It's Monday: What Are You Reading?

So, I haven't had time to read lots lately. But, the things i've read have been such fun. Here are some highlights!

I read Polly Horvath's new MR. AND MRS. BUNNY-DETECTIVES EXTRADINAIRE BY MRS. BUNNY.  It is absolutely HYSTERICAL. I LOVE Polly Horvath--I have ever since I read EVERYTHING ON A WAFFLE years ago.  I picked this one up on a whim because I was in a reading rut.  I found myself laughing outloud early in the book and quickly fell in love with both Mr. and Mrs. Bunny. I decided I was hooked when I read this:

"Yes, you do that," said Mrs. Bunny, who wanted to get back to her fitness routine. She didn't like Mr. Bunny around for this.  He tended to make remarks.

HAH!

There are many surprising lines like this and I laughed aloud throughout the book. I have no idea if kids will catch the humor but I am pretty sure they will.

Even without the humor, this is a fun story and I highly recommend it. This book received several starred reviews so lots of people love it. A must-read, I think!

And, thank goodness for the CYBILS. I quickly ordered a few of the winners that were announced last week. It is always fun to discover new-to-me books and I thank the CYBILS for recognizing some great books I may have missed.  I read the nonfiction picture book winner,  I FEEL BETTER WITH A FROG IN MY THROAT: HISTORY'S STRANGEST CURES by Carlyn Beccia. This is a fun book that I am sure kids will love.  The book tells of various cures used throughout history and examines those that do/do not really work. I read it cover to cover and learned lots.

I also read HAVE FUN, ANNA HIBISCUS! How have I missed this character?  WOW! I love this character--I love her like I love Clementine and Roscoe Riley. She makes me smile. I ordered every Anna Hibiscus story after I read this one!

Since I am trying to start this running routine, I am also reading a few books to keep me thinking about that.  HEALTH AT EVERY SIZE is a good read. Lots of interesting information about lifestyle changes. I like that one but I am LOVING WHAT I TALK ABOUT WHEN I TALK ABOUT RUNNING by Hakuri Murakami.  A great reflective, memoir-type book about running, writing and life. I am anxious to read more of this one this coming week.

Visit TEACH MENTOR TEXTS for the whole round up of IT'S MONDAY-WHAT ARE YOU READING?

BOOKS THAT CHANGE LIVES

So, I admit that I bought 2 copies of THE FAULT IN OUR STARS the day that it was released.  I was really looking forward to this book.  So was my 21 year old daughter. And I really wasn't in the mood to share this one. And I figured having two would allow me to share it with lots of people. Anyway, I read the book and loved it.  I couldn't even start another book for a while because of the impact it had on me.

I decided I wanted my husband to read it. My husband reads a lot. He reads James Patterson, Harlan Coben, Dan Brown. He reads a bazillion sports blogs and anything Phillies. He reads tech articles and tech magazines.  But I decided it was time that he read a book that would change him. So I recommended THE FAULT IN OUR STARS and told him it was time for him to start reading books that changed him.  He rolled his eyes but picked up the book.  He read the first few chapters and I asked, "So, has it changed you yet?"  He said, "No,"

My 12 year old (who had not read the book) jumped right in, "It had to have changed you by now!!" We proceeded by asking him lots of questions.  We asked him if he met some characters that were different from people he knew in life.  We asked him if he understood anything about a character that might help him understand someone else someday. We asked him if it made him think about something he had never thought about. Or made him think of something that had ever happened to him with new insight.....Of course he said yes.  Of course the book had already changed him.  He read the book quickly and quietly and although he is not one to talk as much as I do (hah!), I know it changed him and I predict he will read more life-changing books in the near future.

This all happened in January.  As we were all anxiously awaiting the announcements of the ALA Youth Media Awards. As I was waiting for the award announcements I had already decided that THE FAULT IN OUR STARS had to win something big NEXT January. How could it not?

Then I read WONDER by R.J. Palacio and THE ONE AND ONLY IVAN by Katherin Applegate.  Two more unbelievable books that changed me. Books that I will never forget.

What a lucky month January was. Three books that will live with me for a very very long time.  Three books that I want to tell everyone about. Three books that truly changed me. New characters who I came to love and who I think about often, long after finishing their stories.

These books have already touched so many readers in so many ways. Teri Lesesne wrote about THE FAULT IN OUR STARS and Colby Sharp shared his thinking about WONDER.

So, I have been thinking about the awards and the disappointment that often goes along with the announcements. I know that I always hope for those books that have had a powerful impact on me to win and I am often sad when they don't. (Although I do get over it and I often see new things in the books that do win and usually acknowledge that they too, are amazing books:-)

But I am rethinking my approach to the awards from now on. I will always love the ALA awards, but I think this January's reading helped me to realize that although the awards are nice, the books that didn't win anything, still had a powerful impact on me and on so many other people. Award or no award, those books matter incredibly.  Nothing can change the power they have to change lives.

So, 11 months before ALA announcements in 2013, I am already anticipating a few books I hope to see on award lists. And I am assuming (from my history) that a few of the books I fall in love with will not be awarded anything.  But I am also realizing that some books are so amazing that it really doesn't matter if they win an award or not. The power they have to change lives is what matters most.

It's Monday! What Are You Reading?

This is my first time to take part in It's Monday! What Are You Reading, sponsored by Teach Mentor Texts.

My current audio read is Unbroken, by Laura Hillenbrand. It's been rough going the past couple of weeks, with Louie Zamperini on a raft in the Pacific and then in Japanese POW camps.

I'm not sure what my next audio read will be...Bill Bryson? The Art of Fielding? Black Swan Green (re-read/listen)?

On my to-read pile are a couple for my classroom:

I'm an avid reader of the Magic Tree House series. This one will be a quick 15-20 minute read.

One of my students read No Ordinary Day, and we compared notes on what it was like to read a book that wasn't particularly fun to read. For V., this book started out hard, but got better and happier as she read. For me (listening to Unbroken), the reading started happy and then got hard. On her recommendation, this book has made it to my TBR pile.

Another recommendation has come from my brother. He saw the play Wit and then read the script twice through, in back-to-back readings. It's been since college that I have read a play, but I'm intrigued because of David's strong recommendation. I have the movie on reserve from the library, but I won't watch it until I've read the play.

The final recommended book on my TBR pile comes from Franki -- the ARC of Wonder is tempting me, but I'm going to make myself wait to read it until I've finished the other three.

Letters to Book Characters

Binky the Space Cat

by Ashley Spires

Kids Can Press, 2009

Dear Binky,

You are so cute and funny. Why do you eat “Aliens”? I think you are a chubby little kittie. I have two cats at home, a big one named Luna and a small one named Taiyou. Toayou is very funny like you, they do not fart as much as you. If you have to much “Aliens” in your “Spsce station” just call an exterminator they kill all “Aliens”.

Your friend,

S.

P.S.   Please answer me.

* * * *

Dear S.,

You are so kind and know when you see a good personalty. I think aliens taste like fried chicken, it is so yummy. Luna should be the leader of the space station because she’s older. I do not need an exterminator I am the one who kills the aliens, anyway I can’t let an intruder in my space station. 

Your Pal,

Binky 

 Holly fuzz butt I forgot! I’m on a diet.

* * * * 

The assignment was to write a letter to a book character, and then write the letter the book character might write back. The students posted the letters on their blogs. This pair turned out great!

Cris Tovani on Rigor/Hard

One of my favorite sessions at the All Write Summer Institute was Cris Tovani's talk "Rigor and Hard are not the Same: Redefining Terms to Engage More Students."

Cris started by challenging us to think about whether we believed that our time should be spent covering vast amounts of content, or engaging students in purposeful work. It's kind of a no-brainer to choose between those two based on our personal philosophy of teaching -- of course we want the engagement and the purposeful work, but the pressures we are under because of testing push us to act in ways that don't always match our philosophy.

To help us to redefine what a rigorous curriculum might look like, and the kind of rigorous work our students might embrace with engagement rather than compliance, Cris led us in an activity where compared and contrasted reading that's hard, and reading that's rigorous. We started by listing things that make reading hard. Most people's list included

• no background knowledge
• unknown vocabulary words
• not invested in the work
• too many words or too much data
• no choice

Next we thought of a hobby in our own lives that is at times rigorous and at times just plain hard. I thought about baking. When I've planned well and have all the ingredients and tools I need, when I get to share the outcome, when I have the choice of what I make, and when I have the support of more experienced bakers, the work is rigorous. When the work is rigorous, I have internal motivation to do it, it energizes me, and I linger with it. When baking is hard, I don't have a choice, my time is crunched, things go wrong in a domino-effect way, and I drop or avoid the project. Can you hear how similar that is to when reading is rigorous vs. hard? The important factors to hold onto  are

• good planning 
• the social nature of reading/learning
• choice
• support

In the same way that reading levels change based on background knowledge, interest/motivation, and purpose, rigorous reading varies from child to child and from moment to moment. My work is no small feat: I need to help each student learn to tell the difference between hard reading and rigorous reading. I need to teach them to embrace rigor. I need to know books well so that I can help each child find the right book at the right time.

It's a big job, but the work, for me, is RIGOROUS, not hard!

The Ways We Read

Thanks to the ubiquity of text on the Internet, not to mention the popularity of text-messaging on cell phones, we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s, when television was our medium of choice. But it’s a different kind of reading, and behind it lies a different kind of thinking—perhaps even a new sense of the self. “We are not only what we read,” says Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist at Tufts University and the author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. “We are how we read.” Wolf worries that the style of reading promoted by the Net, a style that puts “efficiency” and “immediacy” above all else, may be weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged when an earlier technology, the printing press, made long and complex works of prose commonplace. When we read online, she says, we tend to become “mere decoders of information.” Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged.

Reading, explains Wolf, is not an instinctive skill for human beings. It’s not etched into our genes the way speech is. We have to teach our minds how to translate the symbolic characters we see into the language we understand. And the media or other technologies we use in learning and practicing the craft of reading play an important part in shaping the neural circuits inside our brains. Experiments demonstrate that readers of ideograms, such as the Chinese, develop a mental circuitry for reading that is very different from the circuitry found in those of us whose written language employs an alphabet. The variations extend across many regions of the brain, including those that govern such essential cognitive functions as memory and the interpretation of visual and auditory stimuli. We can expect as well that the circuits woven by our use of the Net will be different from those woven by our reading of books and other printed works.

From Nicholas Carr's "Is Google Making Us Stupid?", The Atlantic.com. Thank you Monica, at Educating Alice, for the link. She chose this excerpt. Go read the whole article. What do you think? Which part resonates in your brain?

Reading and the Internet

Good article in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: Education Online: Bit by bit, computers alter how we read.

Reporter Bill Schackner's ending:

At Penn State University, literature professor Michael Berube said jokingly that thanks to the Internet, he's had no reason to leave his desk since 2002.

Reading a novel on a monitor can be unpleasant, and in fact, Dr. Berube said he knows no colleagues who do. But he's not sure people are any less likely to read.

"The same culture that's given us Google has given us the 800-page Harry Potter novel," he said.

"I try not to be too dour about this," he said. "I have a friend who was an early enthusiast of the Internet, and by that I mean, 1993. I would tell him 'Yeah, fine. Wake me up when you can find specific passages in books I can't even remember.' "

Fifteen years later, said Dr. Berube, "we're there."