IMWAYR

I'm not doing a good job of carving out time for reading lately. These are two books I'm still working on:

This is our Grade 3 book club book. It's a quick read. I just need to get the time to focus on it.

This is my book club book this month.

The Alphabet Thief (Bill Richardson)

Clever! Great for phonemic awareness. It is full of all sorts of puns too, which are great for discussion in class.

It was interesting to see who could quickly figure out what the new words would be when the letters were taken by the alphabet thief.

And best of all, it's a Canadian author! Thanks for helping me get to my goal of 150 Canadian books this year :)


Goodreads summary:

The alphabet thief stole all of the B’s, and all of the bowls became owls…

When night falls, along comes a peculiar thief who steals each letter of the alphabet, creating a topsy-turvy world as she goes. It seems that no one can stop her, until the Z’s finally send her to sleep so that all the other letters can scamper back to where they belong.

Bill Richardson’s zany rhymes and Roxanna Bikadoroff’s hilarious illustrations will delight young readers with the silly fun they can have with language — and may even inspire budding young writers and artists to create their own word games.

The Princess and the Pizza

This story is quite funny. I like the independence the princess shows. My students loved the twists on the Princess and the Pea (the princess rolls her eyes at the fact that they're using the old pea under the mattress trick to see if she really is a princess). A bunch of princesses show up to compete for the chance to marry the prince. There's the one whose always tripping on her hair, the one who has all these strange little men with her, etc. In the end, she turns down the chance to marry the prince (he was named Drupert....so you can imagine how much personality he had) and opens her own pizza shop instead.

Goodreads summary:

An out of work princess must prepare a feast fit for a prince.

Yours Sincerely, Giraffe (Megumi Iwasa)

As I read this book I kept thinking, there must be something deeper and more meaningful than I'm getting. I'm not entirely sure there really is. It's a cute and fun little story that makes you think about things a little differently. How would you describe someone if you had never seen that type of person, err, animal.

This would be a good beginning of the year read aloud. Lots of pictures and simple text and a few chuckles along the way. Would also be a good introduction to the letter writing we do for special students every week.

Goodreads summary:

Giraffe is bored, as usual. He'd love a friend to share things with. So he writes a letter and sends it as far as possible across the other side of the horizon. There he finds a pen palPenguin.

IMWAYR

Boy, I have a bunch of reading to do this week! I haven't done enough reading lately. My husband has had health issues and I'm having trouble concentrating on books. Instead I worry about him!

Book club book for this month.

This is an issue in so many people's lives! Fascinating read.

I keep taking this one out of the library and then not reading. Stop it! Just read it!

One of my students gave this to me and I never have got around to reading it. He asked me about it the other day so I better get it read!

Passed to me by one of my reading friends and co-workers. Intriguing.

IMWAYR

I'm going to try to not read so many books at one time. I'm in the middle of The Elegance of the Hedgehog and hope to finish it early this week.

After that, I plan to start The Sleep Revolution and then The Wild Robot.

Bridge to Terabithia (Katherine Patterson)

I love this book. I have read it a number of times and have even blogged about it before. It was our grade 3 book club choice for this month. In the middle of reading it this time, my husband had a stroke. I had a hard time getting back into it because  knew I wasn't eager to see Jess go through that loss again while I was going through something hard. As my husband improved though, I was able to finish it. Interesting how our own emotions and difficulties make some stories more difficult. 

This time I practice my Notice and Note skills. It was a great experience to find all the sign posts along the way! I have been dancing around the edges of the sign posts, always asking others what they are rather than searing for them myself. After I wrote them all down, I realized there could be some debate about what sign post they fit with. Clearly, there may be be overlap and some would put these ideas in other places. I guess that it what makes for a great discussion. 

I really enjoyed it though and plan to do this with more books. 

 

Our own beloved Storybook Theatre did the play recently too.  Jess was played by one of my son's friends, Gabe T. We loved the play as well.