Millie Fleur's Poison Garden (Christy Mandin)

 

This is a super cute story with a great message. Be yourself!! 

It would be fun to plant some strange garden plants after reading this.

Goodreads says:
Wednesday Addams meets The Curious Garden in this delightfully peculiar story about finding joy in being wonderfully weird.

Garden Glen is a very bland place. Every house and every garden looks exactly like the other. That is… until Millie Fleur La Fae comes to town.

Up on a scruffy hill, beside a ramschackle house, Millie Fleur plants her marvelously strange garden, filled with Sneezing Stickyweed, Fanged Fairymoss, and Grumpy Gilliflower. Millie Fleur finds it enchanting, but the townspeople of Garden Glen call it poison!

But Millie Fleur is proud of her beloved little garden. So if some townspeople want to be sticks in the mud, she'll take matters into her own hands and find the kindred spirits who appreciate everything the garden has to offer.

Millie Fleur's Poison Garden is a reminder to embrace everything that makes us wonderfully weird. Perfect for readers of The Creepy Carrots and fans of the Addams Family movies.

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? 

Two Truths and a Lie (Ammi-Joan Paquette and Laurie Ann Thompson)

This book is fabulous. It should be required reading for every adult before the post anything on Facebook (my current pet peeve is the STUPID falsehoods people put on Facebook). This would be a great book to use to start off a unit teaching students who to discern information that is useful and information that is not useful, especially online. This book would be a great way to teach kids to question what they read and seek back up information. The vocabulary in the book is quite impressive and might be tricky for younger grades.

I can't wait for the next volume to come out!


Goodreads says:

Two Truths and a Lie is the first book in a new series that presents some of the most crazy-but-true stories about the living world as well as a handful of stories that are too crazy to be true—and asks readers to separate facts from fakes! Did you know that there is a fungus that can control the mind of an ant and make it do its bidding? Would you believe there is such a thing as a corpse flower—a ten-foot-tall plant with a blossom that smells like a zombie? How about a species of octopus that doesn’t live in water but rather lurks in trees in the Pacific Northwest?

Every story in this book is strange and astounding. But not all of them are real. Just like the old game in this book’s title, two out of every three stories are completely true and one is an outright lie. Can you guess which? It’s not going to be easy. Some false stories are based on truth, and some of the true stories are just plain unbelievable. And they’re all accompanied by dozens of photos, maps, and illustrations. Amaze yourself and trick your friends as you sort out the fakes from the facts!