New Books in February

February looks to be another great month for books!  Here are some of the books I am looking forward to being released this month!

My kids have become HUGE fans of The Quirks since I brought it into the classroom. And they ask me daily if I have the new one yet!  They are going to be thrilled when The Quirks in Circus Quirkus makes it to the classroom. The Quirks is one of my favorite new series for 3rd graders.  The perfect kind of story for this age.  I am anxiously awaiting lots more!

There is also a new Stink book coming out. My kids will be thrilled to see Stink and the Shark Sleepover (Book #9)

And I am very excited about Lord and Lady Bunny--Almost Royalty!  I so love Polly Horvath and I loved Mr. and Mrs. Bunny-Detectives Extraordinare! It was so quirky and fun.  I'm excited to see a new one!

And who could not be excited about a new version of Goldilocks called Goldi Rocks & the Three Bears?

Another series I'm anxious to take a look at is the upcoming one by Henry Winkler.  This is Hank from Hank Zipzer series but a younger version.  Bookmarks Are People Too! #1 (Here's Hank) looks similar to the text that my 3rd graders enjoy and it looks to be funny which is a huge plus for many of my readers. I'm anxious to check this new series out.

I'm not sure how I heard about Extraordinary Warren: A Super Chicken but it looks like great fun!

I recently read Winger and it was fabulous.  I definitely want to read more by this author. His book Grasshopper Jungle comes out in February. Not sure how fast I'll get to it but it is definitely on my TBR list!

Baseball Is . . . is one I have been waiting for for a long time. Louise Borden is amazing and I love the whole idea behind this book. I can't wait to get a copy (or copies).  It will be great for all ages, I think.

A Snicker of Magic and Half a Chance are two middle grade novels I have been looking forward to for a while. Both sound amazing and I am a huge Cynthia Lord fan!

Feathers: Not Just for Flying is a nonfiction book that looks fabulous.  We have been reading a lot about birds and this book looks like a great addition to our basket of bird nonfiction.

We are huge Arnie the Doughnut fans here so we are all very excited about the newest...Invasion of the Ufonuts (Adventures of Arnie the Doughnut)!

January Mosaics

I thought it would be fun to take a look at five Januaries, instead of just one.

January seems to be a time for food and snow. I was amused to see the dragonfly yard art make a snow-covered appearance in both 2010 and 2014.

January 2010 Mosaic

January 2011 Mosaic

January 2012 Mosaic

January 2013 Mosaic

January 2014 Mosaic

Welcome to a New Blog!

Rethinking Media Centers

Our Central Ohio bloggers' group continues to grow! Welcome Jamie and Cheryl, and congratulations on taking that big scary step to bring your thinking out into the world -- WRITE ON!!

CELEBRATE TODAY!

On our 8th Birthday, we decided to celebrate 2014 by celebrating others who inspire us every day. Each month, on the 1st (or so) of the month, we will celebrate a fellow blogger whose work has inspired us recently. We feel so lucky to be part of the blog world that we want to celebrate all that everyone gives us each day.

This month, we are celebrating Ruth Ayres and her blog. Ruth Ayres Writes is a blog that grounds us on a daily basis. Ruth's honesty and joy about all things teaching, parenting, and beyond is one reason we love her blog. But the thing we've loved best lately is the gift she has given all of us with her Saturday CELEBRATE TODAY Meme  We love reading everyone's posts in her roundup but so many of us who participate regularly realize the gift that this roundup offers.  Ruth has invited all of us to look at our weeks with new eyes--and to find the things to celebrate each day. It is a mindset change when our weeks aren't as we hoped they'd be,  and we love Ruth for giving us this gift.

We are honoring Ruth by making a donation to BOOK LOVE in her name. If you don't know the BOOK LOVE FOUNDATION, it is a non-profit started by Penny Kittle. The mission on their website says this:

"TO PROMOTE THE LOVE OF READING AMONG ADOLESCENTS BY PROVIDING CLASSROOM LIBRARIES OF HIGHLY ENGAGING BOOKS TO MIDDLE AND HIGH SCHOOL ENGLISH TEACHERS."

 Brilliance indeed!  If you don't know of this amazing new foundation, we encourage you to check it out!

So our CELEBRATE post this week is a celebration of Ruth and all she does for the Blog Community! BOOK LOVE to RUTH AYRES this month as we celebrate those people who inspire us on a daily basis!

Poetry Friday -- Sweet Little Kitty

Photo by Mary Lee Hahn

Sweet Little Kitty

Cat curls up tight,

closes eyes, purrs.

Disguised by sleep,

sinks down deep where

cat dreams are found

and stalks, soundless,

huge now, lethal.

©Mary Lee Hahn, 2014

This is the poem I wrote for this week's Poetry Stretch at The Miss Rumphius Effect. The form is called "Climbing Rhyme." Each line can either have four words or four syllables. I went for syllables. The rhyme is internal. For more details, read this post. Here's a nice visual Tricia gave us to track the rhymes:

xxxa

xxax

xaxb

xxbx

xbxc

xxcx

xcxx

Besides hosting the weekly Poetry Stretch challenge (c'mon, folks, jump in and give them a try!), Tricia has the Poetry Friday roundup this week at The Miss Rumphius Effect. Go check out the week's offerings!

A Year of Reading Award Winners

Here are the award-winners I read in 2013:

Newbery -- Flora and Ulysses: The Illuminated Adventures

Newbery Honor -- The Year of Billy Miller

Caldecott  (and Robert F. Sibert Informational Book Award Honor) -- Locomotive

Caldecott Honor -- Journey

Caldecott Honor -- Mr. Wuffles!

Coretta Scott King Author -- P.S. Be Eleven

Coretta Scott King Honor -- Words with Wings

Coretta Scott King Illustrator -- Knock Knock: My Dad's Dream for Me

Coretta Scott King Illustrator Honor -- Nelson Mandela

Michael L. Printz Honor -- Navigating Early

Mildred L. Batchelder Honor -- The Bathing Costume: Or the Worst Vacation of My Life

 

Pura Belpré Illustrator -- Niño Wrestles the World

Pura Belpré Illustrator Honor and Author Honor -- Pancho Rabbit and the Coyote: A Migrant's Tale

My only regret was that The True Blue Scouts of Sugar Man Swamp didn't win an Odyssey Award for best audio book.

2013 was a great reading year! Can't wait to see what 2014 holds in store!

Josephine

Josephine: The Dazzling Life of Josephine Baker
by Patricia Hruby Powell
illustrated by Christian Robinson
Chronicle Books, January 14, 2014
review copy provided by the publisher

I have a dancer in my room this year. She spends hours every week at dance. Was excited just before the holidays to get her toe shoes. One glance at this book and I knew she'd love it. She did, and agreed to write a guest review of it. Thank you, V!

I love the book Josephine by Patricia Hruby Powell. I read it to my sister and she liked it too. Before I started this book I didn’t think she would be famous for things besides dancing. Josephine was born in 1906, so she was alive when the color of your skin still mattered. Josephine loved to dance. Josephine performed in the streets with The Jones Family. The Dixie Steppers needed an extra act, and The Jones Family won the job. They got to perform on stage! Josephine was so good the Dixie Steppers asked her to join their group. They were going to leave on a tour to Saint Louis, but at the age of thirteen Josephine was too young. But she went anyway. She told her sister not to tell their mom, so Josephine went with the Dixie Steppers.

Josephine became famous after Caroline Dudley invited her to Paris to perform in La Revue Negre. The name Josephine Baker was up in lights. She became rich. People sent her shoes, perfume, dresses. Josephine was all the rage! She made records and starred in movies. She danced through Germany, Russia, Egypt, Sweden, South America.

Josephine became a stunt pilot. She met a millionaire and married him. But he wanted her to live at home so she divorced him. In 1939 war erupted in France. So Josephine joined the Red Cross. But Josephine got Pneumonia. Newspapers reported her dead, but she got better, well enough to perform for the U.S. troops. She helped win the war for France and became a hero. Josephine was awarded France’s highest honor.

She married Jo Bouillon and started to adopt children of different races and from different countries. Josephine adopted twelve children in all. She called them her rainbow tribe. They lived in a mansion with a farm and resort, where visitors could stay. But Josephine spent money faster than she could earn it. She left so she could tour the world and dance and sing. She sold her gowns, her art, her jewels, but not enough money. Josephine was evicted. They lived off of friends and fans. At sixty-seven, Josephine booked a performance in New York City. The audience loved her. That led her to starting a new show in Paris called Joséphine. Her doctors told her to rest, she couldn’t. One night Josephine went to sleep and never woke up.

I think it was very extraordinary when Josephine joined the Red Cross and adopted children. She really was an amazing person.

The book Josephine is really unique. Some words have all capital letters and there are quotes from Josephine throughout the book. There are beautiful drawings and the sentences are arranged in a very specific, artistic way. (For a peek at the way the text dances across the page and the energy-filled illustrations, click here.)

Changing My Stance on Charts and Chart Creation

So, I've been fascinated and blown away by Smarter Charts by Marjorie Martinelli and Kristi Mrax since I picked up the book a while ago.  I had a basic understanding of charts but after reading this book, I realized that I wasn't as thoughtful as I needed to be about the charts in my room.  I usually just used easel paper to capture thinking or post ideas around a topic, etc. There were charts everywhere and kids used a few.  After reading Smarter Charts, I realized I had to play around a bit and figure out how to do a better job.

I did a podcast with Kristi and Marjorie for Choice Literacy and one comment from the interview stayed with me.   At one point in the interview, Kristi said, " I feel like planning out chart goes right alongside with planning our units in reading, writing, math, and inquiry."  She talked about how planning charts was part of the planning and I had never really done that. I just picked up a marker when I thought we needed to capture something. Of course, I had an idea of what kinds of charts would be part of a study but I never really thought them through, planned them out and built them over several days as part of the learning.  Then they blogged sharing their process and the blog post made it much more clear to me.

For a while, I tried to play around with the specifics that Kristi and Marjorie talk about. They are so great at drawing and sketching and I am hopeful I'll get more comfortable with these at some point. But in the meantime, I wanted to just rethink the planning of my charts-the purposes, the supplies, the visual support, the construction, the student piece, etc.   So, for our nonfiction study that we are doing, learning to build stamina in nonfiction reading while we write informational pieces, we created this chart over the last two weeks.

This is a chart of the learning we did around nonfiction series books in our classroom.  I chose 7 series or authors that seemed to be books most 3rd graders could read on their own--books that stretched from the skimming and scanning I've noticed they do in nonfiction.  We studied several stacks of these books in small groups, looking for the decisions authors made to make the informational interesting and accessible to readers.  This piece of the study served a few purposes.  First, it gave my kids lots of time with nonfiction books I am hopeful they'll want to read in the near future--books they haven't looked closely at. It also gave them time to have conversations about the decisions authors made and the features they used in each book.  It gave us a common set of books to talk from and it also started conversations about stamina and how these books were all designed to be read from cover to cover.  Although we created this chart in a study of reading, I plan to build on what we learned as we move to write our own informational texts.

Here is what I took from the brilliant Chartchums girls that really helped me:

-I actually planned out the chart. I chose the books, pulled stacks and sketched out the way I envisioned the chart.  Part of planning was finding books that matched my learning goals for the kids.  I planned it along with the planning of the unit of study.  

-I changed up the visual piece. I made color copies of book covers to kids could revisit the chart easily as needed throughout the unit. I used 24 X 36 construction paper to give it a background different from those non-thoughtful charts they've become used to ignoring.  

-I involved the kids in the process as they added the information about their stack to the chart.

-We built this over days and the chart grew as the understanding grew.

-It is a chart we'll use for more than a few days.  It is one that will carry us for several weeks as we've anchored our thinking and can use the books and ideas generated to build our strategies as writers.

I still have a lot to learn about creating better charts and I know Marjorie and Kristi may be cringing as they read this, seeing how much of their brilliance I've missed in this first chart.   I do want to get more comfortable with drawings and lettering. I want to play with restickable glue sticks and having min-versions of charts available for kids in the classroom.  I want to revisit the book and the blog to see what else I've missed. But,  I feel like this first step was about changing my stance about charts. And I feel like I did that.  I approach them differently now.  I no longer just pick up a marker and fill my classroom with charts no one uses.  And I think over time, I will see a huge difference in the ways my students use them because of that.  

Love the Chartchums girls and highly recommend their book if you haven't read it.

(And, there is a great new post on Chartchums sharing lots of great posts that go along with the thinking in book and podcast!)

#Nerdlution Round 2: Lipstick?

As we get ready for Round 2 of #nerdlution, I thought long and hard about #nerdlution as a way to change habits a bit.  Even though I was not successful at Round 1 of #nerdlution, I learned a lot.

#Nerdlution #1
Since I am not so good at doing things every single day (I love days of nothingness:-), I've decided to make exercise 5 days a week part of my #nerdlution goal.  Last week, I ran/walked 3 times and went to 3 yoga classes.  6 is a great week but I know some weeks won't allow me to fit in 3 yoga classes and 3 runs, so 5 seems reasonable.  Right now, I am all about running and yoga but in 50 days, that might change and when I think about big goals, it is about consistent exercise, so I will leave it at that.

#Nerdlution #2
My OLW is "TODAY" and I got a bracelet that I love to help remind me to live in the moment just a little bit more.  I've done a much better job of slowing down in the classroom and I can see more (and happier) learning because I am not always in a rush or rushing the children.  I find that I am a little kinder and more willing to be helpful when I am not in such a hurry and not always moving to the next thing.  I need to continue to live this word a little better outside of school.  The word is making me a kinder person and I like that. So my second #nerdlution is to continue working on this idea of Today.

My bracelet from Hands Free Mamma  http://shop.handsfreemama.com/products/only-love-today-bracelet-classic-brown

#Nerdlution #3
Lipstick. I will put on lipstick (yes, lip gloss counts) every day for 50 days.  This sounds a little shallow I know but it is about taking the time for little things that I've let go slowly over the years.
I've learned that there are times in our life when we have to let things go.  When my kids were little, I stopped wearing earrings for a long while because babies seem to pull at earrings.  When I got Plantar Faciitis a few years ago, I stopped wearing shoes with heels because they hurt and made the injury worse. When I got my concussion last year and was off work for 6 weeks, I started to wear yoga pants and sweatshirts every day.  When life gets busy or things happen that require that I take care of something--family, work, writing, house, etc.--I tend to drop little things that aren't the priority.  Like putting on lipstick in the morning.  When we drop little things, over time though, those little things add up if we don't build them back into our routines.  This is what happens to me and exercise. To me and healthy eating.  To me and lipstick.

Now, I have never been one to refresh my lipstick during the day. I am too busy doing things to remember to reapply lipstick. But there is something about starting the day in a way that is not in a hurry that is good for me.

So, the lipstick is not about how I look really (although I should look a little better!). It's about making a decision to not let little things go because I'm in a hurry and I want to get to the next thing faster.  That the 15 seconds I gain from not putting on lipstick is not going to make me any more productive during the day. If I am going to slow down and enjoy the days, it has to start with the morning, the "getting ready for the day" part.  So, lipstick seems to be a good reminder of that. (And my mother will be oh, so happy at this #nerdlution!)

Looking forward to this round of #Nerdlution. I feel like I learned lots about myself during Round 1 and I am ready to try for some new habits and routines.  And, there is nothing better than the #nerdlution community to cheer you on!