I'm recommitting to sharing my reading plans for the week every Monday. I learned about IMWAYR from Teach Mentor Texts. Go there for lots of other great links!
My goal this year is 104 books - which should be totally do-able. I hope to smash through that goal.
My TBR stack is getting pretty high right now. I need to add a couple Judy Moody books to this stack too because that is the topic of our grade 3 book club this month. I'm committing to do more book talks with my students, so I will have a lot of J fiction to read and re-read.
Book Love....because Penny Kittle is iconic and I've never read it. Every reading teacher should!
The Gown by Jennifer Robson is her latest book. I can't wait to get into it!
The Book of Negroes by Laurence Hill is one I've read before but my book club is discussing it next month so I need to read it again.
Something Fierce is the book club book for the next month. This one can be put off for a bit.
The Futures is the book I got from my December book club gathering/book exchange.
Better Than Before is what I read every January.
My mom gave me some Nancy Drew books and The Wizard of Oz for Christmas. Haven't read those since I was in elementary school. I'm really looking forward to re-reading them and sharing them with my class.
I read The Fairy Ring, which is the same story, this years ago and just recently came across this picture book. I thought I'd read it to my class because we have been talking about genre and I thought this would be interesting because of the mix of something not real (fairies) and a true story.
Big fail!
Turns out their belief in fairies in strong enough to make this very confusing. At the end, one said, "Mrs. Ackroyd, I can't decide if fairies are real or not now, but I think I am going to still believe they're real."
I dropped the genre discussion.
Goodreads says:
The true story of British cousins who fooled the world for more than 60 years with a remarkable hoax, photographs of “real” fairies. Exquisitely illustrated with art by Eliza Wheeler as well as the original photos taken by the girls.
It was fun to notice the different personalities of the dogs, and connect it to our friendship unit.
Goodreads says:
Beloved storyteller Kate DiCamillo and cartoonist Harry Bliss introduce some delightfully doggy dogs in a warm, funny tale of a timid pup who needs a friend.
Rosie is a good dog and a faithful companion to her owner, George. She likes taking walks with George and looking at the clouds together, but the closest she comes to another dog is when she encounters her reflection in her empty dog bowl, and sometimes that makes Rosie feel lonely. One day George takes Rosie to the dog park, but the park is full of dogs that Rosie doesn’t know, which makes her feel lonelier than ever. When big, loud Maurice and small, yippy Fifi bound over and want to play, Rosie’s not sure how to respond. Is there a trick to making friends? And if so, can they all figure it out together?
I can't wait to share this one with my class. They love trading cards and in this book children trade monster cards for stink sap. It would be a great read aloud.
I think they will also love how the school is organized: There were three classrooms in the Academy. Classroom One was for the younger squidges. Classroom Two was for squidges who are old enough to know better. Classroom Three was for squidges who thought they knew better than everyone else but really didn’t. Totally logical!
Goodreads says: Hugo is a young Sasquatch who longs for adventure. Boone is young boy who longs to see a Sasquatch. When their worlds collide, they become the unlikeliest pair of best friends. At the Academy for Curious Squidges, Hugo learns all manner of Sneaking—after all, the most important part of being a Sasquatch is staying hidden from humans. But Hugo dreams of roaming free in the Big Wide World rather than staying cooped up in caves. When he has an unexpected run-in with a young human boy, Hugo seizes the opportunity for a grand adventure. Soon, the two team up to search high and low for mythical beasts, like Ogopogos and Snoot-Nosed Gints. Through discovering these new creatures, together, Big Foot and Little Foot explore the ins and outs of each other’s very different worlds but learn that, deep down, maybe they’re not so different after all.
This is another one of those books I would have never read if it weren't for Book Club, however, I'm glad I read it.
Truthfully, I found it hard to follow. The dialogue made it especially difficult and I found myself needing to read it aloud to even come close to understanding it. I'm not patient enough to read and re-read lines to try to figure it out. The accept though was really reminiscent of how my husband talks about Nova Scotia from the time he spent there on his mission.
Apparently, when the book was written, people from the area were angry about it because they felt like they were portrayed negatively. I can see why they'd feel that way. The superstition, the lack of education and survival mentality is heavy. I did love the parts about the teacher coming to the island and David wanting to learn to read. I'm not sure he was really successful though.
The Maritimes is a harsh and unforgiving place. Interestingly, it continues. This was a news article from today:
records show Newfoundland was literally shaking from wind and waves
"
Seismic records show Newfoundland was literally shaking from wind and waves
Seismometer in St. John's shows how intense Thursday's winds were
CBC News ·
Heavy seas crash into the land at the Drook, a spot on the road to Cape Race. (Submitted by Clifford Doran)
The waves crashing into the rugged shoreline of Newfoundland and Labrador this week led to waves of a different kind.
The squiggly black lines produced by a Natural Resources Canada seismometer show the seismic activity of a vicious windstorm that whipped across the province on Wednesday and Thursday.
The wind and waves were so strong, the island was shaking.
"What we saw over the past 48 hours was quite a dramatic change in [activity]," said John Cassidy, an earthquake seismologist with Natural Resources Canada.
"It was very noticeable and in our seismic data, our plots, it just jumped off the page. You could just see that shaking."
The federal government has seismometers — tools that measure earth movements — all across the country.
Cassidy said each year, a handful of storms will produce winds and waves strong enough to record seismic activity on the east and west coast.
And over time, as these weather events impact older infrastructure, it just breaks down.- Randy Oram, Karwood Homes
With winds gusting between 100 and 140 km/h, the conditions were just right to get the Rock rocking.
"It's that combination of the wind, that incredible wind, and the waves that were hitting the island," Cassidy said.
"Both of those, the waves and the wind, gets trees shaking, rocks shaking ... And all of that can be recorded by our seismometers on the island."
Homebuilders association reacts
Randy Oram, president of the Newfoundland and Labrador branch of the Canadian Home Builders' Association, said people have to prepare for these earth-quivering storms to be the new normal.
There was damage reported to home and businesses across the province, but Oram said his company, Karwood Homes, has yet to receive any reports of damage.
When asked why some homes suffer damage and others go unscathed, Oram said it has to do with location and age.
"With these weather events, some of the extremes can be localized," he said. "And over time, as these weather events impact older infrastructure, it just breaks down."
Oram said the industry is changing as the weather worsens, and contractors need to keep up with the standards.
"You look at shingles we were using 15 years ago, they were rated for 97 km/h winds. What we're using nowadays, 210 kilometres is what they're rated for. As climate change happens, building products advance."
It was very noticeable and in our seismic data, our plots, it just jumped off the page. You could just see that shaking.- Seismologist John Cassidy
Randy Oram, president of the Newfoundland and Labrador branch of the Canadian Home Builders' Association, said standards are changing to meet climate change. (Paula Gale/CBC)
Part of the industry is regulated by Natural Resources Canada, which is currently working on a five-year project on adaptations to home building for climate change.
Where it used to study historical weather events, Natural Resources Canada is now trying to model future storms and set standards based on what is expected to happen, Oram said.
"They're actually looking at where the weather is going in the future, and testing new products and codes for the future."
This is a book to revisit and reread often - just like their Signposts book. This will give me some good strategies to use to teach students to think about and discuss books. I love reading about reading.
Goodreads says:
In their hit books Notice and Note and Reading Nonfiction, Kylene Beers and Bob Probst showed teachers how to help students become close readers. Now, in Disrupting Thinking they take teachers a step further and discuss an on-going problem: lack of engagement with reading. They explain that all too often, no matter the strategy shared with students, too many students remain disengaged and reluctant readers. The problem, they suggest, is that we have misrepresented to students why we read and how we ought to approach any text - fiction or nonfiction.
With their hallmark humor and their appreciated practicality, Beers and Probst present a vision of what reading and what education across all the grades could be. Hands-on-strategies make it applicable right away for the classroom teacher, and turn-and-talk discussion points make it a guidebook for school-wide conversations. In particular, they share new strategies and ideas for helping classroom teachers:
--Create engagement and relevance --Encourage responsive and responsible reading --Deepen comprehension --Develop lifelong reading habits
“We think it’s time we finally do become a nation of readers, and we know it’s time students learn to tell fake news from real news. It’s time we help students understand why how they read is so important,” explain Beers and Probst. “Disrupting Thinking is, at its heart, an exploration of how we help students become the reader who does so much more than decode, recall, or choose the correct answer from a multiple-choice list. This book shows us how to help students become the critical thinkers our nation needs them to be."
Eleanor was a disappointment to her family right from the beginning because she wasn't beautiful enough, and well, she wasn't a boy. The beginning of this story was startling to me. Eleanor's disfavor continued her entire life. Not only was she disfavored, she was unlucky. She seemed to not understand why, but her parents weren't good parents - and maybe not even very good people (although I'm inferring that). Eventually, they died, leaving her an orphan.
Despite all that, she became someone of great worth - the wife to the president of the USA! She never forgot the poor and unprivileged in the world and worked to help lift them up.
Who doesn't feel this way sometimes? This is a great story for anyone who has ever felt shy and awkward and undiscovered.
This could be a great story to read while we're doing biographies in class. Barbara Cooney is the illustrator of Roxaboxen!
Goodreads says:
Though she came from a wealthy and privileged family, Eleanor Roosevelt grew up in a cheerless household that left her lonely and shy. Years passed before Eleanor began to discover in herself the qualities of intelligence, compassion, and strength that made her a remarkable woman. In Eleanor, two-time Caldecott Medal winner Barbara Cooney paints a meticulously researched, lushly detailed picture of Eleanor's childhood world--but most importantly, she captures the essence of the little girl whose indomitable spirit would make her one of the greatest and most beloved first ladies of all time. "There are many biographies of Eleanor Roosevelt, but this one is special?Cooney is at her artistic best."
Student: Why did the author say: You look up; You look back; Your eyes begin to close....etc. Me: What genre is the story?
We settled on historical fiction although there are a lot of non-fiction text features. There is an author note at the end of the book explaining that in 1994 a cave was discovered in southern France with drawings made more than 30,000 years ago - 15,000 years older than all he other drawings known at the time. In the cave, they also found a child's footprint and the footprint of a wolf. Good questions ensued: But did a boy really stand in front of a woolly mammoth? They were also a little perplexed as to whether or not the main character was a boy or a girl. The character wore clothing without a shirt sometimes and had quite long and messy hair. I loved the ending. Referring to drawing, it says: And it's still MAGIC! Goodreads says: Imagine you were born before the invention of drawing, more than thirty thousand years ago. You would live with your whole family in a cave and see woolly mammoths walk by! You might even see images of animals hidden in the shapes of clouds and rocks. You would want to share these pictures with your family, but wouldn't know how. Who would have made the world's first drawing? Would it have been you? In The First Drawing, Caldecott Medal winner Mordicai Gerstein imagines the discovery of drawing...and inspires the young dreamers and artists of today.
Once again, a book I would have never pushed through and read if it wasn't for being part of a book club. I feel like there is really much more to this book than I've figured out - but I did get a few things from it. This is definitely one to read again and I really look forward to the book club discussion this week.
The characters seem to have this idea that they're always chasing happiness. Gatsby thinks that if he can only have Daisy, then everything will be perfect and he'll be happy. Wrong. The American dream is about the fact that you don't have to be royal to be rich - but this book seems to beat that up.
The narrator is Nick Carraway. Care Away?? He starts off with some wise words: Reserving judgment is a matter of infinite hope - the grasp of hope or pursuit of what people want is what keeps them chasing happiness. They're all a bunch of shallow fools who are always chasing something, but never finding it. Just like in Romeo and Juliet - people who are born to privilege often run straight into disaster and it ruins them.
These characters are people who aren't willing to do the work. Nick inherited his money from someone who paid another person off so he wouldn't have to go fight the civil war for them. Gatsby throws all the parties just for one reason: To win back Daisy (or is it to win her mansion)
Early in the book they're at a party and a guy gets in an accident. The wheel falls of his car but he keeps trying to drive it. To me, this is like Trump!! The wheels are falling off dude. It's time to get out - but just like the guy in the book, he won't get out. He will keep driving the car until it is ruined.
Gold and yellow seem to be colors given status: Gatsby's car, his tie, the button on Daisy's dress, money, the flowers that Nick says smell like pale gold. The green light at the end of Daisy's dock that Gatsby is always looking at across the bay is also similar. Gatsby thirsts for that light...the house....Daisy. Nick calls it an enchanted object - a false God, I'd say. We all have things that we chase and give honor to that aren't worth anything long term.
The yellow is actually corruption, a-morality, and in the end, death. Right now, in American politics, it seems like people really love Trump mostly because of his success with creating wealth. Just like Trump, no one came across their money honestly and there is never enough money. Everyone always wants more and more and more wealth. The car that Daisy is driving when she kills someone, is also yellow. Pursuing all that stuff makes you unhappy and maybe even evil in the end.
Daisy tells a story about a butler who used to polish silver for the rich people he worked for. He did it day and night until the silver polish ruined his nose. Lesson?! These parties won't last forever and the pursuit of money is not equal to the pursuit of happiness. In the end, Gatsby dies and no one attends his funeral or cares. They just want to pick up their shoes from the house before they're lost. Everyone wants a care-free life - but in the end, Gatsby was not ok. He was chasing happiness but never found it.
Goodreads says: A true classic of twentieth-century literature, this edition has been updated by Fitzgerald scholar James L.W. West III to include the author’s final revisions and features a note on the composition and text, a personal foreword by Fitzgerald’s granddaughter, Eleanor Lanahan—and a new introduction by two-time National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward.
The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s third book, stands as the supreme achievement of his career. First published in 1925, this quintessential novel of the Jazz Age has been acclaimed by generations of readers. The story of the mysteriously wealthy Jay Gatsby and his love for the beautiful Daisy Buchanan, of lavish parties on Long Island at a time when The New York Times noted “gin was the national drink and sex the national obsession,” it is an exquisitely crafted tale of America in the 1920s.
This is a seriously fun book. I read it in one night before I went to bed. It's one of those books that seems silly, but if you get rid of any snobbishness and just enjoy it, soon you'll be chuckling too. It was my first Dog Man book, so I was a little uneducated on the characters. It made me think I should go back and read the books that came before.
There are a lot of knock knock jokes - which seem simple and perhaps an extra - but soon you start to realize they're part of the plot. Great story about a guy with bad character who actually does want to change.
And this is my favorite part:
Goodreads says:
When a new bunch of baddies bust up the town, Dog Man is called into action -- and this time he isn't alone. With a cute kitten and a remarkable robot by his side, our heroes must save the day by joining forces with an unlikely ally: Petey, the World's Most Evil Cat. But can the villainous Petey avoid vengeance and venture into virtue?
I read this book slowly. Sometimes I wanted to soak it up. Sometimes I could only take so much.
Part of what really drew me in was the dysfunctional traits I saw in families I know. Tara's family honors their father and even though he is clearly out of line, mentally ill and puts family members' lives in danger, the unwavering dedication to following him was an extreme example of things I've seen. Tara doesn't follow quite so easily and struggles for years as she goes in and out of feeling comfortable with that expectation. It made me uncomfortable that they were members of the church. However, she is careful to add that this isn`t a story about the church. It`s a story about family and mental illness and dysfunctional relationships. They took what the church teaches to an unhealthy extreme. I felt shame that it could be rooted in something I love but turn into something so terrible. Now she is no longer active in the church. I`m not surprised. It`s pretty impossible to grow up with abuse and have a good relationship with religion and God. Her abuse was too connected and excused by religious teachings and breaking free of that was really the only way to get healthy.
People in the family have a series of terrible accidents that are treated by oils and tinctures. Those were parts I could hardly stand.
Tara has a brother that is abusive and mentally ill. I don't know why the family defended him and let the needs of almost every one else in the family go unmet. I wanted to punch him in the face. The guy needs help and my guess is he'll end up in jail one day. I was angry at her mother for not standing up for her children. All through the book the family is preparing for the Day of Abomination. I felt like the mother was an abomination. She stood by her mentally ill husband even though there are windows of time where she admits he is fallible. She even stands by him when he for some absurd reason, refuses to admit (first I wrote see....but you can't tell me he couldn't see it) the abuse his son, Shawn dealt. Why do some parents do that? It is incomprehensible to me - but then again, it is something I`ve seen to a lesser extreme. Still, it makes me reel.
I loved that Tara is saved by education. Even though she never went to
school, she learns to learn and goes to BYU to learn. She had to learn
how to take tests, the importance of text books, and she had her mind
opened to many things that we take for granted. She was saved by finally
becoming educated, along with two of her brothers. It was truly a
miracle.
p. 180 I did not think of my brother as that person; I doubt I will ever think of him that way. But something had shifted nonetheless. I had started on a path of awareness, had perceived something elemental about my brother, my father, myself. I had discerned the ways in which we had been sculpted by a tradition given to us by others, a tradition of which we were either willfully or accidentally ignorant. I had begun to understand that we had lent our voices to a discourse whose whole purpose was to dehumanize and brutalize others - because nurturing that discourse was easier, because retaining power always feels like the way forward.
I could not have articulated this, not as I sweated through those searing afternoons in the forklift. I did not have the language I have now. But I understood this one fact: that a thousand times I had been called Nigger, and laughed and now I could not laugh. The word and the way Shawn said it hadn`t changed; only my ears were different. They no longer heard the jingle of a joke in it. What they heard was a signal, a call through time, which was answered with a mounting conviction: that never again would I allow myself to be made a food soldier in a conflict I did not understand.
Throughout the story, when she is away at BYU and then Cambridge, she doesn`t tell people much about her family. She hides their truths. Her mother abandons and allows her to be in danger when working with her dad and abused by her brother. Instead of feeling rage, Tara feels shame. However, along the way something clicks that causes a change:
p. 273 I told them I`d been poor. I told them I`d been ignorant, and in telling them this I felt not he slightest prick of shame. Only then did I understand where the shame had come from: it wasn`t that I hadn`t studied in a marble conservatory, or that my father wasn`t a diplomat. It wasn`t that Dad was half out of his mind, or that Mother followed him. It had come from having a father who shoved me toward the chomping blades of the Shear, instead of pulling me away from them. It had come from those moments on the floor, from knowing that Mother was in the next room, closing her eyes and ears to me, choosing, for that moment, not to be my mother at all.
Her brother, Tyler, finally gets it and stands up. In the end, although he recognizes the abuse, he doesn`t distance himself totally from the family. What he said to Tara though was so true:
p. 316 Our parents are held down by chains of abuse, manipulation, and control....They see change as dangerous and will exile anyone who asks for it. This is a perverted idea of family loyalty...they claim faith, but this is not what the gospel teaches. Keep safe. We love you.
Tara has to become a new person to survive. She has to separate herself from her parents and now has no relationship with them. So many times when she`d go back to her family I wanted to scream, `Don`t go!` The compelling ties to family make living a healthy life really difficult for her. I get that. I feel for her. Finally, in the end, she decided she could not live a healthy life with them in it.
p. 328 If there was a single moment when he breach between us, which had been cracking and splintering for two decides, was at least too vast to be bridged, I believe it was that winter night, when I stared at my reflection in the bathroom mirror, while, without m knowing it, my father grasped the phone in his knotted hands and dialed my brothe, Diego, the knife. What followed was very dramatic. But the real drama had already played out in the bathroom.
It had played out when, for reasons I don`t understand, I was unable to climb through the mirror and send out my sixteen-year-old self in my place.
Until that moment she had always been there. No matter how much I appeared to have changed - how illustrious my education, ow altered my appearance - I was still her. At best I was two people, a fractured mind. She was inside, and emerged whenever I crossed the threshold of my father`s house.
That night I called on her and she didn`t answer. She left me. She stayed in the mirror. The decisions I made after that momet were not the ones she would have made. They were the choices of a changed person, a new self.
You could call this selfhood many things. Transformation. Metamorphosis. Falsity. Betrayal.
I can it an education.
I found myself googling information about this family after I finished the book. Are they real? Do they really run a health business? Where are her parents now? It looks like they're still denying everything.They also run a huge business.
Goodreads says:
An unforgettable memoir in the tradition of The Glass Castle about a young girl who, kept out of school, leaves her survivalist family and goes on to earn a PhD from Cambridge University
Tara
Westover was 17 the first time she set foot in a classroom. Born to
survivalists in the mountains of Idaho, she prepared for the end of the
world by stockpiling home-canned peaches and sleeping with her
"head-for-the-hills bag". In the summer she stewed herbs for her mother,
a midwife and healer, and in the winter she salvaged in her father's
junkyard.
Her father forbade hospitals, so Tara never saw a
doctor or nurse. Gashes and concussions, even burns from explosions,
were all treated at home with herbalism. The family was so isolated from
mainstream society that there was no one to ensure the children
received an education and no one to intervene when one of Tara's older
brothers became violent.
Then, lacking any formal education, Tara
began to educate herself. She taught herself enough mathematics and
grammar to be admitted to Brigham Young University, where she studied
history, learning for the first time about important world events like
the Holocaust and the civil rights movement. Her quest for knowledge
transformed her, taking her over oceans and across continents, to
Harvard and to Cambridge. Only then would she wonder if she'd traveled
too far, if there was still a way home.
Educated is an
account of the struggle for self-invention. It is a tale of fierce
family loyalty and of the grief that comes with severing the closest of
ties. With the acute insight that distinguishes all great writers,
Westover has crafted a universal coming-of-age story that gets to the
heart of what an education is and what it offers: the perspective to see
one's life through new eyes and the will to change it.
