“Touch blue and your wish will come true.”

Cynthia Lord’s new novel is a wish come true for middle school librarians!  Simple and sweet with lots of meat, the narrative explores hosting a foster child.

Tess’ family lives on a small island off the coast of Maine.  When the state says there are not enough students to keep the island school open, the local minister hatches a plan to have island families open their homes to foster children.  Tess’ Dad doesn’t feel completely right about the plan, but her mom convinces him.  ”How can it be wrong to share that [a strong, loving home] with a child who needs one – even if he brings us something in return?”

“Dad couldn’t answer that…” so Tess gets her older foster brother.  Her hopes and wishes do not match the reality of the troubled Aaron, however.  Tess and her family try their best, but Aaron is distant and surly.  But it doesn’t stop Tess from trying to change their luck and Aaron’s.

A charming frame to the story is Tess’ obsessions with luck and wishing.  Each chapter starts with a proverb related to luck.  ”A rainbow means change is coming.”   The narrative also contains lovely details related to lobster fishing, which is how Tess’ father makes his living.   The setting is well developed with realistic, believable situations and compelling characters all in a package suitable for grades 4 and up.

Highly recommended.  This one will touch you…

Dr. Douglas B. Reeves of The Leadership and Learning Center gives his position on school libraries in the 21^st century:  http://www.leadandlearn.com/multimedia-resource-center/video-library

Quotes I liked from the video:

“Library must be the heart of research, writing, thinking, and analysis for every school.”

Living it:  1^st grade just collaborated with me, selecting library materials to support a new non-fiction reading and writing project they are adding in response to Common Core.    I am here to help all of my teachers.  My job is to collaborate and support them with resources as we begin drilling into the Core!

“We want our students not to be mindless cutters and pasters from the Internet, but rather to be critical thinkers who start with one source and use that ‘old fashioned library’ including perhaps secondary and primary sources to try to identify where the truth of the argument really is.”

Living it:  Introducing EBSCO information database to students, providing and training them to use a reliable variety of sources.  I’ll be with the 7th grade on Monday doing just this!

 “…the library becomes a social place in the best sense of the word, not just to fool around with other students, but rather to identify a safe place to be smart.” 

Living it:  Come watch 6-8^th graders during Advisory or Study Period as they work at their projects and collaborate with me and with each other.  The student who just left was helping the others (and I was helping him) with Excel and charts.  “I love this,” he said.

“High touch – human relationships – precede high tech.  …high tech can give the illusion of precision and the illusion of accuracy but demands to be double checked by a thoughtful reference to multiple sources which takes us right back to the library.”

Living it:  High tech is touted for its ability to engage, but engagement without learning does not educate.  Teachers educate.  Librarians educate.  High tech guided by high TOUCH is what works!

Jennifer L. Holm brings 1935 alive in a unique setting – Key West Florida. Like the main character, Turtle, this novel is both snappy and sweet.

Holm seems to launch many of her novels from old family stories beginning with her first (and Newberywinning) novel Our Only May Amelia which was inspired by a diary kept by her great aunt, Alice Amelia Holm.  Penny from Heaven was inspired by her mother’s life.   In the tradition, ”Turtle” was inspired by family tales from the Conch relatives; Conch is what Key West natives call themselves. Jennifer’s Great-Grandmother was a Conch.  (pronounced conk)

And Holm has a way with words:

“Mama put her hand over her heart.  Otherwise it would have leaped right out of her chest.  She fell so hard for Archie she left a dent in the floor.”

Holm did her homework.  1935 Key West comes alive, complete with a couple of encounters with Papa Hemingway.  Turtle owns a cat, so I was surprised that Holm didn’t mention Papa Hemingway’s six toed cats.  But then I did MY homework.  Those cats came  from Cuba with the Hemingways in the 1940s after the events of this narrative.

An excellent piece of historical fiction for young readers, this narrative evokes a strong sense of place and time.  It doesn’t surround any earthshaking events other than a brush with the 1935 Labor Day Hurricane and the Depression era issues surrounding Turtle’s family, but it has a Conch style Little Rascals feel to it.

The cover is unfortunate; boy readers may be put off.  In spite of a girl main character, however, this is a book with a lot of boy appeal.  Turtle is the only girl among a gang of boys and the book has pirates and treasure, not to mention lots of talks about everyone’s bungy.  (Bungy is ostensibly the Conch word for butt according to the novel.)  An easy read at 177 pages (narrative) it includes 14 pages of additional notes and pictures.

I recommend you snap this one up!

I’ve been thinking a lot about the Common Core Standards focus on reading informational text.  Like other education professionals, I’ve been preparing to respond and adapt to the changes.  And I’ve been promoting how library media specialist positions should prove more important than ever in light of Common Core.

With this ever on my mind, while purchasing this year’s Rebecca Caudill nominees I had a duhpiphany!  (Duhpiphany – Sudden realization or comprehension of the (larger) essence or meaning of something I should have thought of before!)  I began to make sure I had non-fiction title (informational text) to correspond to the fiction titles. 

I have collaborated with teachers on pairing fiction and non-fiction before, but somehow I never made sure I had matches for the state award nominees.  As I said, it was a duhpiphany!

Actually, it was Roland Smith’s “Peak” that made me realize a lot of kids were going to want to read more on the topic.  I wasn’t happy with anything in my current collection about Mount Everest and mountain climbing so I started an order.  For some titles, such as “Woods Runner” I already had plenty of quality titles in the collection.  But it was a good chance to update some subjects such as Darwin and evolution to support both “…Calpurnia Tate” & “Leviathan”.

I am calling these books “Caudill Connections” and I promoted the concept when I booktalked the nominated titles.  Caudill Connection books are in a separate display, marked in the OPAC as a Resource List, and labeled to identify which book they match.  Labels Caudill Connection

I’ve attached the list of the correlating titles: Caudill Connections 2012  You will notice that not every Caudill nominee has corresponding nonfiction.  Fantasy just doesn’t match non-fiction!  Hopefully you get the idea. 

At the very least, comb your current collection and highlight titles that match current Caudill nominees!  We all know that, gulp, not everyone likes reading fiction.  They might not read “Peak”, but the Mount Everest book may attract their interest.  

Whatever connects a kid and a book….

It had to happen.  Historical Fiction now is being written about events I can remember.  *Sigh* 

2012 Caudill Nominee, “The Rock and the River” by Kekla Magoon, intimately details the racial unrest I remember from my elementary school years.  I remember my family cancelling a trip to my aunt’s home in Joliet, Illinois because the Black Panthers were expected to be demonstrating. (We were from a farming community far to the southwest.)  Even when there was no violence, people feared it when the Black Panthers were mentioned, and the media supported those fears.  I cautioned my students when I booktalked this wonderful title, however, that the media failed to share the social agenda of the Black Panthers.  Before reading Magoon’s novel I knew nothing of them feeding breakfast to schoolchildren and starting medical clinics in the inner cities… Walter Cronkite never told me about that side of the Black Panthers.  As part of my booktalk I encouraged my students to be good consumers of information – to NOT assume that even when the media is telling you the truth, that it is the whole, unbiased truth.

Gary D. Schmidt’s “The Wednesday Wars” is another recent title that could be playing on my personal “This is Your Life”.   It was a blast from my grade school past.  I have recommended this rich YA novel to many of my adult friends for that reason!  We lived it!

And I just finished reading “The Red Umbrella” by Christina Gonzalez.  Set in 1961, it details the impact of the Cuban Communist Revolution through the eyes of one family.  The novel is loosely based on the author’s own family experiences.  For the record, I was only two years old in 1961 when the events in the novel take place, but the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 shadowed my childhood.  The duck and cover drills Schmidt recalls in “The Wednesday Wars” were a direct result of US/Soviet/Cuban relations.  My recurring childhood nightmares were straight out of current events.

Kierkegaard’s famous quote,  ”Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forward” is brought to life in the novels mentioned above.  So perhaps it is fortunate that historical fiction is now exploring events from my lifetime; a chance for me to add some understanding to my own experiences.  But I’ve got to find a way to rephrase myself during booktalks!  I find myself saying, ”When I was your age” and I realize that I’m history!

Since I’m in a K-8 cornfield, middle to low income school setting very, very, very few of my students have their own e-readers.  I will be watching to see if that changes after Christmas…  Regardless I’m learning and considering how to respond when the demand surfaces. 

One of the benefits of E-readers is the INSTANT factor – no waiting and no trip to the store or library.  But with e-books in the library there is a problem – E-books can only be downloaded by one student at a time.  The instant factor just went on hold.  Granted, there will be no late returns and books could be returned early BUT they will still serve only one student at a time.  Thus there is no advantage over print in the library in this regard.

The dust is still swirling related to marketing and licensing of e-books for libraries; it is even cloudier for school libraries.  And so far there are no consortium opportunities like offered to public libraries. 

So what is the advantage of e-books in a school library setting?  It would certainly save shelf space to buy multiples of hot titles in e-book form.  We buy multiple paperbacks now and withdraw them later; if e-books would give me an economical way to replace that practice I would be thrilled… assuming I had enough students desiring the format. 

What I want is to satisfy the immediacy factor for my students because if they don’t get what they want, when they want it from me, they will purchase from Amazon or Barnes and Noble.  They will purchase because it is instant and the result is that my library becomes irrelevant to them.  A possible solution would be a marketing model that gave me a good price for multiple copies of an e-book.  I wouldn’t even mind limited circulations.  (I buy paperbacks assuming limited circulations!)  The HarperCollins model (26 circ limit) priced correctly would suit this! 

But until there is a demand from my students for the format I will keep watching the dust swirl.  And I’ll renew my “who has a Kindle or a Nook” poll every January with my cornfield kids.

Indians of the Midwest is an excellent NEW resource on Native Americans in the Midwest from the Newberry Library in Chicago.  (Vetted by Debbie Reese, Assistant Professor in American Indian Studies, University of Illinois – If you are familiar with Debbie’s reviews in her blog you know her stamp of approval is hard to get!) 

http://publications.newberry.org/indiansofthemidwest/

Past and Present

This web resource is lovely in that it is not just a historical treatment, but a cultural treatment. The subtitle of this site’s homepage says past and present; in educating our young students we need to stress that Indians/Native Americans/First Nations are TODAY and not just yesterday’s history!   Too often we focus on history only.

Authority

I also like the sections labeled “How we know”; it is a good example of information literacy, providing clear authority for the information provided. 

The teacher as learner

All teachers should spend some time on the site educating themselves!  Face it – what we learned in grade school ourselves needs updating!  The site is best for fourth grade and up because of reading level of the material, but teachers of younger grades might want to pick and choose from the many multi-media resources on the site to use with students.  

Life long learners

“Learning is not a product of schooling but the lifelong attempt to acquire it.” Albert Einstein (1879 – 1955) Physicist & Nobel Laureate

We are not supposed to be teaching, but instead creating learners… this web resource is a perfect vehicle.

Spend at least one extended time period this school year allowing the students to use this site to learn what they wish about Indians of the Midwest.  Let them satisfy their own curiosity (stage one in life-long learning). 

To keep them focused ask them to make brief notes on five things they learned that were interesting or new information to them.  Take the last five minutes and have them exchange notes.  No grading necessary!  If you must, give a participation/focus grade.

Or start the web resource session by having the class generate individual or group questions.  What do they want to know about Native Americans in the Midwest (past or present)?  What do they think they already know? Have them predict what they will learn.  Then let them explore the site, reading what they wish rather than strict information seeking.  (A great deal of what I, myself, learn is along the information seeking highway whether or not I reach my information destination.) Leave time to come together afterwards to discuss whether they encountered answers to the questions or gained new knowledge.

Harry Wong says that good teachers steal – and this idea was stolen… ahem!  I mean evolved from an ISLMA listserve discussion  I followed recently on creating inexpensive shelf dividers.

I had previously rejected the idea of shelf dividers because of the expense and I wasn’t crazy about homemade looking stuff ruining the professional aura of my collection.  I was also concerned about the valuable shelf real estate they would take up.  But the listserve discussion started me thinking and I began looking around at what I had available …

Why add shelf dividers?  Today’s students are very visual – young students have ALWAYS been very visual.  My shelving is labeled at the top of each section but students do not always make the connection.  Having something on the shelf where it divides from A authors to B authors, for example would help students understand the organization in a more concrete way.  (And it won’t hurt my aide or I when we are re-shelving, either!)

Living Green:  The idea that I stole and adapted to do this is very green!  We took old primary textbooks and primary reference books slated for recycling and created a plain white paper jacket for them using tabloid size paper.  I created 26 labels for the fiction section, A-Z, and ten for the non-fiction section, 000-900.  Then we covered the paper jackets and labels with our usual Mylar cover.

I am satisfied with the professional look of the dividers.  Since we chose slim volumes they do not take up much real estate.  So we have divided… we shall see if there is any conquering…

After raving about Hunger Games on these pages (http://read2me2.edublogs.org/?s=%22hunger+games%22&x=0&y=0) I cannot believe I am saying that “The Candy Shop War” by Brandon Mull is too violent… but it is.  The plot is juvenile, lacking the subtle social commentary of Collin’s novels.  The novel with all its candied plot finally referenced “Hansel and Gretel” but it was a direct reference out of one of the character’s mouths rather than the plot device that it could have been.  The characters are flat and just plain brainless a great deal of the time.  Occasionally Mull gives them an intelligent thought, but it is obviously contrived and deliberate rather than woven into the character.  And while the characters are flat, the villains are even flatter.  (One, the Flatman, is literally flat – a horrifying former piece of humanity floating in a solution of water and formaldehyde.)  There were so many villains and alter-egos that I was confused by the end.

This narrative’s basic plot is a war between wizards, where children are the pawns – fed magic candy and then sent to steal and destroy.  The violence is mindless and not countered with anything redeeming.  Laborious and contrived, I had to force myself to finish this novel… and it took me a week and a half to do it.  The good news is I had several unplanned naps.

Sickly, not sweet.  Do not consume!

PS –  My friends often say, sarcastically, “Tell us what you really think”.  And I regret that I’ve posted two scathing reviews in a row.  But… I tell you what I really think.  Here is hoping the next novel in my stack to read is better!

Orphan Annie meets Hugo Cabret.

Hard knock life kid, Hope Scroggins, dreams of finding her sister Honey who was deliberately abandoned by their parents.  Hope ends up at the WWMB (World Wide Memory Bank).  The WWMB, which stores and sorts all memories, is at war with the CSG (Clean Slate Gang) which advocates forgetting.

Coman’s gently contrived novel is as sweet as the CSG lollipops that clog the WWMB Receptor, but it never quite loses the feeling of trying too hard.  The narrative is a thinly veiled social commentary on parenting which will be lost on the intended audience and is not clever enough for young adult or adult readers.

And while Rob Shepperson’s drawings evoke memories of Brian Selznick’s “The Invention of Hugo Cabret” the publisher was just dreaming.  ”The Memory Bank” has not woven the illustrations into story as skillfully as did Selznick.

Selznick spoke at the Illinois Reading Conference shortly after winning his Caldelcott for “…Hugo Cabret”, sharing that Hugo began as a full novel.  Brian then combed through the narrative for sections which could be visually driven and translated those into the illustrations.  ”The Memory Bank” appears to have tried the same approach, but it misses the mark.

I join the CSG  for this one - forgettable.