Viola Desmond Will Not Be Budged (Jody Nyasha Warner, Richard Rudnicki)

 

I love this story. She is the lady on the $10 bill that is vertical. We are reading the story of Jackie Robinson and knowing similar things were happening in Canada is always a good reality check. 

My husband works with someone whose mother used to get her hair done by Viola Desmond. This is recent history!

Goodreads says:

In 1946, Viola Desmond bought a movie ticket at the Roseland Theatre in Nova Scotia. After settling into a main floor seat, an usher came by and told her to move, because her ticket was only good for the balcony. She offered to pay the difference in price but was refused: “You people have to sit in the upstairs section.” Viola refused to move. She was hauled off to jail, but her actions gave strength and inspiration to Canada’s black community. Vibrant illustrations and oral-style prose tell Viola’s story with sympathy and historical accuracy. 

Neil Armstrong (Little People, Big Dreams series) by Maria Isabel Sanchez Vegara

 

I was surprised how many of my students knew who Neil Armstrong was. They really liked learning about how he became an astronaut. Great discussion!

Goodreads says:

In this book from the critically acclaimed, multimillion-copy best-selling Little People, BIG DREAMS series, discover the life of Neil Armstrong, the first person to walk on the moon.
 
Little Neil’s dreams took flight when he rode on his first airplane as a child. After studying aeronautical engineering and time spent in the Navy, he became a pilot. From there, he was selected to take a trip to where no human had gone before—the moon! Along with his team, Buzz and Mike, he was the captain of the Apollo 11. And Neil took a giant step for humankind as the first person to ever step onto the surface of the moon.This inspiring book features stylish and quirky illustrations and extra facts at the back, including a biographical timeline with historical photos and a detailed profile of the legendary astronaut.

​Little People, BIG DREAMS is a best-selling series of books and educational games that explore the lives of outstanding people, from designers and artists to scientists and activists. All of them achieved incredible things, yet each began life as a child with a dream.

This empowering series offers inspiring messages to children of all ages, in a range of formats. The board books are told in simple sentences, perfect for reading aloud to babies and toddlers. The hardcover versions present expanded stories for beginning readers. Boxed gift sets allow you to collect a selection of the books by theme. Paper dolls, learning cards, matching games, and other fun learning tools provide even more ways to make the lives of these role models accessible to children.

Inspire the next generation of outstanding people who will change the world with Little People, BIG DREAMS! 

It's Impossible (Tracey Corderoy)

 

Amazing illustrations and a get illustration of how possibility thinking can help you get somewhere you originally thought you couldn't go. 

Goodreads says:

An imaginative, hilarious, and fun story that teaches children that nothing is impossible!

Dog longs to visit the ocean, but it is MILES away. “Impossible!” he sighs. After using a new laundry soap called “Ocean Magic” a crab appears and needs help getting home. Will Dog take this chance to make his dream come true?

Stay Out Of The Basement (R.L. Stine)

 

I like to read a book from a series to introduce my students to it....and once I started reading this one I saw them reading all sorts of Goosebumps books in the classroom. I have to say though, it was pretty scary!! I'm not entirely sure it's okay for 8 year olds! I decided to read it at Halloween time because it would be a quick read and maybe kind of fun. Sheesh! One girl told me that when she gets scared her teeth hurt - and they hurt a lot during this book! 

Goodreads says:

Dr. Brewer is doing a little plant-testing in his basement. Nothing to worry about. Harmless, really.

But Margaret and Casey Brewer are worried about their father. Especially when they... meet... some of the plants he is growing down there.

Then they notice that their father is developing plantlike tendencies. In fact, he is becoming distinctly weedy- and seedy. Is it just part of their father's 'harmless' experiment? Or has the basement turned into another little shop of horrors? 

The Great Fuzz Frenzy (Janet Stevens, Susan Stevens Crummel)

 

Short summary: This story is about a tennis ball that gets dumped down a gopher hole by a dog. 

But it's so much more than that!! It's about friendship, community and problem solving...and it's hilarious.

I love picture books where you have to turn the page and there are fold outs to make it huge....like when the ball goes down down down down a gopher hole! 


Goodreads says:

Deep, deep down in their underground town, the prairie dogs live in harmony - until a mysterious, fluorescent, very fuzzy thing (otherwise known as a tennis ball) rolls down their hole. When the prairie dogs discover that they can pluck and pull the fuzz into fabulous fashions, their fear quickly turns to curiosity, then delight, then pure greed.
The frenzy that erupts threatens to tear apart the prairie-dog town forever. But when mean ol' Big Bark is kidnapped after taking all the fuzz for himself, the prairie dogs come to the rescue and remember the true meaning of community.

Shapes, Lines, and Light (Katie Yamasaki)

 

This is an amazing story! My students had no idea about the racism towards Japanese people during World War II in the USA. The author's grandfather was a famous architect. The story mentions 9/11 and says how sad he would have felt....ironic considering the racism he faced. However, destroying a building he designed because of racism would have hurt his heart. He wasn't alive during 9/11, however. 
The story does a good job of showing parts of his life he loved and the warmth and light despite the hurdles he faced.

Goodreads says:

Minoru Yamasaki described the feeling he sought to create in his buildings as “serenity, surprise, and delight.” Here, Katie Yamasaki charts his life and work: his childhood in Seattle’s Japanese immigrant community, paying his way through college working in Alaska’s notorious salmon canneries, his success in architectural school, and the transformative structures he imagined and built. A Japanese American man who faced brutal anti-Asian racism in post–World War II America and an outsider to the architectural establishment, he nonetheless left his mark on the world, from the American Midwest to New York City, Asia, and the Middle East.


This striking picture book renders one artist’s work through the eyes of another, and tells a story of a man whose vision, hard work, and humanity led him to the pinnacle of his field. 

Bittersweet (Susan Cain)

 

Susan Cain has done it again. This is another brilliant book. It has gospel truths in it focused on how life cannot be wonderful without the terrible and sad parts. I remember when Destiny was born silently how people tried to cheer me up and tell me how grateful I must be <insert a number of different things....have two healthy children.....know that we will have our children with us in the eternities....etc> but I didn't find my solace in those things, even though I did realize how important they were. I needed that time for sadness and grief. Sometimes I still do.  Too often people in North America (and in my religion) are far too uncomfortable with sadness. We are kind of expected to see the bright side and simply be happy. There is a place for the sadness, sorrow and longing though. I need this sorrow and sadness and longing for many things, perhaps most of all, to remind me that life is fragile and to appreciate it. This book reminds me again that it is okay to get what I need. It's okay to long for something that is lost or just simply never was.

There's a lot to this book. I'd definitely find it worthwhile to read it again.


Goodreads says:

In her new masterpiece, the author of the bestselling phenomenon Quiet reveals the power of a bittersweet outlook on life, and why we’ve been so blind to its value.

With Quiet, Susan Cain urged our society to cultivate space for the undervalued, indispensable introverts among us, thereby revealing an untapped power hidden in plain sight. Now she employs the same mix of research, storytelling, and memoir to explore why we experience sorrow and longing, and the surprising lessons these states of mind teach us about creativity, compassion, leadership, spirituality, mortality, and love.

Bittersweetness is a tendency to states of longing, poignancy, and sorrow; an acute awareness of passing time; and a curiously piercing joy when beholding beauty. It recognizes that light and dark, birth and death—bitter and sweet—are forever paired. A song in a minor key, an elegiac poem, or even a touching television commercial all can bring us to this sublime, even holy, state of mind—and, ultimately, to greater kinship with our fellow humans.

But bittersweetness is not, as we tend to think, just a momentary feeling or event. It’s also a way of being, a storied heritage. Our artistic and spiritual traditions—amplified by recent scientific and management research—teach us its power.

Cain shows how a bittersweet state of mind is the quiet force that helps us transcend our personal and collective pain. If we don’t acknowledge our own sorrows and longings, she says, we can end up inflicting them on others via abuse, domination, or neglect. But if we realize that all humans know—or will know—loss and suffering, we can turn toward each other. And we can learn to transform our own pain into creativity, transcendence, and connection.

At a time of profound discord and personal anxiety, Bittersweet brings us together in deep and unexpected ways.

Between Two Kingdoms (Suleika Jaouad)

 

The more I read this book, the more I loved it. Having gone through cancer (and death) with two close family members, her journey through cancer touched my heart. I also really loved the way the book ended - with her travling around and meeting up with all the people she had connected with through her writing and with the lessons she learned from them as she worked to return to a healthy life after cancer. There were a lot of great lessons. Cancer took a lot from the author....and in the end, she said she would not reverse her diagnosis and would not take back the suffering to learn the lessons she gained. I'd say the same thing for the experiences of grief that I've experienced. In the moment, I was not grateful for the experiences, but time is a great healer and gref is a great teacher.

Goodreads says:

A searing, deeply moving memoir of illness and recovery that traces one young woman’s journey from diagnosis to remission and, ultimately, a road trip of healing and self-discovery.

In the summer after graduating from college, Suleika Jaouad was preparing, as they say in commencement speeches, to enter “the real world”. She had fallen in love and moved to Paris to pursue her dream of becoming a war correspondent. The real world she found, however, would take her into a very different kind of conflict zone.

It started with an itch—first on her feet, then up her legs, like a thousand invisible mosquito bites. Next came the exhaustion, and the six-hour naps that only deepened her fatigue. Then a trip to the doctor and, a few weeks shy of her twenty-third birthday, a diagnosis: leukemia, with a 35 percent chance of survival. Just like that, the life she had imagined for herself had gone up in flames. By the time Jaouad flew home to New York, she had lost her job, her apartment, and her independence. She would spend much of the next four years in a hospital bed, fighting for her life and chronicling the saga in a column for The New York Times.

When Jaouad finally walked out of the cancer ward—after three and a half years of chemo, a clinical trial, and a bone marrow transplant—she was, according to the doctors, cured. But as she would soon learn, a cure is not where the work of healing ends; it’s where it begins. She had spent the past 1,500 days in desperate pursuit of one goal—to survive. And now that she’d done so, she realized that she had no idea how to live.

How would she reenter the world and live again? How could she reclaim what had been lost? Jaouad embarked—with her new best friend, Oscar, a scruffy terrier mutt—on a 100-day, 15,000-mile road trip across the country. She set out to meet some of the strangers who had written to her during her years in the hospital: a teenage girl in Florida also recovering from cancer; a teacher in California grieving the death of her son; a death-row inmate in Texas who’d spent his own years confined to a room. What she learned on this trip is that the divide between sick and well is porous, that the vast majority of us will travel back and forth between these realms throughout our lives. Between Two Kingdoms is a profound chronicle of survivorship and a fierce, tender, and inspiring exploration of what it means to begin again. 

An Ordinary Day (Elena K Arnold)

 

Well, I should have read this one ahead of reading it to my class.  

We recently put our family dog down. This was a tough one to read! 

It is a beautiful story though. 

Goodreads says:

An ordinary day in an ordinary neighborhood turns out to be quite extraordinary in this story about the circle of life.

It’s an average day in the neighborhood—children play, roses are watered, and a crow watches over it all. But then two visitors arrive at two houses, one to help a family say hello to a new baby and one to help a family say goodbye to a beloved pet.