One Book, One School with Jack by Liesl Shurtliff

We are doing our One Book, One School this year with Liesl Shurtliff's Jack! For our One Book, One School, I select a book that I think would make a great read-aloud for our families, which means the book needs to have appeal for grades K-5. We have had some great choices in the past 5 years but I think Jack is another excellent choice! As in Rump, Shurtliff takes us into the fairy tale world with a fresh and engaging new twist. It is full of adventure and voice and I feel many readers/listeners in my school community will be begging for one more chapter!
Here are some of my resources I used for the One Book, One School:

• Book Trailer (Publisher-made)
• Signs for around the school
• Reading Schedule Bookmark
• Informational Letter & Family Reading Night Invitation

This year we kicked off our One Book, One School with a visit from author Liesl Shurtliff. She is a fabulous speaker - students and teachers loved her. It was a great way to get kids excited to read the book. In the past, I've always had the author come at the end, after families were finished reading. With an inspiring author like Liesl Shurtliff, I can definitely see the benefits of starting with the author! Kids were so excited to go home and start reading! She also autographed all the books for us.

To go along with the reading at home, we have a family reading night at school. I always coordinate this with my bookfair to get more people to shop. To go along with Jack, we had a fairy tale theme with stations around the school.
Here are the stations that we had and some of the resources that I used with them:

• Three Pigs Building Challenge
• Photo Booth with Fairy Tale Props 
• Puppet Pal iPad App 
• Partner Read Green Screen (Teacher Directions) 
• Imagination Writing & Viewing Book Character Pumpkins (info letter) 
• Fairy Tale Bingo (Clues; I used print-bingo.com to make boards) 
• Book fair and storyteller 

It was a great night and I received lots of compliments! If you are interested in seeing more pictures of this year's Family Reading Night, see my MRC blog post. To learn more about other One Book, One School books we've done, see this presentation from my state library conference (ISLMA).

Now my only problem is what in the world are we going to read next year?? :)

What I'm Reading: Wolf Hollow, Lily and Dunkin, Full of Beans & more!

I've read a lot of good books lately and honestly, I just feel like reading more and more! My huge stack of ARCs from School Library Journal's Day of Dialogue is calling. I decided to keep my reviews super short and sweet today - 7 words or less to describe the book. :) There are plenty of other places to look to get more information and opinions about these books, but I highly recommend them.

Wolf Hollow by Lauren Wolk
Poignant, lasting, powerful, bullying, kindness, sad


When Mischief Came to Town by Katrina Nannestad
Family, sweet, grief, acceptance, warm, stories

Full of Beans by Jennifer L. Holm (Aug. 30 release date)
Voice, funny, inventiveness, savvy, Great Depression

Lily and Dunkin by Donna Gephart
Challenges, empathy, acceptance, understanding, differences, transgender, bipolar

Red: The True Story of Little Red Riding Hood by Liesl Shurtliff
Magic, strength, love, family, searching, finding, friendship

The Thank You Book by Mo Willems
Thankfulness, friends, touching, farewell

App-Smashing with Book Creator

I serve on my school district's App Review Committee (ARC). Before teachers can put apps on student devices, we need to review it considering privacy concerns, ease of use, terms of services, etc. For more information about our ARC, and to see the database of apps we have reviewed, checkout this blog post written by my colleague here.

The iPad app Book Creator is one of the App Review Committee's Recommended apps, in part for its versatility in creating books. Students as young as kindergarteners for the most part find it intuitive to make a book. Within the app, users just press the plus sign to add photos, writing/drawing, text, or sound to their book. Students can easily use the app to share their learning. Final projects can be exported as an ePub, a PDF (no audio then), or a video (with automatic "page" turning). However, Book Creator is also a great app to use with other apps to make even more engaging or just snazzier ebooks! Here are a few combinations you might want to try with your students:

 Explain Everything is an interactive whiteboard/screencasting app. Like Book Creator, it is simple enough that young learners can create products with relative ease but complex enough to be appropriate for all grade levels. It has a few capabilities that Book Creator does not, including recording while drawing/writing, and panning and zooming. Teachers and students might export books they've created in Book Creator to Explain Everything to read with the pointer and record their voice, highlight, and/or annotate. Or, they might use the pan and zoom feature in Explain Everything to add some pizzazz to a PDF of their Book Creator books, especially if they created a comic book. Another app-smashing option is to take a whole class' projects or responses from Explain Everything and put them together in one Book Creator book.

The iMovie app provides a simple way to make a movie on the iPad with some nice editing options. A common way to use iMovie and Book Creator together is to edit some video before bringing it into Book Creator. For example, students can use the trailer style of iMovie to create a brief, engaging video about a person they are writing a biography on, or a book trailer they are writing a book response to. This could be used in all subject areas, from showing science experiments to proper form in PE as a way to assess students. Checkout this Youtube video from David Panush that includes examples of using these two apps to assess students on their understanding of health and safety rules. Additionally, you could start with Book Creator and export the book as a video file into iMovie to add music and other editing from iMovie.

Speaking of creating fun movies, another great app to combine with Book Creator would be DoInk Green Screen. The green screen app allows students to record themselves and others and put whatever background they want behind them based on what they are learning about: weather, a historical event, a newsroom, animals and habitats, jobs, locations around the world, a math worksheet...the sky is the limit! Those videos can then easily be imported into a student, small group, or class ebook in Book Creator.
 

While it is possible to use colors beyond the 12 standard colors in Book Creator, my young students have had difficulty creating a brown color (which makes both books about seeds and Martin Luther King Jr. a bit difficult). Why not completely unleash their creativity and let them start by creating drawings in Drawing Pad , which has a wide variety of colors and tools including paint, chalk, crayons, stickers, markers, and pencils. After saving to the photos, these can be easily brought into Book Creator.


 Once the creative juices start flowing, it is easy to think of dozens of apps that could be used in conjunction with Book Creator, so I'll list just a few more:

• Tellagami - create and share a quick animated Gami video with a talking avatar
• Chatterpix Kids - make a photo of anything talk in a short video - just draw a line for the mouth
• Stop Motion Studio - create stop motion movies
• Shadow Puppet Edu - easily create videos with copyright friendly videos and voice over
• Toontastic, PuppetPals - create animated stories with characters and settings
• Keynote - create presentations
• Popplet, Kidspiration, or Inspiration - make mind-maps
• Numbers - add tables and charts
• WordFoto - turn words into typographic works of art

What I'm Reading: Picture Books!

I unfortunately had strep throat and a prolonged fever (SIX DAYS LONG) this week so I missed the whole week of school. I've got a lot of catching up to you! But, thankfully, PARCC testing went on without me!
Here are a three very different but absolutely delightful picture books I read this afternoon that made me happy. Unfortunately, I had them at my house the whole time I was sick they couldn't make any of my students happy. But that will change very soon. :)

Solving the Puzzle Under the Sea written by Robert Burleigh and illustrated by Raúl Colón is a wonderful book for so many reasons:

• It's a great first-person picture book biography
• The subject, Marie Tharp, is not very well known but this book makes her story extremely accessible for young readers
• A woman overcomes obstacles to do what she really wants to do: be a scientist!
• Did I mention the lovely illustrations?
• It has an informative afterward, glossary, bibliography, websites, and "Things to Wonder About and Do" section

What's not to love? So I do love it! I knew very little about Marie Tharp but this picture book has me intrigued in learning more about her life. 

Next up is Spot, the Cat by Henry Cole. I have a special spot in my heart for Henry Cole because the first "One Book, One School" program I did was with his chapter book, A Nest for Celeste. Not only is that a wonderful book, but he was absolutely one of the best authors we have ever had visit. (Not that I have favorites, but I highly recommend him!)
Spot the Cat is wordless. I will admit, I did not always appreciate wordless picture books, especially as read alouds. I just didn't know what I would say to captivate the 24 little faces looking at me, without words to read. That all changed when I took a chance and read aloud Journey and Quest by Aaron Becker and it took two library sessions to read one book! They were so entranced as we told the story together and I learned my lesson: Wordless picture books can be awesome.
Spot the Cat could be a little more difficult to read to a large group because there are some small details to spot in the black and white illustrations. These details include Spot the adventurous cat and the boy who is looking for him. Whether they are large or small on the page, the subjects show expression and life and will be fun for wandering young eyes to find. It's a charmingly simple story with lots to pour over.

Finally, another new favorite of mine is Horrible Bear written by Ame Dyckman and illustrated by Zachariah OHora, the same duo as Wolfie the Bunny. This book is picture book perfection. This would make a great read aloud for absolutely any age and I do intend to read it to as many classes as possible. There's no need for me to summarize this one, just watch the trailer (and read the book!)

What I'm Reading: Maybe a Fox, Summerlost, The Goblin's Puzzle

PARCC standardized testing at school means less lesson planning, etc. for me to do at home and more time for reading! (There's got to be some benefit to testing, right?) I read a several great books in the last week.


Maybe a Fox by Kathi Appelt was a sad yet beautiful read that deals with death and grief. 11-year-old Jules is dealing with too much of both after her sister drowns when she was in an area of the woods she was not supposed to be in. Jules is left asking what happens after you die? "Maybe you turn into wind. Maybe you turn into stars. Maybe a fox."
 People are calling this one a Newbery possibility and saying it is accessible for middle grade readers. This may be unpopular but I am afraid it is going to be a tough sell for some of my students. I had a fifth grade who read it say it got too weird, with its ideas of reincarnation and spirit animals. However, I also know of plenty of readers who ask for a sad, touching story and this could be a touching choice for them.

Another book I read this week also dealt with loss, in a very different way: Summerlost by Ally
Condie. It's been a year since 12-year-old Cedar lost her her father and brother in a car crash. In order to get away from the sadness surrounding their deaths, Cedar, along with her mom and little brother Miles, are spending the summer in their mother's hometown of Iron Creek. Cedar meets a boy named Leo and they both work at a Shakespeare festival for the summer. They connect and by the end of the summer feel they are each other's "person" (in a non-romantic way). There was a lot to the story besides dealing with loss, including a bit of mystery, bullying, kids getting into trouble, yearning to reach goals, and a possible ghost. I loved it!



I also read The Goblin's Puzzle: Being the Adventures of a Boy with No Name and Two Girls Called Alice by Andrew S. Chilton. I will admit this one took me a little bit to get into, for some reason, but once I was hooked, I found this clever, whimsical fantasy story engrossing. Readers looking for an adventure/quest story will find familiar tropes including lowly heroes rising to greatness, tricksy creatures who take delight in confusion and mayhem, and a smart girl who is overlooked. However, it is all done with great voice and  freshness and lightness that I greatly enjoyed.


Last week I had a 5th grader tell me that the Thirteen Treasures series by Michelle Harrison were the best books ever, so I borrowed 13 Treasures and read it over the weekend.  I found it to be an enjoyable read, indeed. For as long as she can remember, Tanya has been able to see fairies. The fairies she sees aren't sweet and beautiful but mean, blackmailing creatures. Tanya's mother is tired of Tanya's strange behavior and sends her to her grandmother's strange old mansion for a few weeks in the summer. There, Tanya begins to uncover several mysteries and learns that she isn't the only one who can see fairies. It was a quick read for me, even with over 400 pages. I'm glad I read it!

Finally, I enjoyed How to Catch a Bogle so much that I gobbled up A Plague of Bogles and just started reading (listening to) The Last Bogler. I don't have these in my physical library collection, just as ebooks/audio books, so I may need to add these next year! I'll miss these characters when I finish the trilogy.


What have you been reading?

Book Bracket Battle Update

We are down to our "Final Four" in our Book Bracket Battle!
It's Amulet: The Stonekeeper vs. Fish in a Tree
and The Unwanteds vs. I Survived the Attacks of September 11!

 Some of the votes have been extremely close, including Milo Speck, Accidental Agent vs. I Survived the Attacks of September 11. 
See here for more about my Book Bracket Battle.

What I'm Reading: The Wild Robot + more

Last week I had the delight to read The Wild Robot, by Peter Brown. I actually listened to this title, and the audiobook was very well done. After I finished listening, I got my hands on the actual book so I was able to see the illustrations, which definitely added to the story (but so did the robot voice in the audiobook!)  It has already gotten a lot of press/blog posts, including getting on the NYT Bestseller's List, plus a NYT Editor's Choice book, an interview on Let's Get Busy with Matthew Winner, and much more.
It is about a robot named Roz, who first powers up to discover that she is on an island. She uses her survival instincts and learns from the animals around her, even as they call her a monster. After much observation, she learns their languages and begins to interact with them, and even begins taking care of an orphaned gosling. There are different layers to this book and I think children and adults would like it. It would make a great read aloud, and I even would consider it as a "One Book, One School" book, although in the end Roz's mysterious origin catches up with her and there is some robot violence, which parents might think is too much for their kindergartener. It was a wonderful read and touches on issues of family, friendship, prejudices, overcoming fear, loneliness, sacrifice, and the interaction between humans and the wilderness.

Other books I just finished include Rules for Stealing Stars by Corey Ann Haydu. 11-year old Silly can remember a time with her mother was better, but lately her mother only seems to be getting worse. She sleeps often, drinks frequently, and has unpredictable moods. Silly's family, which includes 3 older sisters and a father who is an absent-minded professor of fairy tales, has moved to New Hampshire to live in their "summer home." The sisters find magical places in the home's closets that help them deal with their dysfunctional family, but is escaping the best way to deal, or should they be fighting for their family? A beautiful and heartbreaking story that is hopeful. I enjoyed it, and I would recommend it for 5th and up.

I also just finished listening to How to Catch a Bogle by Catherine Jinks. It is a historical fantasy with a Dickens-like feel. The main character Birdie is a brave and sassy bogler's girl, which means she is an apprentice who sings sweetly to lure the bogles out of the hiding places. Bogles are nasty creatures who live in dark, damp places and prey on children. Not everyone wants the bogles to be vanquished, however, and so Birdie and her master Alfred must pit themselves against a human foe as well.
The story left me wanting to read/hear more! I just downloaded the audio of book two, A Plague of Bogles, and am hoping it is the same narrator.