It's Monday! What Are You Reading? 12.07.2020

This weekly post comes from Jen at Teach Mentor Texts

 and Kellee and Ricki at Unleashing Readers.  

It's a great source to find new books to use with your students.

Last Week's Adventures

Don't miss these nonfiction picture books that celebrate people in the arts!

Picture Books

Prairie Days

written by Patricia MacLachlan

illustrated by Micha Archer

I love Micha Archer's work and I think this book has some of her best.  Her multilayered pieces look beautiful in the outdoor illustrations that fill this book.

This seems like a love letter to MacLachlan's younger days, growing up on a farm, in a small town, and living on a large area of land.  Both wildlife and the joys of living in a small town are celebrated in this book.

I looked up where MacLachlan was born and it said Wyoming.  While you can sense her joy when writing about what it was like to grow up this way, I also wonder where you draw the line... what is the proper way... to acknowledge the original land dwellers, which Native American tribe first lived on the land when talking about a time in the past.  Is it ok to leave it out, or should it be woven into the story somehow?  Honestly asking and wondering.

Gurple and Preen: A Broken Crayon Cosmic Adventure

written by Linda Sue Park

illustrated by Debbie Ridpath Ohi

What kind of thinker are you when things go wrong unexpectedly?  Do you panic and look at the negatives?  Or are you someone that works at the problem, a little at a time?

Robots Gurple and Preen have crash landed and their cargo (crayons) have spilled everywhere.  While Gurple keeps breaking crayons and random objects, animals, and eventually people, come out, it's Preen who is able to see how everything can work together to leave again.

Featuring Ohi's broken crayon art, this book has a good message that will get kids thinking about how they problem solve.

I Will Dance

written by Nancy Bo Flood

illustrated by Julianna Swaney

I really like this one because of the inclusion of a character with a disability.  It strays away from ableism because it's not about the able bodied kids helping the disabled character.  Our main character is in a wheelchair as a result of a congenital disability.  She has low lung capacity and only moves her arm and hands.  She is in a motorized wheelchair, but that has not stopped her from her desire to dance and her passion for it.  She just hasn't figured out a way to do so in a public capacity.  One of her moms finds an inclusive studio that is looking for all abilities to try out for their dance program.  Once arriving, the girl sees people of all physical abilities, including others in a wheelchair, using a walker, or a prosthetic.  Among them are able bodied dancers.  Working together and encouraged to participate and stretch to their own ability, all of the humans there find ways to dance and dance together.

Me & Mama

by Cozbi A. Cabrera

A beautiful love letter to the bond between mothers and young daughters.  I loved some of the comparisons the author used, like this one, "The clouds outside are wearing shadows.  The wind is painting the outside window with beads of water."  Just beautiful!

Stand Up! Speak Up! A story inspired by the Climate Change Revolution

by Andrew Joyner

In some ways I think this book hit the mark it was aiming for, and in other ways I think it missed it.

Joyner (author of The Pink Hat) gives us a black/gray/white illustrated story with touches of green to reflect the color associated with climate change and a story with two word phrases that encourage an "up"stander action.  

I like the color theme.  I like the idea.  But while I get the two word phrase with "up"  being the second word, the idea of climate change is probably new with a lot of young readers.  I don't think a book needs to be too wordy, but a little more information would have taught more than this book did.

Wild Symphony

written by Dan Brown

illustrated by Susan Batori

When I first heard Dan Brown was writing a children's book, I might have grimaced a bit.  I feel like that doesn't always equal out - even though you're an excellent writer of adult fiction, doesn't mean there will be the same success as a children's book author.  Especially when you're adding music and writing in rhyme!  But surprisingly, it worked!  Each page has music composed that reflects the animal on the page.  The rhymes are well written and flow.  Each animal story has a moral that goes along with it.  And there is a puzzle to solve on each page.  In order to access the music, readers need to have a device that has a QR scanner, or can go to a website, or pull up an app.  I think the music really does add a fun piece to the experience, but you do not have to listen to the music to understand the book.  I wish there had been a little more direction or hint to the puzzles at the start of the book.  The answers to the puzzles are in the app, but that was even hard to find.  Once I saw the answers, I better understood what I was supposed to be doing with the puzzles.

As you can tell, there really is a lot to enjoy with this book.  I think this works better as an individual child/grown-up read aloud than one you do with a whole class, but it does work.  Make sure you have time to really enjoy it!

The Blue Table

by Chris Raschka

While not a Thanksgiving book, it does fit in perfectly with food and gathering together.

The blue table is the focus of this book.  At first it's a place for a family to come together, and while we never see faces, we see plates and glasses and items that are often found at a table.  Then the table expands as a leaf is added to the table and more people come to gather and be thankful around the blue table.  Told in simple words and phrases, I like the idea of the table being the focus and to think about everything that does happen around a table!

I Believe I Can

written by Grace Byers

illustrated by Keturah A. Bobo

A book that reminds young readers that they can achieve their dreams and goals with hard work and perseverance.  

Sugar in Milk

written by Thrity Umrigar

illustrated by Khoa Le

Both an immigration and refugee story, both focusing on perspective.  A young girl is an immigrant in a new country.  She at first feels alone and disconnected, but then her aunt tells her a story about Persian refugees who flea to India.  At first, they are not allowed to enter the new country but after a smile, a story told without words, and a hug, the refugees are allowed to stay.  The little girl understands that in order to make friends, a smile may help.

Middle Grade

A Place at the Table

by Saadia Faruqi and Laura Shovan

I really enjoyed reading this dual-authored story that features two marginalized voices - one Pakistan American character and one Jewish character.  I thought both voices brought a different understanding to the table.  One is a brown character who often faces judgement based on the color of her skin.  The other, while being white, faces her own discrimination as a non-Christian religion character.  Too often when we read about a Jewish character it's about WWII.  I think it will be important for readers to gain a new perspective.  Exploring ideas of friendship, family, and cultural identity and belonging, this would be a great story to use for a middle school book club.

See You at Harry's

written by Jo Knowles

This was my November #mustreadin2020 book.  I have no idea how long I've owned it, just that when I bought it everyone had been raving about it for awhile.  Since it's been in my stack for so long, I knew I wanted to finally get to it.

I do think our opinions of books are influenced about what is going on in our lives when we read them.  This book is a book about grief and how it impacts one family.  Maybe reading it during COVID19 was not a solid choice.  Maybe reading it during the pandemic when we had just celebrated a holiday where I could not get together with loved ones was not the right time.  I ended up skimming through most of it just because it was such a heavy topic and that is not what I was ready to handle at this time.  

Definitely an upper middle grade read.  Jo Knowles continues to be an author I enjoy reading.

The In-Between

by Rebecca Ansari

I believe this is Ansari's sophomore novel, and I think I enjoyed it even more than her first.  Ansari's stories, which are longer in length, but will definitely pull in readers who want mystery and suspense.  This one took me a bit to fall into, but once I did, it was hard to put down.

There is a lot going on in siblings Cooper and Jess' lives - an absent-remarried-new family father, a mom who is working too hard, friendship issues, and Jess' diabetes.  When Cooper and Jess start piecing together a mystery surrounding the house across the alley, involving a very mysterious and silent girl,  they learn that the effects of the mystery may involve their own lives.  When a new friend, Gus, gets involved, it's not until the end when they see how much their lives are intertwined.

Really fun ending.  Once I got there, I could not put it down and wanted an immediate reread.  Look for this in January 2021.

Thank you to edelweiss for the advanced e-galley.

Currently Reading

Girl Giant and the Monkey King

by Van Hoang

This is a Vietnamese mythological story, told in the vein of the new Rick Riordan imprint stories.  Just getting into it, but fun so far!

Hope you're finding more time to read than me.  Mine is pieced together in weird bursts of time!  'Tis the season!