48 Hour Book Challenge Begins

How do you start a 48 Hour Book Challenge? First a good breakfast of fortifying GRANOLA (right, Bill? GRANOLA) at NorthStar Cafe, then a trip to Cover to Cover Bookstore with a dozen blogger friends.

In the back, L to R:

Maria of Teaching in the 21st Century

Mary Lee of A Year of Reading

Bill of Literate Lives

Mandy of Enjoy and Embrace Learning

Next row, L to R:

Franki of A Year of Reading

Karen of Literate Lives

Tony of atychiphobia

Stella of My World-Mi Mundo

Christine of Best Book I Have Not Read

Deb of Primary Perspective

Floor, L to R:

Katie of Creative Literacy

Cathy of Reflect and Refine

Both Franki and I will have 48 Hour Book Challenge summary posts later today or tomorrow, detailing what happened AFTER breakfast and the bookstore!

Poetry Friday: Dictionaries

(Click on the image to enlarge it.) This is an original dictionary created by one of my fourth graders. You have to admit, it's pretty amazing! It's an ongoing project, and it inspired many of the other students in my class to create original words. 

If the speaker in the following poem had done his book report on the Korindictionary, he would have been way more entertained:

BOOK REPORT ON THE DICTIONARY

by

Gregory K.

I found the plot missing,

The dialog weak.

I kept waiting and waiting for someone to speak.

The characters bored me.

In fact, there weren’t any!

The jokes were not funny, and there weren’t too many.

(the rest of the poem is here)

Toby is hosting the Poetry Friday round up at The Writer's Armchair. Let's go check out the words and poems everyone has chosen to share this week!

CAKE POPS: Can You Believe I Made These?

This post is dedicated to my friend Lori Sabo (Lori's Lessons) who inspires me to make things!

Can you believe I made these????

One of my summer goals is to learn to bake some new things.  This week, my daughter and I tried a new lemon cupcake recipe (which was delicious) and we made our first batch of Cake Pops.  My daughter made them at a baking camp last year and we loved them. I later discovered the Bakerella blog which I visit often as well as the accompanying book, Cake Pops:  Tips, Tricks and Recipes for More Than 40 Irresistible Mini Treats, both by Angie Dudley.

I absolutely love this book--these fun cake pops have so many possibilities and the author makes it so easy to learn to do them. I figured that it would take a few batches before mine were presentable, but they worked the first time.  We definitely made the basic cake pops for our first try but with the presentation tips that Bakerealla includes in the book, we created a very fun treat to give away or to serve. This time, we used chocolate cake with basic sprinkles. We tried a few kinds of sprinkles--some worked better than others.  But we have a plan for our next batch and I feel confident that I could make these for a future event.

If you are looking for fun things to try this summer, I would definitely recommend this book. The product is a fun one (although they do take a bit of time) and it was a fun project to do together.  Hopefully, I'll attempt one of the more complex cake pops later this summer, but for now, I am happy to have this new fun treat on my list of things to bake!

#bookaday -- Two (more) For My Classroom Library

Cinderella Smith
by Stephanie Barden
illustrated by Diane Goode
Harper, 2010
review copy purchased for my classroom library

I'm really good at keeping my readers going in series books. I love them (you might have noticed that if you were paying attention on Wednesdays in April and May), and most of my 4th graders love them. But when a student is ready for a stand-alone novel, or when I'm ready for a student to break into stand-alone novels, I sometimes have a hard time suggesting books. Cinderella Smith will be at the top of my pile of recommendations next year.

Cinderella got her nickname NOT because she has a wicked stepmother or awful stepsisters, and NOT because she sleeps on the floor by the fireplace, and NOT because she had to do lots of horrible chores. She got her nickname because she loses her shoes. In this book, Cinderella has more problems than just lost shoe problems -- she has new teacher problems, sitting at the smart boys' table problems, and friendship problems. But she's got lots going for her, too. For one thing, she understands how to use a PROCESS to solve a problem, so she sets out to help the new girl, Erin, figure out if the two step-sisters she has not yet met will be wicked.

Cinderella Smith is a great new character, perfect for 8-10 year-old girls.



Like Pickle Juice on a Cookie
by Julie Sternberg
illustrated by Matthew Cordell
Amulet Books, 2011
review copy purchased for my classroom library

This novel in verse is another great book to have on hand for readers transitioning to stand-alone books. Eleanor has lots of adjusting to do in an August that's "As bad as pickle juice on a cookie. / As bad as a spiderweb on your leg. / As bad as the black parts of a banana." She manages to have a good end to her summer, giving readers hope that their own pickle-juicey problems will get better.

Franki reviewed this book earlier this month.

May Mosaic

Fun month -- nut butter tasting, Orlando, a retirement, line drawings and nets in math, Race For the Cure, Time With Teacher, the requisite peonies and iris, retirement party, never-ending rain, camp, a baby opossum in our back yard, the best scallops I've ever eaten (Barcelona -- birthday celebration), Mulch-o-Rama in the land lab at school, a bridal shower, a wedding (unrelated to the earlier bridal shower), a towering TBR pile, and school out before the calendar page turned to June!

#bookaday -- Mal and Chad

Mal and Chad: The Biggest, Bestest Time Ever
by Stephen McCranie
Philomel, May 2011
review copy purchased for my classroom library

One of the last things I heard as I walked my students to the bus last Friday was, "Can I come back and visit you next year and check books out of your classroom library?" It was a rhetorical question; my students have seen 5th graders coming back to browse my shelves all year long. I have the best books, that's all there is to it. It's my goal: something to tempt every reader and if I don't have it, I'll scour the library and bookstores to get it.

My graphic novel readers are going to LOVE Mal and Chad. A reviewer on Amazon puts it this way, "Imagine "Dexter's Laboratory," "Jimmy Neutron," and a dash of "Calvin & Hobbes" and you've got a pretty good idea of what "Mal and Chad" is like." Mal is the super-brilliant inventor boy, and Chad is his talking side-kick dog. Their adventures include a time machine and dinosaurs, underwater exploration in the kitchen sink thanks to a mini-mega-morpher and some magic lollipops, and a little bit of a crush on a girl who can throw a flaming dodge bomb in dodgeball.

At the beginning of the book, Mal's teacher is trying to get him to write a short essay on what he wants to be when he grows up. What Mal finally comes up with is this: 

"I spent the whole week trying out different jobs, but I couldn't figure out what I wanted to be when I grow up. Then I realized that finding a job wouldn't answer the question of what I want to be...it would only answer the question of what I want to do. In the end, I found out that being the person you want to be is more important than getting the job you want to get. And if that's the case, why wait until I'm an adult? I'm going to try to be the person I want to be right now." 

Yes, I'll be using this book in our study of theme. (It's stated, not implied, but it's a good one, isn't it?!?)

#bookaday -- ML's TBR Pile

Yes, it's a towering stack, but I've already read the three thinnest, I've thrown one out because it's the second in a series, and I'm more than halfway through The Wednesday Wars. (Clever and practical of me to have borrowed the middle of the pile from the library, eh? I have to read some books I missed -- Jennifer Holm, Gary Schmidt -- so that I can read the next in the series...because you know how I am about reading series in order!) And did you notice the ADULT reads  there at the bottom of stack -- Geraldine Brooks' new one, Caleb's Crossing (I LOVED People of the Book and March) and an anthology of poems by the Poets Laureate. I'll have to add to the pile in order to have enough to make it through Mother Reader's 48 Hour Book Challenge next weekend, and to last me for two weeks when I go home to visit Mom.

Then again, life might conspire to prevent me from finishing a book a day EVERY day of summer break. Hanging over my head are the two journal articles I still need to complete, and the ppt presentation that needs polishing. I have a bit more paperwork and classroom put-to-bed work that needs to be done at school, and the other 1/3 of the land lab needs to be mulched. The 2/3 I mulched last week with the help of 10 of my students looks great, doesn't it?

My own flower beds need attention (I did get the herbs planted today before it got too hot), there are piles to excavate in my home office, and (YAY!) a birthday cake to bake for a weekend celebration.

Hooray for summer break!

Goodbye, Badbye

P.S.S. I love Kidblog! 

FINALLY!!!

Poetry Friday: Annie Dillard

There's a real power here. It is amazing that trees can turn gravel and bitter salts into these soft-lipped lobes, as if I were to bite down on a granite slab and start to swell, bud, and flower. Trees seem to do their feats so effortlessly. Every year a given tree creates absolutely from scratch ninety-nine percent of its living parts. Water lifting up tree trunks can climb one hundred and fifty feet an hour; in full summer a tree can, and does, heave a ton of water every day. A big elm in a single season might make as many as six million leaves, wholly intricate, without budging an inch; I couldn't make one. A tree stands there, accumulating deadwood, mute and rigid as an obelisk, but secretly it seethes; it splits, sucks, and stretches; it heaves up tons and hurls them out in a green, fringed fling. No person taps this free power; the dynamo in the tulip tree pumps out ever more tulip tree, and it runs on rain and air. (p. 114)

Along with intricacy, there is another aspect of the creation that has impressed me in the course of my wanderings...Look, in short, at practically anything--the coot's foot, the mantis's face, a banana, the human ear--and see that not only did the creator create everything, but that he is apt to create anything. He'll stop at nothing.  (p.138)

What I aim to do is not so much learn the names of the shreds of creation that flouish in this valley, but to keep myself open to their meanings, which is to try to impress myself at all times with the fullest possible force of their very reality. I want to have things as multiply and intricately as possible and visible in my mind. Then I might be able to sit on the hill by the burnt books where the starlings fly over, and see not only the starlings, the grass field, the quarried rock, the viney woods, Hollis Pond, and the mountains beyond, but also, and simultaneously, feathers' barbs, springtails in the soil, crystal in rock, chloroplasts streaming, rotifers pulsing, and the shape of the air in the pines. And, if I try to keep my eye on quantum physics, if I try to keep up with astronomy and cosmology, and really believe it all, I might ultimately be able to make out the landscape of the universe. Why not? (p.141)

from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, by Annie Dillard.



Yes, I'm playing a little fast and loose with the idea of poetry here, but I've been listening to Pilgrim at Tinker Creek on my commute to and from school for the past few weeks, and Annie Dillard's words are the poetry I've been hearing as I drive through this wet, green, lush, pulsing, growing spring. The mystery of the earth re-making itself has pushed to the back of my mind the (too much) to-do lists that come with the end of the school year.

And now, suddenly, it is here. The end of the school year. Our last day. The mystery and miracle of watching children accumulate another year of knowledge, skills, manners, personality will be put on hold until the end of August. All of my intimate knowledge of the intricacies of this group of children -- their handwriting, the way their smiles come slow or fast, how much I need to suggest or tease or pressure them to do their very best -- this all will be lost by the end of the summer, in order to make room for the next batch, brood, class.


Heidi has the Poetry Friday roundup today at my juicy little universe.