It's Monday! What are you Reading? 4/2/12

It's Monday! What are you Reading? From Picture books to YA is a meme hosted by Jen and Kellee at TeachMentorTexts. Hop on over to their blog to see what others are reading this week!  

This week I read:

I really enjoyed all of these books. I don't know what took me so long to read The Bad Beginning, but now that I have I am looking forward to reading the next book in the series. I listened to this book on CD and it was narrated by Tim Curry. He did a FANTASTIC job! I think kids would love the voices he gives to each character, especially his very creepy interpretation of Count Olaf. I read The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind on WeGiveBooks.org. It was a very inspirational story based on real events. Dead End in Norvelt was narrated by the author, Jack Gantos. This was great because he has a very funny voice and I enjoyed listening to him imitating his more youthful self. The Touble with May Amelia was very good, and I can't wait to get my hands on the original! (To see book trailers for the last two books, click here.)

This week I  will still be working on Breadcrumbs by Anne Ursu. I am also going to be starting Divergent by Veronica Roth. A could of friends and I decided to start a mini book club, and this will be our first read. Since reading the Hunger Games series, I am totally into this type of genre now and can't wait to start another highly recommended series. 

What have you been reading lately?

World Read Aloud Day 2012

This is loooooong over due! But, better late than never!

Ivan has become and instant
 favorite among the students.

On March 7th, my students had the great honor of participating in a Skype session with author Katherine Applegate. Mrs. Applegate is most recently noted for her wonderful book, The One and Only Ivan. We were reading her book as our class read aloud, so I reached out to Mrs. Applegate to see if she would be available to read to us on World Read Aloud Day. She kindly agreed to. It was wonderful! Not only did she read aloud to the students, but she also spoke with them about being an author and answered some of their burning questions. We had a great time and are so thankful to her for spending some of her valuable time with us. 






Here are some pictures form our virtual visit:

Making introductions

Mrs. Applegate shows the students another one of her books, Home of the Brave

Mrs. Applegate talks about the Animorphs series that she co-wrote with her husband. The kids were surprised to discover she wrote them!

Sharing her favorite award: One she received after a school visit.

Meeting Mrs. Applegate's muse, Lightning.

Students stood up in front of the web cam to share their questions

Talking about our favorite books!

Mrs. Applegate shares her secret to writing a good story: ask yourself "What if?"

We learned so much from Mrs. Applegate and are so appreciative of her agreeing to Skype with us on such an important day. It was hard to tell who was more excited that day, me or the kids. Afterall, it was MY first time meeting an author face-to-face, too! 

It's Monday! What are you Reading? 3/26/12

It's Monday! What are you Reading? From Picture books to YA is a meme hosted by Jen and Kellee at TeachMentorTexts. Hop on over to their blog to see what others are reading this week!  

Here are the books I read this week:

Here are the books I am working on:

I am reading Breadcrumbs by Anne Ursu, and listening to the audiobook of The Touble with May Amelia by Jennifer L. Holm. This is Holm's follow up novel to Our Only May Amelia, which I have not yet read. However, from what I can tell, you do not necessarily need to read one before the other. Breadcrumbs would make and excellent read aloud from what I can tell. A mixture of realistic fiction and fantasy.

Both books that I am currently reading are very good so far, but I will tell you more about them when I finish!

What reading adventures did you take this past week, and which ones will you venture into next?

New Discovery: Pic Lit!

This week, my kids used a really cool site I discovered (thanks to Twitter)! The site is called Pic Lit. There, you can search a wide variety of inspirational photos and create sentences (or paragraphs) that appear right on top of the photos. What I really like is there are two ways of doing this:

1) A drag and drop with provided words for those writers who need some inspiration


OR


2) A freestyle for writing virtually anything


Since this was the first time my kids had used the site, I just had them write what came to their minds when they say the picture. Here are some of the results:

I told them not to worry about spelling or capitalization this time, so excuse our errors. I just wanted them to be inspired. As I have thought more about this site, I feel like there are TONS of possible uses in the classroom. Some of these include:

• writing a full poem with the picture as a background
• collecting favorite book quotes and writing them into pictures that match
• writing sentences using sensory and figurative language
• writing sentences about "life" and life lessons
• writing themes of books

I needed to create a log in, and then I used our class name as the "Pen Name." When the kids log in, they log in as me, but they are all able to log on simultaneously. There isn't a print feature, so you can have them email you the pictures and then copy and paste the images into word if you want to print them. I use a program called MSWSnap to take pictures of them from the site and then save them. Do what works best for you. 

How do you think you might use Pic Lit in your classroom?

Great Twitter Chat!

My teacher buddy, David Etkin, shared something marvelous on Twitter the other day: 


Reading Partnerships


I was so intrigued by the idea, that together we cooked up the idea of a Twitter chat to discuss this innovative teaching tool. We came up with the hashtag #RdgPartners and jumped right in! 


Click here to see the Google document archive of our first ever #RdgPartners chat!