Maybelle and the Haunted Cupcake

Maybelle and the Haunted Cupcake
by Katie Speck
illustrated by Paul Rátz de Tagyos
Henry Holt, 2012
review copy provided by the publisher

Ever since I fell in love with Archy and Mehitabel in high school, I have been a sucker for cockroaches in literature. I even kept Madagascar Hissing Roaches as classroom pets for a lot of years.

So of course, I love Maybelle the Cockroach! Maybelle has a friend who is a flea, and in this book, Bernice, a picnic ant with a bad head cold that prevents her from smelling her way home shows up. Bernice is used to serving her Queen, and Maybelle thinks it sounds great to be served. But she soon learns to be careful what you wish for. Bernice causes more problems than she's worth, but she does convince Mr. and Mrs. Peabody that Mrs. Peabody's mini cupcakes are haunted.

This is an entertaining 58-page easy reader with two other books in the series. I'm thinking Maybelle will be popular as a quick read in my classroom!

Dark Humor for Halloween

Last Laughs: Animal Epitaphs
by J. Patrick Lewis and Jane Yolen
illustrated by Jeffrey Stewart Timmins
Charlesbridge, 2012
review copy provided by the publisher

Laughing about death is not everybody's cup of tea, so when this book made its appearance in my 5th grade classroom, I made sure that readers were forewarned. The pictures are gruesome and the animals in the book meet untimely and horrible deaths...but at the same time, to the right reader (mostly boys, to be honest), this is a very funny book.

Here are a couple of examples that have been favorites in my classroom:

THE LAST OF THE STAGGERING STAG

Win some.
Lose some.
Venison.


BARRACUDA'S BITE-SIZE DEMISE

My teeth were vicious;
my bite was hateful.
A great white met me --
the date was fateful.
The shark was hungry,
and I was baitful.


CHICKEN CROSSES OVER

She never found the answer
to the age-old question,
Why did the chicken cross the ro---?

Poetry Friday: "You are the same as ever, constant in your instability."

Change
by Louis Jenkins

All those things that have gone from your life, moon boots, TV
trays, and the Soviet Union, that seem to have vanished, are
really only changed, dinosaurs did not disappear from the earth
but evolved into birds and crock pots became bread makers.
Everything around you changes.

(the whole poem can be read at The Writer's Almanac)

I love the last line of this poem. I used it for the title of this post. We are all so constant in our instability, aren't we?

And I hope you figured out that there is a change in the hosting blog for the roundup today. Amy and Betsy traded weeks, so we are at Betsy's today -- check out all of this week's Poetry Friday offerings at Teaching Young Writers.

Nuff said?

Hugh MacLeod reads my mind (Franki's, too) once again.

BOO!

Just Say Boo!
by Susan Hood
illustrated by Jed Henry
HarperCollins, 2012
review copy provided by the publisher

Halloween will be here before we know it! (If I say BOO loud enough, do you think I can scare it back a week or two?)

In this sweetly illustrated rhyming book for the younger set, three kids face all their fears and troubles while trick-or-treating by remembering to say, "BOO!" They also remember to say "TRICK OR TREAT!" and "Thank you." In the end, they find enough brave to scare the grownups, and to rescue the spider that's scaring Mom. When the littlest one cries, they teach him to say, "BOO!"

Global Read Aloud: Our Reading Notebooks

We have a new post up at our class blog sharing the ways some kids are using their reading notebooks during our Read Aloud of The One and Only Ivan.

Picture Books I've Loved This Week

A great week for picture book reading! These are four MUST HAVES in my opinion:-)

Boot & Shoe by Marla Frazee

Each Kindness by Jacqueline Woodson

The Chicken Problem by Jennifer Oxley and Billy Aronson

Let's Go for a Drive! (An Elephant and Piggie Book) by Mo Willems

Poetry Friday -- New With Old

Glad sight wherever new with old
by William Wordsworth


Glad sight wherever new with old
Is joined through some dear homeborn tie;
The life of all that we behold
Depends upon that mystery.
Vain is the glory of the sky,
The beauty vain of field and grove
Unless, while with admiring eye
We gaze, we also learn to love.




Every year at the Ohio Casting for Recovery retreat we spend some time early on Sunday morning down by the pond singing together, reading a couple of poems together, and blessing each other with words and hugs.

I am never ready for the emotions that invariably rise up in my heart and streak down my face, almost from the first moment I stand in that circle of new and old friends.

The fleeting beauty of the pond, the autumn snap in the air, the brief time we have together that weekend, the knowledge that no matter how long we have on this beautiful earth we will not want to leave when it is our time, the remembrance of those who have already had to leave, the thoughts of those who have recently had their life shift in an instant with a diagnosis...all of this breaks my heart and then glues it back together again in a new and beautiful design.

I cry, I sob...and then I wipe my tears and laugh again. We go to breakfast, gear up, get a little crazy, and head back to the pond full of life and energy and hope.

The new and the old are joined together for me at that pond; the past and the future both live there simultaneously in those brief moments. The beauty of life is seen and felt and heard with a rare clarity...and then life goes on.



Happy Poetry Friday! Laura has the roundup at Writing the World for Kids.

Classroom Charts

I love the story our classroom charts tell at this time of year.  I looked around the room today and loved looking at the evidence of the conversations and learning that have started our year.  We've had a great first month of school and I can already see such growth in the thinking the kids are doing. I thought I'd share some of the charts and things that are hanging around our room right now.

We started this list a few weeks ago as a place to collect ideas for blog posts. It keeps growing. (You can visit our classroom blog at http:iressib.blogspot.com)

We have been reading lots of personal narratives in writing workshop.  We are noticing and naming the things we like on "Wow! I Wish I Could Do That in My Writing" charts. Then they go off and give something a try.

As we begin to learn how to design good experiments in science, we created a chart detailing the differences in the ways we conducted one of our first simple experiments.

The beginning of our Read Aloud log--"Books We've Read Together"

The start of our "Words We Use When We Talk About Words" Chart

Our beginning chart of words you would hear and see in our Math Workshop.  We are working to use math specific words in our talk and writing.

Our first thinking around The One and Only Ivan--we are participating in The Global Read Aloud!

Rereading THE GIVER, Looking Forward to SON

Today, Lois Lowry's book Son will be released--the finale to THE GIVER series. I had no idea Lowry had plans to do this but, was so happy that she did! I am definitely looking forward to reading this book.  When we learned that there would be a 4th book in this incredible series, Mary Lee suggested rereading the series before its release. I am not a big rereader. I don't often like to reread a book I've already read but when I saw that SON will pull together all 3 books in the series, I decided to at least reread THE GIVER.

I read THE GIVER by Lois Lowry when it was published in 1993.  It was a powerful read. An incredibly powerful read.  I remember that I had finished it around the time of our Dublin Literacy Conference and that Mem Fox was our speaker. I remember picking her up at the airport and talking about the ending of the book on the way to her hotel.  I remember that everyone I knew was reading the book and talking about the ending.

I didn't  even remember that I talked about this book until I reread it last week. And once I was back in the story, I was amazed to realize how much that book has lived with me over the last 20 years of my life.   I am so glad to have reread this book. It was as powerful a reread as it was almost 20 years ago. This round, I am reading it on my Kindle, and I find myself highlighting all of those scenes that I remembered so clearly. I am highlighting Lowry's lines that had an impact on me, without me actually realizing it.  I am reminded again and again what an amazing writer Lois Lowry is.

Rereading this book made me realize that you don't really know when a book is life-changing. It doesn't happen overnight. And you can't really pinpoint the changes within yourself. But when a book. a set of characters and a community live with you for 20ish years, you are changed. I am actually a different person than I was before I read THE GIVER. I can see that as I reread--actually revisiting the scenes that moved me. I find myself actually experiencing the same emotions I did during my first read. It is incredible really. Going into the reread, I didn't really remember the plot or what happened. I had forgotten the details of the story. But I remembered the way the story made me feel, the things it made me think about and the unsettled feelings I had when I read certain lines. I remembered caring deeply for the characters and having incredible hope for them all.

After rereading THE GIVER, I have decided to  reread GATHERING BLUE and THE MESSENGER before I read SON. I am trying to hurry a bit because I am so anxious to read this book and to see how Lowry ends the series.  But I want these characters and my understandings of them to be fresh in my mind when I read this new book.

It was really a gift to have reread this book. So glad that the anticipation of SON pushed me to do that. Thanks, Mary Lee--a great idea!