was whole group and it was a piece of writing that I shared with the students. I wrote a piece that I was hoping to put on Kidblogs about my younger brother. Sibling stories are popular in the classroom right now, and I wanted my kids to see that I got ideas from their writing.  I also wanted to practice together. So I told my students that as a writer, I had to prepare for the response group.  I had chosen a piece of writing that I wanted help with, made copies for everyone, and thought of a few specific things I wanted help with.  I read the piece aloud.  Their job was to read the piece and write thoughts that came to them as they read--things that might help make my writing better. They each marked a piece up.

The next day I fishbowled with 3 students about my writing.  I asked them specifics ( a few questions about word choice and some advice on the lead.).  They shared confidently and kindly and I got some great advice. We processed the things that made the response group positive.

Then kids went off and chose a piece of writing from their writers' notebooks that they wanted feedback on.  They were very excited about doing this once we got to this point in the cycle. Getting feedback on their writing was something they were excited about!  They marked the piece, jotted down specific feedback they were looking for and we copied those pieces so that everyone in the response group would have his/her own copy.

Then we started to get ready. Students were put in groups of 4 with one writer and 3 responders each day.  The WRITER of the day met with me about things they were hoping to learn from the responders while responders read and marked up the writers' texts.

Then response groups met, focusing on one writer each day.

Writers took notes on the things they needed to remember when they went back to revise.

By the end of the cycle, we will have a chart that reminds us how we get ready for a response group (writers and responders) and the kinds of things we might say/hear in a response group (as a writer or responder).

As we continue to build, our feedback will get more detailed and specific but my goal with this first cycle was for kids to see the power of response groups--for both the writer and the responder. 

You Can Never Have Enough Books That Invite Readers to Make Car Noises, Can You?

I found two great books this week that somehow belong together.  Both are for those readers who just love cars, trucks, and vehicles.

 
MITCHELL'S LICENSE by Hallie Durand is great fun. Definitely one of my favorite reads lately--one I can't wait to share with kids. The story is about Mitchell, an almost four year-old.  Here is how the story begins:  "Mitchell never ever EVER wanted to go to bed.  Until his dad finally said he could drive there". This is one of those books where the words and the illustrations are both necessary in the story. Both play equal parts in the fun.
Through the text, we learn that each night, Mitchell inspects his car's tires, checks the engine, cleans off the windshield and drives.  The illustrations let us in on the fun. Mitchell's dad is the car and they both have a ball with this new bedtime routine.  This book is great fun.  The illustrations by Tony Fucile (of LET'S DO NOTHING and BINK AND GOLLIE) are perfect. They capture the spirit and the love in this relationship. Every page makes me smile.

Along with this book, I found another fun book-CARS GALORE by Peter Stein- that could go in a basket on cars, trucks and vehicles. This would also make for a fun read aloud but for totally different reasons.  This is a rhyming book filled with cars of every kind.   For example:

Black car, green car,
nice car, mean car.
Near car, far car.
Whoa! Bizarre car!

This book is fun to read aloud.  It will also make for a fun "I-Spy" type of reading where readers look for the cars described in the text.