Spring Cleaning

Save trees, send less waste to the landfill (or hopefully, to recycling), and reduce your risk for identity theft.

1. Switch to e-statements and e-billing whenever possible. Save trees and keep your personal information out of publicly accessible mailboxes at the same time.

2. Opt out of unsolicited credit card and other pre-screened offers. OptOutPrescreen.com

3. Opt out of unwanted catalogs. Call the company directly, or go to CatalogChoice.org

Thanks to Danielle Chatfield, Community Affairs Director of MidState Educators Credit Union for these suggestions.

Poetry Friday

Here's a poem for the first day of Spring Break:

The Tables Turned
by William Wordsworth

Up! up! my Friend, and quit your books;
Or surely you'll grow double:
Up! up! my Friend, and clear your looks;
Why all this toil and trouble?

The sun above the mountain's head,
A freshening lustre mellow
Through all the long green fields has spread,
His first sweet evening yellow.

Books! 'tis a dull and endless strife:
Come, hear the woodland linnet,
How sweet his music! on my life,
There's more of wisdom in it.

And hark! how blithe the throstle sings!
He, too, is no mean preacher:
Come forth into the light of things,
Let Nature be your teacher.

She has a world of ready wealth,
Our minds and hearts to bless—
Spontaneous wisdom breathed by health,
Truth breathed by cheerfulness.

One impulse from a vernal wood
May teach you more of man,
Of moral evil and of good,
Than all the sages can.

Sweet is the lore which Nature brings;
Our meddling intellect
Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things:—
We murder to dissect.

Enough of Science and of Art;
Close up those barren leaves;
Come forth, and bring with you a heart
That watches and receives.


Today's roundup is at Wild Rose Reader.

Amulet News

An article in Variety reports that Amulet (my review here) will be made into a movie by Warner. Siblings Willow and Jaden Smith will have the brother-sister star roles.

Also in the article, "Five books are planned in the Scholastic series, with the second installment skedded for release this year." Skedded? That's a word?

Moo

Everywhere the Cow Says "Moo!"
by Ellen Slusky Weinstein
illustrated by Kenneth Andersson
Boyds Mills Press, 2008
Review copy compliments of the publisher

One of the indicators in our 5th grade social studies standard about immigration says that students should be able to identify the lasting effects of the English, Spanish and French in the U.S.. I know that standard so intimately because Karen and I wrote an immigration unit a couple of summers ago.

So I get this book in the mail and I open it up.

"In English, the dog says, 'Bow-wow bow-wow!'
In Spanish, the dog says, 'Goo-ow, goo-ow!'
In French, the dog says, 'Wah-wah, wah-wah!'
In Japanese, the dog says, 'Wan-wan, wan-wan!'
But everywhere, the cow says, 'Moo!' "

How could my Integration Radar not go up?!?!

The pattern in the book repeats for what the frog, duck, and rooster say. You guessed it. Everywhere the cow says, "Moo."

The best part are the illustrations. The English dog surprises a Beefeater, the Spanish dog defies a bullfighter, the French dog serenades the Eiffel Tower, and the Japanese dog sits beneath a cherry tree. In each illustration is something iconic from that culture. Including architecture.

You don't have to love this book because it's perfect for your social studies unit. There are plenty of reasons to simply love this book.

* * * * * *
Edited to add: Monica at Educating Alice has a great connection to this book -- a website where you can hear kids from around the world imitating the sounds of animals! Check out her post and then go listen!!!

Nonfiction Monday -- Sabertooth

Sabertooth
by Patrick O'Brien
Henry Holt, 2008
review copy compliments of the publisher

Step aside, dinosaurs. Time to pay attention to the kitties.

Sabertooths of some kind or another hunted the Earth from 13 million to 10,000 years ago. The best-known, and the star of this book, was the Smilodon (3 million-10,000 years ago).

O'Brien's painted illustrations vary from full-spread to full-page to multiple panels per page. With the text in boxes that overlap or overlay the illustrations, the book almost has the feel of a nonfiction graphic novel.

You will learn how scientists know what they do about this ancient cat (the fossil record), how all cats evolved from one common ancestor, what scientists don't know about sabertooths (what color their fur was, whether they hunted alone or in cooperation), the prehistoric predators they likely competed with for food, and the food animals they might have hunted.

The book ends on a cautionary note, reminding us that we need to protect the habitats of our modern big cats, or they, too, will go the way of the sabertooths.



The Nonfiction Monday Roundup is at Picture Book of the Day.

Shakespeare For All

Henry V
by William Shakespeare
script adaptation by John McDonald
Classical Comics, 2007
2007 Cybils Nominee
review copy compliments of the publisher






Macbeth
by William Shakespeare
script adaptation by John McDonald
Classical Comics, 2008
review copy compliments of the publisher






I don't need to tell you the plot line in these books. What you need to know about is the publishing format.

First of all, this is Shakespeare in graphic novels. Instead of just reading the play, you get to see it "acted out" on the page before you. But the best part is that each title comes in three versions of the text: Original Text (the bard's own words, full and unabridged), Plain Text (a plain English version of the full script) and Quick Text (shortened dialogue for young readers and for those people who want to understand the story rapidly).

The folks at Classical Comics have "turned up the excitement volume" when it comes to classical literature and they want to share the excitement with you. Check out their website for free downloads and an extensive page of links to articles about everything from teaching with graphic novels to further information about Shakespeare. They have 9 more titles in the works: more Shakespeare and Bronte, Dickens, Shelley, Stoker, and Wilde.

Let the high school English and ELL teachers in your life know about these books! Differentiated instruction made possible!

Poetry Friday -- Daylight Savings Time

Daylight Savings Time
Comes Early This Year

This is so wrong...
and so beautiful.
I am sitting here at my
east-facing
window-facing
desk
watching a big ball of orange emerge
from behind skeletal trees into a pink-and-purple sky.

I am at work
watching the sun rise.

I am momentarily blinded
by a flash of grace
before the day races away from me.




Round up today is at jama rattigan's alphabet soup. She's celebrating Bob Dylan and asked us to share our favorite Dylan lyrics. I'm not a Dylan fan. I did, however, read a book this week in which the main character is a Dylan fan (Naked Bunyip Dancing by Steven Herrick). That's the best I can do. Especially when it's the week Daylight Savings Time shifts my universe.

(image from Freefoto.com)

Scaredy Squirrel At the Beach

Scaredy Squirrel At the Beach
by Melanie Watt
Kids Can Press, 2008
Review copy compliments of the publisher

Scaredy is back on the scene just in time for spring break. Slather on your 65 spf sunscreen and stretch out with him on his fake -- and very SAFE -- beach.

Shake your head when he cooks up a plan to mail himself to the beach to get a shell so that his beach has the proper wave sounds.

Laugh out loud when he gets more than he planned for at the beach (ie: a crowd of people), and has more fun than he could have imagined (after playing dead for awhile).

Scaredy's fake beach will never be the same once he gets home and makes some modifications...and once he finds out he brought home more than just a shell...

Pleasant Surprises, Part One

Naked Bunyip Dancing
by Steven Herrick
illustrated by Beth Norling
Front Street Press
April 1, 2008 release
review copy compliments of the publisher



I never would have picked this book up on my own, but it was required reading, so I gave it a go. And I was pleasantly surprised!

Now, I should give a small disclaimer here -- I hardly ever read YA, and I haven't ever read any of Steven Herrick's other books. The sole soul on Goodreads who has read and reviewed this book didn't think it was as good as his others. So keep that in mind. And a note on the title -- a bunyip is a mythological Australian animal. I Googled bunyip after I read the book, but knowing what a bunyip is hasn't helped me understand the title. Maybe it has given me permission to be okay with the fact that I don't understand the title.

This is a novel in verse about an Australian 6th grade class with a new, liberal, pony-tailed, Dylan-singing teacher named Mr. Carey. The poems, in the voices of the students, understandably give us a very childlike view of what happens in their classroom. These poems are what you'd get if you overheard kids talking about their day at school -- they talk about the parts of the day that were out of the ordinary; they talk about each other; they talk about their weird and wonderful teacher; they talk a little bit about what's going on at home. If you read between the lines, you know that Mr. Carey has a method to his "madness," he knows his students very well and works hard to play to their strengths, and there's a lot more teaching going on than the students report.

On Friday afternoons, the class does co-curricular activities. "Mr. Carey says its stuff you do/on Friday afternoons/and you don't have to do tests/or be marked on it." The class is working on a concert, and the way Mr. Carey stays out of their way and lets them make if it as much as they can reminds me of The Last Holiday Concert by Andrew Clements.

The class takes a field trip to the Sewerage Works. (Australian spelling.) When else has that happened in children's literature? The Qwikpick Adventure Society by Sam Riddleburger, of course!

The way you can infer the influence of the teacher through the students' voices and actions is reminiscent of Mr. Fab in Ralph Fletcher's Flying Solo.

The depth of the characters revealed in the fewest number of words is all Love That Dog by Sharon Creech.

All these book "cousins" on my bookshelf are what made me pleasantly surprised by this book. I haven't tried it on a real, live child reader. I don't know if the Australianisms will throw them off. Stay tuned for that. I am going to add Mr. Carey to our list of 100 Cool Teachers in Children's Literature! (He's number 111.)

Nonfiction Monday -- Trout Are Made of Trees

Trout Are Made of Trees
by April Pulley Sayre
illustrated by Kate Endle
Charlesbridge, 2008
review copy compliments of the author


This was a fun book to read to fourth graders. They knew what it was going to be about as soon as I read the title. "This is a food chain book, isn't it?!"

That did not prevent them from listening intently as I read. The text is simple, but poetic: "They (the leaves) snag and settle soggily down."

The illustrations tell the story of the children studying the stream as well as the story of the life in the stream. And the illustrations were painstakingly researched. Although stylized, the aquatic insects are true to life, right down to the gravel cases of the caddisfly larva.

One of our Language Arts Standards talks about writing for different purposes and audiences. When I finished the book, I asked my students who they thought was the intended audience for this book. "Kids," they said. "Little kids," someone elaborated, "Because there aren't very many words on each page."

I'm betting that another audience for this book will by fly fishers. I'm going to take a copy of the book to our next fly fishing club meeting for the raffle. I'm pretty sure there are some fly fisher dads (one is an avid member of Trout Unlimited and does lots of stream restoration) who would gladly take this book home.



April Pulley Sayre on writing nonfiction at I.N.K..
An early review of Trout Are Made of Trees at Charlotte's Library.
Our interview with April last year is here.
April's website is here.
The Nonfiction Monday roundup is here.