It's Monday, What Are You Reading? (And a challenge!)

It's Monday! Huzzah! It's Monday and I'm sitting at home on my big comfy couch, surrounded by books.

You just gotta love a three day weekend, right?

I've been reading oodles of books lately, partially in hopes of finding the just right way to reach my new students in my new school where I feel a little like Alice and a little like Goldilocks, and a lot like Mr. Magoo.

So between the bumps and bruises of adjusting to my new school home, I read.

Recently, I've read quite a few fabulous middle grade novels, with a stack of promising reads to keep me busy for at least another month. Here's a sample of what I've read so far:

Somehow, between having students with really good taste, and some excellent timing, I've managed to read (or reread) a few delightful books by Sharon Creech throughout the month of September. Love That Dog will always remain a favorite for me -- combining poetry with dog love and a boy learning to love words? Yeah -- you got me. I hadn't planned to read it to my classes so early in the year, but they prodded me and it ended up being a perfect beginning for us. Afterwards, a student handed me Granny Torrelli Makes Soup, which I hadn't read before. I love how Creech weaves together past and present in this short but touching tale of friendship. I'll definitely be passing it along to more students!

Love That Dog * Granny Torrelli * The Great Unexpected

And finally, I picked up a copy of the recently published The Great Unexpected. Interestingly, I heard a little bit of Rosie's voice from Granny Torrelli piping through in Naomi's best friend, Lizzie. I'm curious if anyone else heard that, as well! In The Great Unexpected, Creech tosses together folk tales with a little magic realism and a lot of love to create a story that any Creech follower is sure to appreciate. I know exactly which student I'll be handing this book to first thing tomorrow morning!

Almost Home

I also just finished Joan Bauer's Almost Home, which is as heartbreaking as it is endearing. I quickly fell in love with Sugar Mae Cole, the 12-year-old main character, and her tag along puppy, Shush. Exploring themes that perfectly spark #chooseKind conversations, Bauer also employs a variety of text genres. Readers will quickly understand how important words are in Sugar's world, while seeing models of letter writing, poetry, memoirs, and more. Within minutes of book talking this new title to my students, I had kids scrambling to be the first to read it. And now it's being passed from hand to hand. Almost Home is a beautiful story that any child with family struggles can relate to, and learn from.

Starry River of the Sky

Currently, I'm splitting my time between Grace Lin's Starry River of the Sky (I'm just on page 43) and an unwieldy stack of profession development books. My husband also keeps nudging Patrick Rothfuss' Wise Man's Fear at me, and on a good day, I read maybe a page of it at a time. I loved the first book in this trilogy, The Name of the Wind, but making time for this type of epic fantasy is hard for me these days! And even with as much as I am reading these days, my to-read stack just keeps growing... I need a vacation to catch up on my reading! Does this sound familiar?



The thing I love about reading this much is how it seems to effect my students. Each Monday we sit together and set a reading goal -- they hold me to mine, and I hold them to their goals, too. And when the following Monday arrives, if anyone hasn't met their goal they are expected to know why and have a solution. If they don't have a solution, our class community of readers offers suggestions. It's powerful to watch them transform each week from this simple conversation. So for as long as my nightly reading seems to inspire them to keep chugging along, I will keep reading. I don't know how many reader role models they have in their lives, but at least they can't count on me as one.

So What Do They Really Know?

While I have all these books spinning wildly about, I feel like I need to do something to ground myself in what I'm learning through my PD books. From October 14 through November 11, I'll be reading Cris Tovani's So What Do They Really Know? and posting each week to reflect on my reading. I'd like to invite you to join me. Comment if you're interested -- I'll post details tomorrow! (Be thinking weekly posts, twitter chat opportunities, and maybe even a google hangout to chat n' learn!) What say you, readers? Do you have time to spend a minute filling out this form so we can read and share together?

It's Monday! What are you reading?

After reading Laura's post over at Camp Read-a-Lot, I decided to postpone my planned post on possibility (whew, say THAT 3 times fast!) and join the fun over at Teach Mentor Texts for their weekly "It's Monday! What are you reading?" meme.

As I've done since reading Donalyn Miller's The Book Whisperer a couple of years ago, I challenged my kids to join me for a #bookaday goal over Spring Break. Some jumped at the chance, while others set a somewhat smaller goal. Today we checked in, and I was super excited to find that most of my kiddos met or exceeded their goals!

Here's what I read:

1. Lemonade by Bob Raczka
2. Wonderstruck by Brian Selznick
3. Ladybug Girl by David Soman
4. Goodnight World by Willa Perlman
5. Stars by Mary Lyn Ray
6. Ruth and the Green Book by Calvin Alexander Ramsey
7. I Can Hear the Sun by Patricia Polacco
8. When I Was Young and in the Mountains by Cynthia Rylant
9. Tulip Sees America by Cynthia Rylant
10. Write Like This by Kelly Gallagher (started, not finished)
11. Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life (started, not finished)

Several of my books were narrative style picture books, since I was amping up to share some great mentor texts with my kids this week. We'll be taking our STAAR writing test next week, so it feels like a good time to munch on some scrumptious words. And I'm just loving Gallagher's Write Like This. His thoughts match my own feelings on what writing should look like in the classroom, and as I was already planning to spend the week revisiting how narrative and expository writing can be written about the same topic but in different ways, much of what I read in his book helped me decide on a new way of presenting the information. Win!

Today I shared Ruth and the Green Book with my students. Before I read the book, we made a list of our purposes for writing, using Gallagher's model. After they had a list of styles such as expressing and reflecting, informing and explaining, and taking a stand and proposing a solution, I passed out sticky notes and asked them to write words and phrases in the story that helped them to determine the author's purpose for writing.

Ruth and the Green Book is an excellent resource as a mentor text! Although the style is narrative, all the students noticed that Ramsey also informs and explains, as we learned many facts about life as an African American in the 1950's and how the Green Book came into existence. Some of my students also felt that the story had elements of the take a stand model as well, since Ruth definitely takes a stand of her own in the story. Wonderful mentor text, and a Bluebonnet choice for 2012-2013, as well! Double win!

After we read, I asked my students to come up with possible prompts for writing that would result in a story like Ruth and the Green Book. They came up with several prompt ideas, including:

• Write about a time you were left out
• A time you felt afraid
• A time someone was mean to you

And more! We made a list and they each chose the one that spoke to them and began writing their own narrative that matched their chosen prompt. An excellent writing day, to say the least.

I'm eager to continue reading Write Like This and start working on my writing plan for next year! It never ceases to amaze me how much a good book can change a life, a day, or even a moment in one person's life. 

Tuesday Slice: time for the sun

I promised myself that as school began this year I would not stop writing.

It appears that has been more difficult than originally believed.

So I am sort of proud of myself for making time to write this Tuesday, just 45 minutes before midnight.

Tonight, as I googled and researched and wrote in student files and signed papers, I chatted on the phone with my 15 year old. He's been living with his dad for the past year, and although I spent the year in a flatlining stupor, I've finally begun healing.

In fact, I was told today that I seem more at peace.  And I am.

I'm at peace enough to not let the little things feel like impossible mountains. And I'm at peace enough to spend most of the evening on the phone with my sweet boy, when I really want to be sitting by his side.

He had a poetry assignment tonight; his teacher asked him to write a poem based on Identity by Julio Polanco. He's always been a good writer. Words come easily to him. But he has always had difficulty accepting that he could actually be good at something.

I hope tonight changed his mind.

Here's what he came up with (I have left it entirely as is, no editing of grammar or spelling):

The Life Giving Sun
Let them be the moon
Always cool, mysterious, the controller of the tides,
But only able to reflect the sun

Id rather be a bright, warming sun,
Beaming down on all, like eyes in a meteor shower,
Always giving, but never taken from.

To break through the surface of clouds,
To shine, to be uncontainable in a never ending sky,
To shine in a forever lasting universe,
Day by day, it will be free,
beyond The blackholes and galaxies,

I'd rather shine on my own,
Then to be alone, in the darkness,
Only to be howled at by the wolves,
Or chased by the astaurnauts,
To be walked on.

I'd rather begin a new day,
Than shine through the night,
If I could sail through the sky independently,
I'd rather be the life giving sun


Written by Daegan Lifsey


I love what he did with this, and I love that we worked on it together, and I love that we are still close enough to do these things -- even if it is just over the phone.

In the Wee Hours: Day 4

Mentor text: If You Give a Pig a Pancake by Laura Numeroff and Twilight Comes Twice by Ralph Fletcher (taken from Corbett Harrison)

Poem formula: start & stop poem (first and last lines are the same)

Inspiration: Our wee hours of the night road trip from Iowa to Illinois

In the wee hours of the night,
a long white van filled with precious cargo
bounces down the road.
Music blurs with words, shared by
a yawning boy, a babbling girl,
and five snoring little ones;
moon gazes from her cloud-blanketed perch,
casts shifting shadows across
weary travellers,
in the wee hours of the night.


More student examples: www.writingfix.com

(And now, 37 hours later, I sleep.  Illinois is lovely, I'm ever so happy to be here, but I'm not even sure what I just wrote, and my fingers do not have a very good command of these keys.  Sleep, it seems, is nonnegotiable.)

Napping, Day 3

Today was a lazy day. While everyone played at the park, I stole a moment for myself to read, which ended in a cozy nap. So today's poem is about a nap, inspired by the rain poem in The Important Book.

Mentor text: The Important Book by Margaret Wise Brown
The important thing about rain is
that it is wet.
It falls out of the sky,
and it sounds like rain,
and it makes things shiny,
and it does not taste like anything,
and is the color of air.

But the important thing about rain
is that it is wet.

My poem:
The important thing about a nap is
that it is quiet.
It creeps up like a mouse,
and sounds like a mother's lullaby,
and it holds you like a warm hug,
and tastes like sea-salt air under the sun,
and is colored with dreams, big and small.

But the important thing about a nap
is that it is quiet.

Poem from the Road & Mentor Texts

It occurred to me that I didn't explain the inspiration for yesterday's Poem from the Road.  I've decided to multi-task, since the new school year is pressing in fast.  So each poem I write is modeled after a mentor text I can use in class.

This strategy is two-fold: one, it gives me a no-fail way to come up with something to write each day (huzzah!) and two, I gain some experience playing with the text, which will (hopefully) help me model it with a little more effectively.

Grandpa Mogk's Farm was actually inspired by a teaching demo during Summer Institute.  One of the fellows used a sentence from To Kill a Mockingbird to show us how to use mentor texts to share great writing with our students and help them integrate these same skills into their own writing.

Hopefully, after this experiment, I'll have several good examples to share with my own students.  In the future, I'll try to remember to put a short blurb about the mentor text with the poem for the day