Franki's Top Picks (so far!) for 2006

Thanks to Mother Reader for another great idea! She has asked us to pick our top 5 books of 2006 in a few categories. Since the purpose of this blog is to read books that could win the Newbery, I have my top 5 in that area on my list. At the moment, based on what I've read and the mood I'm in, here are the top 5 picture books and chapter books for middle readers.

Top 5 Fiction for Middle Readers
(Novels that COULD Win the Newbery Award)

YELLOW STAR by Jennifer Roy

PENNY FROM HEAVEN by Jennifer Holm

YEAR OF THE DOG by Grace Lin

FAIRIES OF NUTFOLK WOOD by Barb Bentler Ullman

GOSSAMER by Lois Lowry


Fiction Picture Books

SCAREDY SQUIRREL by Melanie Watt

LAST DAY OF SCHOOL by Louise Borden

THE PRINCESS AND THE PEAby Lauren Child

HIPPO! NO, RHINO! by Jeff Newman

BIG SISTER, LITTLE SISTER By LeUyen Pham

Teacher Challenge!

I am fascinated by Fibonacci Poetry (thanks to Gotta Book) and Emily Reads Haiku Reviews (thanks to A Chair, A Fireplace, and a Tea Cozy). I'm also quite amused by Book-a-Minute.

So, teachers, here is your challenge,
create a Fibonacci Poem OR a Haiku OR a School-Day-A-Minute describing your day at school.

Mary Lee, you go first:-)


School Fib for Tuesday, September 12

Wake,
walk
dog and
swim laps, then
it's all a blur 'til
I fall asleep reading in bed.


To Teach Fib

To
teach
is to
motivate,
inspire, encourage,
watch, listen, cajole, celebrate.


ML

The Horn Book Article

Thanks to Read Roger, whose blog I read almost daily, I found this great article from this month's Horn Book Magazine. I hadn't dug into my copy yet but checked out the Table of Contents when Roger mentioned that it was available. I always love the sneak peak at the articles online. I am so interested in getting the right books into the hands of our new chapter book readers that I loved this one. It is a letter to parents from a second grade teacher about books and book choice at this age. If anyone knows the author, I'd love to tell her how amazing this letter to parents is!

The First Six Days of School

(Disclaimer: I am a looping teacher. One of the joys of the second year of the loop is that there is a weave of connectedness to everything that happens in our classroom right from the start.)

The first book I read aloud this year was DOOBY DOOBY MOO by Doreen Cronin. Last year we read Click Clack Moo, Giggle Giggle Quack, Duck for President, Diary of a Worm, and Diary of a Spider, so predictions and connections were numerous and were rich with background knowledge about the farm, the farmer, and the duck. The kids loved how Cronin uses asterisk footnotes that sound just like the fine print in real life.

The asterisk footnotes led me to read WOLVES by Emily Gravett next. (Yes, this is the one I stole out of Franki's pile at Cover to Cover.) I won't spoil it for you, but the end of this book is similar in tone and style to Cronin's asterisk footnotes. My students were touchingly distressed by the first ending, and laughed hysterically at the sarcasm of the second ending. 10 years old and already so jaded!

After two picture books, I was ready for a novel, and we jumped right into GOSSAMER by Lois Lowry. I say "jumped right into" because we usually spend time doing what readers do when they choose a new book -- studying the cover, reading the blurbs on the back and on the flaps of the cover, thinking about all we might know about the author's other books. All I told them was that they should expect to be confused, but that one of the main characters was also confused and would be asking lots of the questions they would have. As I read the first 10 pages or so, we stopped often, trying to piece together the clues about who these creatures are and what they are doing. The way Lowry writes with such authority about these imaginary (??or are they real??) dream givers reminded us of the way one of the students in our class wrote about the alien cultures in the lunar system that she invented last year.

I'm still making my way through Katie Wood Ray's STUDY DRIVEN, but I have read enough to know that our first study in writing workshop will be of the interesting things punctuation can do in our writing. (Ray writes about such a study in a first grade class. Why re-invent the wheel, eh?) It seemed natural to use Cronin's asterisks as the example that would send some students off to gather other anchor texts for our study. They went right to Cronin's other books, so it looks like we'll be doing a combination study of how Cronin uses punctuation, and, oh, yeah, how a few other writers use it, too.

I tabbed this important statement in Ray's STUDY DRIVEN: "When students are just writing on their own in writing workshops, they must learn to answer this essential question, 'What have you read that is like what you are trying to make?' " As we reviewed what a writer needs to think about when planning a piece, one student offered up, "You need to know what you're going to make." (goosebumps) So as I circulated around the room and asked students what they had read that they thought their writing might be like, one student said she was planning to make a story that would be like DOOBY DOOBY MOO, set on a farm, with a farmer and some farm animals for the characters. Two boys have attempted to write humor in the style of CAPTAIN UNDERPANTS, but I'm going to send them back to Pilkey's books for more study. Their funniest joke so far is the one about the Barbies vs. Barneys: The Ultimate Battle video game that is rated M for Mature. The rest of the humor is gratuitous bathroom humor. Maybe they need to get some peer reviewers to look at their work, too. I could be way off on the bathroom humor.

Enough for tonight. I have to go make lunches for the week and then fall into bed and hope to get enough rest to tackle our first, full, five-days-in-a-row week of school, which will include both the unveiling of our science museum and curriculum night.

Poetry Friday!

I decided to feature two of my favorite professional books for teachers this week. If any of you know me, you know I am talking about Georgia Heard's books, FOR THE GOOD OF EARTH AND SUN: TEACHING POETRY and AWAKENING THE HEART: EXPLORING POETRY IN ELEMENTARY AND MIDDLE SCHOOL. Neither are new books, but they are books that I go back to every year to think about poetry teaching. I am a big fan of Georgia Heard's work. She is amazing and has helped so many teachers to teach poetry well. I used to dread the idea of getting kids to write poetry. But, after discovering FOR THE GOOD OF EARTH AND SUN years ago, we have a great time reading, writing and thinking about poems. She is a poet and teacher and her strategies for teaching poetry help kids (and teachers) to love the genre of poetry and to learn to write it well. I have found that studying poetry and language the way that Georgia Heard teaches us to, helps students improve their writing across genres. Georgia Heard is a poet who has also written several poetry books for kids, such as CREATURES OF EARTH, SEA, AND SKY, THIS PLACE I KNOW: POEMS OF COMFORT, and SONG OF MYSELF: AN ANTHOLOGY OF POEMS AND ART.

"Comments are the Lifeblood of Blogs"

I couldn't agree with Graham Wegner more.

Doug at Borderland shares some tips for organizing and tracking your comments...a little beyond my skill level right now, but maybe not yours...

Links for Teachers

I updated our generic and quirky "Links" section on the sidebar to (hopefully) be more useful to teachers who read here. Any other favorites you'd like us to consider?

archy and mehitabel

From the Don Marquis website: "Archy is a cockroach with the soul of a poet, and Mehitabel is an alley cat with a celebrated past -- she claims she was Cleopatra in a previous life. Together, cockroach and cat are the foundation of one of the most engaging collections of light poetry to come out of the twentieth century."


the lesson of the moth

By Don Marquis, in "archy and mehitabel," 1927


i was talking to a moth
the other evening
he was trying to break into
an electric light bulb
and fry himself on the wires

why do you fellows
pull this stunt i asked him
because it is the conventional
thing for moths or why
if that had been an uncovered
candle instead of an electric
light bulb you would
now be a small unsightly cinder
have you no sense

plenty of it he answered
but at times we get tired
of using it
we get bored with the routine
and crave beauty
and excitement
fire is beautiful
and we know that if we get
too close it will kill us
but what does that matter
it is better to be happy
for a moment
and be burned up with beauty
than to live a long time
and be bored all the while
so we wad all our life up
into one little roll
and then we shoot the roll
that is what life is for
it is better to be a part of beauty
for one instant and then cease to
exist than to exist forever
and never be a part of beauty
our attitude toward life
is come easy go easy
we are like human beings
used to be before they became
too civilized to enjoy themselves

and before i could argue him
out of his philosophy
he went and immolated himself
on a patent cigar lighter
i do not agree with him
myself i would rather have
half the happiness and twice
the longevity

but at the same time i wish
there was something i wanted
as badly as he wanted to fry himself

archy

Happy Blogday!

We got tagged by A Chair, A Fireplace and a Tea Cozy for BlogDay 2006. It sounds like fun, so here goes:

Happy BlogDay 2006! Here's how you can participate:

1. Find five new blogs that you find interesting.

2. Notify the five bloggers that you're recommending them on BlogDay 2006.

3. Write a BlogDay post today with a short description of each blog, and a link back to each one.

4. Add a BlogDay 2006 Technorati tag and/or link back to the Technorati BlogDay 2006 page.

5. Link to the BlogDay website.

So here are my five blog choices:

a wrung sponge She's thoughtful and funny, takes great pictures, and is a home-grown one-woman environmental movement.

Lowry Updates Lois Lowry is one of my favorite children's authors, and finding her blog made my day! In between the release of her books, I can still enjoy her fine writing (and smile at the antics of Alfie).

blog of proximal development Here is a PhD candidate whose thesis is on the use of blogging communities in education. Our school district's Framework for Learning stands on the shoulders of Vygotsky's "Zones of proximal development" and as a beginning blogger, I have palpably felt the edges of my ZPDs as I build my skills!

Perpetual Thursday She has the MOST AMAZING yearly reading lists. I aspire to be as widely read as she is, and as organized in my list-making. She's also the one who turned me on to Library Thing.

GottaBook He hooked me with his Ogden Nash-esque poem about Pluto's demotion. I haven't even scratched the surface of his Fibs, Oddaptations, and Poems. Fun reading here!

More On Summer Reading Lists

There seems to be more going on with the Summer Reading Requirements this summer. I read at Fuse #8 about a school district that suspended 519 students on the first day of school for not completing their Summer Reading and assignment. They were happy because this was down almost 50% from last year's suspensions.

The interesting thing was --of the 519 students, all but about 93 came back the next day with their reading assignments completed. So, do we really think those kids went home and in one day completed a summer's worth of reading?

I did a bit of investigating and found the school district's website. They have a good goal. There is big research out there that supports the idea that kids need to read in the summer. I totally agree with that. So, this district had signs all over town, reminding kids of their Summer Reading. So, from what I read, if a chid went to a local restaurant, there might be a sign reminding them that they had to read over the summer.

The teachers seemed to be very smart about this assignment. From the lists and assignments I found, they really worked hard to help kids have choice in what they read, inviting them to read books on the list or to find their own. They also gave choice within the project. Although the district announced that the assignment should be turned in on the first day of school and would count as a big test grade, the teachers created good lists and thoughtful projects.

I think where we are going wrong with all of these summer reading lists is in the message to students that you have to "work" in the summer too. It can't be good to have kids thinking that they "have to" read and that reading is "work". Instead, as teachers and administrators, we should help kids discover the amazing experience that reading is, so that they use the summer to catch up on the books that they have been dying to read. I would think a good goal would be for kids to get excited about an event like the 48 hour book challenge sponsored by the brilliant Mother Reader. How many of us were extremely excited about the idea of giving 48 hours to ONLY reading? This is the kind of reader I think we want to come out of our schools. Imagine if our high schoolers were reading for 48 hours, writing about their reading, to a real audience, as they went. Maybe if we spent our time helping kids find the right books so they become readers during the school year, maybe if instead of assignments, kids could meet over the summer to discuss and share the great books they found, we could keep kids reading over the summer AND help them become lifelong readers.

I think so often, we are trying to get kids to "prove" that they read. In my lifetime, I have turned in book reports on books I hadn't read that scored higher grades than reports on books I had read. It is easy to "fake" these assignments that are designed to "prove" that you read. What messages are we giving our children if they think reading is such an awful thing that we are going to check to see whether or not they really did it?