It's Monday! What Are You Reading?

It's Monday! What Are You Reading is a meme hosted by Jen of Teach Mentor Texts and Kellee of Unleashing Readers. Visit their blogs to see the round up and discover great new books!


Here are some highlights from my latest reading.

Two Recent Picture Books I've Loved:

Sophie's Squash

Henny (Paula Wiseman Books)

A New Early Reader Series I Discovered 

Thanks to CYBILS Finalist Lists:

Urgency Emergency! Big Bad Wolf

New Nonfiction Picture Books I Love:

The Long, Long Journey: The Godwit's Amazing Migration

Eat Like a Bear

Handle With Care: An Unusual Butterfly Journey (Nonfiction - Grades Prek-4)

(I reviewed this one last week on the blog.)

My Latest Adult Read that I Highly Recommend:

Flight Behavior: A Novel

Books We are Enjoying in the Classroom:

Outfoxed

The Thing About Georgie

Poetry Friday -- Recipe

Recipe

The yellowed newspaper clipping
is attached to an index card
with brittle cellophane tape.
"Nov. 1949
Women's Day Kitchen"
is written in faded ink
at the top of the card.

Her canned tomatoes
were from the garden,
mine are from the store.
Her biscuits were made from scratch,
mine are a boxed mix.

She washed up the prep bowls
by hand,
tired after a long day's work.

Some things don't change.


©Mary Lee Hahn, 2014



I am participating in Month of Poetry (#MoP) again this year. It is coordinated and led by Australian poet and children's author Kat Apel, a "friend in my head" (never met her in person) from the March Madness 2012 poetry tournament. The discipline of writing a poem a day for at least a semi-public audience is good practice for April. It's a healthy reminder that I have to take what I get in the 20-30 minutes of #nerdlution writing I've promised myself on a daily basis. I wrote this poem while dinner was cooking last night.

The actual recipe is in Mom's recipe box. It's a childhood favorite that I cooked for her while I was home at Christmas. I copied the recipe down (not word for word) to bring a little HOME back home.

Hamburger Cobbler
Nov. 1949 Women's Day Kitchen

1 sm onion, chopped
1 clove garlic, minced
3/4 lb hamburger
1 tsp salt
1/4 tsp pepper
1/4 tsp marjoram
1/4 lb sliced cheese
1 (cup) can drained diced tomatoes
2 T worcestershire sauce
3 T ketchup

(ingredients for homemade biscuits)
2 1/4 c Bisquick + 2/3 c milk

Sauté onion and garlic, then add hamburger and seasonings and brown. Spread in a 9x9 baking dish. Put sliced cheese on top, then the tomatoes mixed with worcestershire and ketchup. Put blops of Bisquick on top of the tomato mixture. Bake at 450° for 25 minutes.



Donna, at Mainely Write, is cooking up the Poetry Friday roundup this week.

History in Graphic Novel Format

Now that I've started thinking about creative "right brain" ways to expand and enrich the ways I am (and my students will be) responding to informational texts (common craft videos, illustrated note-taking), new possibilities keep cropping up everywhere I look:

Why not take a page of text and do an erasure poem with it? Or, as Austin Kleon calls them, a newspaper blackout poem?

How about a ThingLink?

And maybe you could take a complicated historical event, like the Boxer Rebellion in China, and make it a two-part graphic novel that explores both sides of the story.

Boxers & Saints Boxed Set
by Gene Luen Yang, First Second, September, 2013
review copies from the public library

I think it's fair to say that I would never have picked up a history of the Boxer Rebellion to read in my spare time if it hadn't been in graphic novel format. And I think it's fair to say that a historical description of the rebellion/movement would never have given me such a deeply personal glimpse into both sides of the story.

An added bonus was finding this review on GoodReads by FirstSecond, and gaining an even deeper appreciation for the complexity of what Gene Yang created in these two books:

One of the things that makes both Boxers and Saints fascinating is how the author treats religion. 

Boxers features a magical realistic element; the Chinese gods (who the characters know mainly through the opera) possess the Boxer rebels and help power their rebellion; when the rebels go to war, they feel that they are taken over by the gods and protected and driven by them. In the book, Gene draws the gods as they are taking over the Boxers and propelling them into battle. The pictures aren't just people saying, 'a god is possessing me!' while nothing is happening -- a god is _there_. 

This is clearly meant (through our 21st-century lens) to be magical realism; these gods aren't something that we today are meant to be like, 'drat those gods possessing people and causing rebellions all the time; you'd think they would know better after all these years of being gods and all.' 

This is all thrown into question in a fascinating way in Saints, when Gene (a devout Catholic) draws the main character seeing an actual Catholic saint -- Joan of Arc -- and at one point, seeing Jesus. In the same way that the Chinese gods appear on the pages of Boxers, the Catholic saint and deity appear throughout the pages of Saints. Does their more-convincing reality (both in our culture today and in the author's life) throw into question the reality of the Chinese gods? Does this set-down-on-paper reflection of the beliefs of that time, both equally devout -- call into question the veracity of our own beliefs today, and the amount our contemporary culture is influencing what our beliefs are?

The format of the graphic novel has huge possibilities both as a launch-pad for introducing readers to new information (history, science, etc), and as a way for readers to process their learning of informational text.

3 New Picture Books!

I picked up 3 great new picture books last week.

Alphablock is going to be my new go-to Baby Gift Book!   It was on display at Cover to Cover and it became an instant favorite for me!  It is this amazing chunky little alphabet book!  The design of this book is amazing as each letter is cut out as a page of its own.  The text is predictable and the illustrations are more detailed than I realized at first glance.  Really, a pretty perfect book for home and school. The images on the Amazon page will help you see the inside pages.

Outfoxed by Mike Twohy is one that was on my Goodreads "Want to Read" list.  I picked it up at Cover to Cover and laughed out loud.  I am trying to read more books with humor as they are not always my faves. This one is quite hysterical and I know my students will love it.  (Even my daughter, who is 14, laughed when she read it to herself on the way home from the bookstore.)

Fossil is a new wordless book from Bill Thomson, author of one of my favorites--Chalk !  I was happy to see this from him and know that kids will make some connections between the two. This one is similar to Chalk with some important differences. Definitely one I am glad to add to my collection of wordless books.

New Books Coming in January

Here are some books being released in January. These are the books I am most excited about this month!

Poetry and Picture Books

Poem-mobiles: Crazy Car Poems

Baby Bear Angel Island

Henny

I am Abraham Lincoln (Ordinary People Change World)

Middle Grade Novels

Winter Sky

Seven Stories Up

Marty McGuire Has Too Many Pets!

Ophelia and the Marvelous Boy

Graphic Novels
Lunch Lady and the Schoolwide Scuffle

Adult Fiction

Still Life with Bread Crumbs: A Novel

The Invention of Wings: A Novel

My First Read of 2014

Thanks to a Facebook post by the amazing Kate Messner,  I discovered the new book Handle With Care: An Unusual Butterfly Journey (Nonfiction - Grades Prek-4) by Loree Griffin Burns.  It was a great first read of 2014!

I have been struggling with pulling my science teaching together this year as it's a new grade level and new content.  I love teaching science when it is authentic and kids are involved in real world issues and thinking. But it always takes a little while for me to find the right resources when starting a new grade level.   I have worked to add some great books to my collection lately--books that really share the work of real scientists.  My students believe that all information comes from reading and as much as I want them to see the power of nonfiction reading, I want them to understand that real research is about discovery and often happens out in the world.

When Kate posted about Handle With Care, I knew I had to have it. First of all, it was recommended by Kate so it had to be good!  And, it looked gorgeous from the cover.  It also ties into our science study on life cycles.  And it seemed to offer a unique story instead of the typical "life of a butterfly" type story.  In this book, the life cycle info is embedded in the story of a butterfly farm in Costa Rica.

The book begins in a museum, where a mysterious package arrives filled with pupa! The the author/photographer team take us back to the butterfly farm where they began. Readers learn about the importance of the farm, what it takes to keep the caterpillars safe and healthy, and information on the life cycle of this butterfly.

I love so much about this book. First of all, I love stories of science/research that are new or behind-the-scenes. Important work by important people. I love how this book embeds the important work of so many people. I love how the content and vocabulary is embedded in an engaging, current science narrative.  And the pictures are not only gorgeous, but they are full of information. (The endpages deserve their own award:-)

I love that the author and photographer share a bit at the end about their research process at the end of the book and in the "about the author" blurb.

But what I  love most is that this book is accessible to younger readers than most books that include this kind of complex information. I LOVE LOVE LOVE the Scientist in the Field series but they are a bit too intense for my 3rd graders. This book does a similar thing in that it explores the life and work of real scientists on real projects, but it does so in a way that allows younger children to engage without making it too simple for older readers to also learn from and enjoy.


It wasn't until I finished this book that I realized I already LOVED this author. She has written my very favorite Scientist in the Field book  (and the one that hooked me on the series), The Hive Detectives: Chronicle of a Honey Bee Catastrophe (Scientists in the Field Series) . And she also wrote Citizen Scientists: Be a Part of Scientific Discovery from Your Own Backyard, another of my favorites.

Other Great Books by Loree Griffin Burns

I can see this book in every K-5 classroom. The photos will engage the youngest readers and the information will captivate students of all ages.  I think I'll read this one aloud to my students. It is still not easy to find compelling nonfiction read alouds for 3rd graders but this one is EXACTLY what I look for!  I am sure they will all want to read it independently too. And I think they'll be as excited as I am to discover this amazing science writer.  Anxious to introduce my students to Loree Griffin Burns with this incredible book!