It's Monday: What Are You Reading?

It's been a while since I've participated "It's Monday: What Are You Reading?" hosted by TEACH MENTOR TEXTS! I haven't read a ton in the last few weeks but wanted to recap the last few weeks now.

I read two books that are MUST READS--OPENING MINDS by Peter Johnston and WONDER by R.J. Palacio.

CHOICE WORDS by Peter Johnston is one of the most powerful professional books I've ever read. It is a book that changed who I am as a teacher and it is one I revisit often.  So, I was thrilled to see that Peter Johnston had another book about the language we use with children.  OPENING MINDS: USING LANGUAGE TO CHANGE LIVES is out this month from Stenhouse and it is brilliant. I had planned on reading it quickly--in a sitting or two.  But I found that I had to read it over a week or two. That I had to read and then reflect and process.  Just as in Choice Words, Johnston packs a ton into a small book.

I didn't have huge expectations for this one.  CHOICE WORDS was so life changing for me that I would have been happy had Johnston have rehashed that. But this new book is just as powerful of a read, if not more powerful.  Johnston talks again about the messages our language gives to our students. He talks about the subtle differences in the things we could say to children and how they impact their learning, most particularly their sense of agency.   He focuses on learning but he also focuses on giving kids a voice. He talks about collaboration and creativity. I need to revisit this book after I've lived with what I've learned for a bit. I am already paying closer attention to the things I say to children every day and how I could rethink some of the phrases I use.

With OPENING MINDS, Johnston adds a new layer to what we already learned from him about the importance of the language we use with children.  This new layer has given me a great deal to think about and it will definitely make me a better teacher.  I so love this book. (You can order it directly from Stenhouse and preview the entire book online there.)

Another must-read in my eyes is WONDER by R.J. Palacio.  I have only been hearing wonderful things about this book so was excited to read an ARC.

Several others have written about the book:

Attack of the Book

Random Acts of Reading

Kirkus Book Reviews

Readaraptor

The Book Armada

Here is the official Book Trailer for Wonder:



This book would make a great read aloud or book club book. So much to think and talk about.  A definitely 2012 favorite already:-)

I also read an ARC of Patricia Maclachlan's upcoming book, KINDRED SOULS. This book reminded me of the books I read when I fell in love with Maclachlan years ago.  This book is about a little boy and his grandfather, two kindred souls.  The book has themes of joy, loss, family and love.  It is a quiet book, and reminded me a bit of reading Sarah, Plain and Tall.  I love how Maclachlan keeps coming back to the same life themes in different ways over the years.

I also read a few picture books.
EXTRA YARN is a great story with a great message. Not only that, but it was great to see that even after the bear ate the rabbit in I WANT MY HAT BACK, that it was only a temporary thing and they are now friends again. See, they were merely playing. That Jon Klassen is genius..

DEAR CINDERELLA by Julie Olsen is a book of letters between Snow White and Cinderella. It is a fun "retelling" of the stories. And I can never have enough pink/purple sparkly books in the library. I try to only pick those that are quality and this one fits both categories:-)

I read two ALA award winners.  TALES FOR VERY PICKY EATERS was a Geisel award winner and a Pura Belpre Honor for illustrations was THE CAZUELA THAT THE FARM MAIDEN STIRRED by Samantha Vamos.

I'm not sure what's up next. Some books I've previewed/read a bit of include BEAUTY QUEENS, THE MIGHTY MISS MALONE, THINKING FAST AND SLOW, SIX INNINGS and WHAT I TALK ABOUT WHEN I TALK ABOUT RUNNING.

January Mosaic and A New Photographic Focus

This year, my Project 365 has a new focus.

I'm going to collect photos of numbers and letters (actual and representations). By the end of the year, I'll be able to make my own Alpha-Numeric picture book through the iPhoto store!

Top row:
0 (garden stepping stone)
0 (knot in wood)
0 (classroom sink strainer)
00 (rings around the moon)

Row two:
00 (condensed milk can)
00 (goofy glasses)
1 (hemlock cone)
2 (hemlock cones)

Row three:
3 (oak leaves on the oak that's growing in the geranium on my classroom windowsill -- formerly the geranium on my front porch!)
3 (hemlock cones -- one of my favorite pictures of all time -- love the light and the sky...)
4 (acorn split by squirrels)
4 (number on sign at the deaf school soccer field)

Row four:
5 (sweet gum leaf)
12 (bloggers + 1 big red dog)
A (fence along McConnell walking trails)
Avocado Mismatch (not really part of the ABC/123 project)

Row five:
S (vine along McConnell walking trails)
W (tree trunks along McConnell walking trails)
Winter (not really part of the ABC/123 project; along McConnell walking trails)
Y (rabbit track in the snow along McConnell walking trails)

Poetry Friday -- A LEAF CAN BE...

A Leaf Can Be...
by Laura Purdie Salas
illustrated by Violeta Dabija
Millbrook Press, 2012

In a rhyming text, accompanied by luminously illustrated pictures, Laura Purdie Salas explores all the things a leaf can be throughout the seasons.

"A leaf is a leaf.
It bursts out each spring
when sunny days linger
and orioles sing.

A leaf can be a...
soft cradle
water ladle
sun taker
food maker
tree topper
rain stopper"

Each pair of words invites the reader to think again about all that leaves can do. In the back of the book, there is a bit more information about each of the leaf jobs in the book, written with young scientists in mind:

"Food maker: Along with sunlight, leaves take in air and water. They turn these things into food for the plant or the tree. This is called photosynthesis."

There's so much to love about this book! I keep going back over and over again to the illustrations. ("Snake concealer" is my favorite!)

It makes me want to try to write a series of rhyming word pairs -- I'm pretty sure it's not as easy as Laura makes it look!

I want to pair this book with A Sock is a Pocket for Your Toes by Liz Scanlon and have students compare and contrast the way these poets crafted their metaphors.

In fact, this book is a great example of an extended metaphor, and I'm always on the lookout for ways to help readers understand and identify metaphors, and to help writers try to incorporate them in their writing.

Another great addition to my classroom library from Laura Purdie Salas!


Karissa has the Poetry Friday roundup today at The Iris Chronicles.

Getting Started with QR Codes

I promised in my "What's On My Wonderopolis iPad" post that I would tell about the little project I did with my students to show them the power of QR (Quick Response) codes.

What is a QR code? It's a little like a bar code, only it's square, and it contains a maze-like design of black and white cubes that are an information code. (more details here, on Wikipedia)

There are lots of QR code generators out there. I picked QRStuff.com.

The steps on the generator page are really straightforward and easy to follow. The type of data we used was plain text. (A QR code can also take you to a website, a YouTube video, etc.)

My students were going to be reading picture books with pretty obvious stated or implied themes. (See yesterday's post for the newest book in the theme tub in my classroom.) Their job was to write a very short summary of the book and identify what they determined to be the theme, and I wanted a fun way for them to share their writing and their thinking about themes.

After writing a draft in their writer's notebook, they went to the generator page, typed the book's title and author, their summary, the theme they identified, and their name. They downloaded the code, we printed it, and now the page with the code lives inside the front cover of the book. 

Students love grabbing one of the iPods or iPads and scanning the code (before or after reading the book for themselves) to see what their friend wrote for the summary and what they thought the theme could be.

And now they are finding QR codes EVERYWHERE and bringing them in to scan! A QR code from a pizza advertisement took us to the company website. Another was found on the tag of an Annoying Orange toy. If you're not on the school's server, it takes you to some really annoying Annoying Orange videos. There's even one on the back of Melissa Sweet's BALLOONS OVER BROADWAY that takes you to her website.

This is a tiny little quickie project with QR codes. Check out this amazing project that Julie Johnson's  3rd graders did. It integrates their local history unit, video-making, and using QR codes to take their work to an authentic public audience! Thanks for ramping up my thinking, Julie!

PLANT A KISS by Amy Krouse Rosenthal

Plant a Kiss
by Amy Krouse Rosenthal
illustrated by Peter H. Reynolds
Harper, 2012

One of my favorite songs as a child was "Lollipop Tree" sung by Burl Ives. I loved the idea that you could plant a lollipop stick and grow a lollipop tree that would produce candy in good weather and ice cream cones in the winter. (Matter of fact, I still love that idea!)

In this sweet, simple and GLITTERY book by the sure-fire team of Rosenthal and Reynolds, Little Miss plants a kiss. She cares for it and waits, waits, waits. Finally, there is a sprout. Everyone comes to see, and Little Miss shares it all. But it's not really gone. "...she learned...from one little kiss...endless bliss!"

This is a great book for my theme tub. Our students need experience with books like this whose themes are stated as well as those with themes that are implied.

What's On My Wonderopolis iPad

The $500 mini grant from The National Center for Family Literacy (NCFL) and Better World Books that I was awarded (announcement post here) purchased an iPad intended for using Wonderopolis to teach nonfiction reading skills. So far, the iPad has done a little of that, but SO much more! In the spirit of Wonderopolis' goal to "engage children’s natural curiosity and transform it into a lifelong love of learning" the iPad has become a reading/writing/math/reference tool in our classroom.

This is the first in a series of posts about how I use a couple of iPads, a couple of iPods and a Kindle in my fourth grade classroom. We'll begin with What's On My Wonderopolis iPad.

Here is the first screen. Book Creator and Comic Book are composition apps. Story Builder and iSentence are primarily for my ELLs. Pages, Keynote, Explain Everything, and Whiteboard are also composition apps. I don't know how to use Dropbox, but it was on the school's iPads, so I included it. BrainPop, Discovery News, The Weather Channel, and the Kindle app are all reading/viewing apps. (Poetry Tag Time by Janet Wong and Sylvia Vardell, Poems I Wrote When No One Was Looking by Alan Katz, and What I Do When I Could Be Sleeping by Greg Pincus are the most popular books in the Kindle.) NineGaps and Long Division are math apps. More on the Reading Folder later. i-nigma is a QR code reader. And Wonderopolis, Storynory, and Animal Facts (wild-facts.com) are bookmarked on the first screen for easy access. They are also reading/viewing apps.

On the second screen, there are reference apps. Merriam-Webster, the bookmark for Merriam-Webster's Word Central website, Google Earth, Google Translate, iMovie, Videos, Motivational Poster, and Comic Life. There are folders for word games, more math apps, science apps, FlipBook, and two new ones I just got for my ELLs and most struggling spellers: Word Wizard and Montessori Crosswords. (As I'm describing these pages, they don't seem very organized, but I set them up to somewhat mirror the school's iPads, and then tucked my extras in where they seemed to make most sense.)

Page three is off limits to the students and so far they've been good about leaving the utilities and my apps alone. They'd rather follow the rules than lose iPad privileges! Along the bottom of each screen for easy access are Maps, Camera, Google, Safari, Photos and Music. What's in Music? All the songs I collected to go with BabyMouse: The Musical, the poems from Hip Hop Speaks to Children and Poetry Speaks to Children, and some Bach, Glenn Miller, LA Guitar Quartet and Playing for Change.

In the Reading folder are iBooks, Charlie Brown Christmas, Peekaboo Forest (I love Charley Harper's art!), The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore, and Sports Illustrated for Kids (we get the print version for our classroom library). In iBooks we have two books by Scott J. Langteau: Sofa Boy, and The Question; Scaredy Squirrel and Scaredy Squirrel Makes a Friend; and Yellow Submarine. If you click on "Collections" at the top by the "Store" button and choose PDFs, you'll find two new Stenhouse professional books I ordered recently as eBooks -- I See What You Mean (2nd Edition) by Steve Moline and Opening Minds by Peter Johnston.

The Word Games folder holds WordSquares, WordFu, wurdle, and Chicktionary.

The Math folder has Math Bingo, Rocket Math, Slice It, MathBoard, and SET.

The Science folder has iBird Plus, pUniverse, and Star Walk.

In my next post, I'll tell you about the QR codes my students created. The QR code reader is one of the hottest apps on the iPad and the iPod Touch (the one with the camera) right now, and my students are finding QR codes everywhere!

HIS NAME WAS RAOUL WALLENBERG by Louise Borden

I read HIS NAME WAS RAOUL WALLENBERG by Louise Borden last week. What a powerful read!  I have listened to Louise's process with this book over the years. Her commitment to authentic research and telling Raoul's story has been apparent for years. I have read drafts, seen photos and listened to her talk about this project that meant so much to her. So, I was excited to get my copy in the mail when it was released.

First of all, it is a beautiful book. The cover photo of Raoul Wallenberg as a boy is perfect.  The design of the book is gorgeous and the variety of artifacts and photos spread throughout the book makes it an incredible read.

Louise begins the book with one of Raoul Wallenberg's class pictures and these words:




Look closely
at this faded school picture from Sweden.

Find the student whose number is 19
and match 19 to his signature.
Read it aloud. See it echo.

19.  Raoul Wallenberg.

It's a name for the world to remember.

Now you,
and others,
can become the storytellers
of this boy's remarkable life....

And the book remains as powerful on every single page.  Louise takes us through Wallenberg's entire life. She introduces him as a young boy and we come to know Raoul, his family and his friends. Through his story we not only come to understand him but we also begin to understand the world at this time.

Raoul Wallenberg made a huge difference in the lives of so many Hungarian Jews when the Nazis occupied Hungary.  His life mission was to help save as many people as possible and he made a huge difference in the world during this war.

Louise's writing makes this book accessible to middle school students.  It is a book about the Holocaust and she tells it with compassion and honesty.  She tells the story of real people during this time. She includes so many photos and artifacts, and documents that I found myself constantly going back and forth between text and visual to better understand the story.

This book is a must-have for any middle school and high school library and it is a great adult read.  This is an amazing book by an amazing author who has dedicated her career to telling the stories of people who have made a difference in history.

If you don't know THE JOURNEY THAT SAVED CURIOUS GEORGE by Louise, you can learn more about it here.  Her commitment to telling the story of people whose stories need to be told is amazing.


The Journey That Saved Curious George from WGBY on Vimeo.

Central Ohio Bloggers

A dozen Central Ohio Bloggers got together on Saturday to eat breakfast at NorthStar and buy books at Cover to Cover.

It was great to catch up on school news from various buildings and districts, to clear out Sally's display of award-winning titles and her stockpile of ARCs, to watch Beth put the right book in the right hands time and time again, and to spend a morning in the company of passionate readers and teachers.

A Wrinkle in Time, cont.

My fourth graders are listening to the audiobook of A Wrinkle in Time, read by Madeline L'Engle.

Yesterday we got the the end of chapter 3, where we encountered Mrs Which for the first time. A shimmering quivering circle of silver says, "I ddo nott thinkk I willl matterrialize commpletely. I ffindd itt verry ttirinngg, andd wee hhave mmuch ttoo ddoo." In the audio, L'Engle's voice sounds like it is an echo chamber when she reads Mrs Which's words. The kids LOVED the way the audio helped them to understand what L'Engle wanted them to get from the way she wrote the words.

As we wrapped up our discussion and prepared to move on to word study, N. pointed out the dedication. "I know why Madeline L'Engle named him Charles Wallace!" she declared excitedly. "Look! The book is dedicated to Charles Wadsworth Camp and Wallace Collin Franklin. Charles and Wallace. Charles Wallace!"

The power of reading together.


(My Wrinkle in Time Blog Tour Post is here. Watch for future posts about reading this classic with fourth graders.)

Poetry Friday -- Rain Songs

April Rain Song

by Langston Hughes

Let the rain kiss you.
Let the rain beat upon your head with silver liquid drops.
Let the rain sing you a lullaby.

The rain makes still pools on the sidewalk.
The rain makes running pools in the gutter.
The rain plays a little sleep-song on our roof at night—

And I love the rain.

January Rain Song (Through Gritted Teeth)

by Mary Lee Hahn

A kiss that lasts this long is just downright obscene.

The beating of the rain is making us go collectively insane.

We go to sleep -- it's raining, we wake up -- it's raining. Some lullaby.

The rain makes deep puddles under the swingset. Indoor recess again.

The rain keeps sump pumps running.

Yet, I must not forget that the rain is the reason for our towering trees—

And so I love the rain.

Jim Hill has the Poetry Friday roundup today at Hey, Jim Hill!