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Day 25 of Summer 2019 #Bookaday Challenge: Mostly the Honest Truth

8/18/2019

Vlog Transcript Below

Slide 1: Hi, Everybody! Welcome back to the #bookaday challenge. I’m Kate Narita, author of 100 Bugs! A Counting Book and fourth grade teacher. Today I will be talking about Mostly the Honest Truth by Jody Little.

Slide 2: Mostly the Honest Truth is an excellent book to have in your classroom because the heroine is brave and generous, it features an alternative learning environment and alternative learning styles and at the end of the book, the main character, Jane, redefines what the word family truly means.

Slide 3: Mostly the Honest Truth really reminded me of Lindsey Stoddard’s Just Like Jackie. In Just Like Jackie, the main character, Robbie, lives with her grandfather and it’s always been the two of them. That’s very similar to the main character, Jane, in Mostly the Honest Truth. She’s always lived with her dad, and it’s been the two of them. Robbie’s grandpa is suffering from dementia, and it’s really becoming a struggle for the two of them to live together. This is similar to Jane’s struggle in Mostly the Honest Truth. The difference is Jane’s father suffers from alcoholism, not dementia. At the end of Just Like Jackie, Robbie redefines what family means and realizes that the two of them is no longer enough. This is very similar to Jane’s emotional arc in Mostly the Honest Truth.

Slide 4: Another novel that Mostly the Honest Truth reminds me of is Cecelia Galante’s Stealing Our Way Home. This is a dual narrative. It alternates back and forth between the brother and sister’s point of view. Jack and Pippa are also trying to save their family. Their dad is in a lot of trouble. They’re not exactly sure what the truth is, but they know they have to uncover it. In Mostly the Honest Truth, Jane knows what the truth is, but she’s afraid to uncover it. So, there’s a really nice parallel between these two books.

Slide 5: I absolutely love the book Far From Fair by Elana K. Arnold. I use the first page every year in my writers’ workshop to teach students the magic rule of three. It’s just a phenomenal line. The main character is talking about the camper on the cover and she says that it is, “obnoxiously ugly, hideously ugly, epically ugly.” The students absolutely love that line, it sticks in their brains and then they’re able to use the magic rule of three in their writing. But the reason why this novel pairs so well with Mostly the Honest Truth is because it also features an alternative learning environment and an alternative learner.

Slide 6: In day seven, I featured Far Away by Lisa Graff and in that text set I also mentioned Gertie’s Leap to Greatness by Kate Beasley. These two novels also pair well with Mostly the Honest Truth. In Mostly the Honest Truth and Just like Jackie, those two main characters come to embrace the community around them as family. The emotional arc in Far Away and Gertie’s Leap to Greatness is different. Here, these two main characters also have a single caretaker. But instead of embracing the community around them, by the end of the novel they learn just how lucky they are to have that single caretaker.

Slide 7: Finally, I always like to include a picture book in my text set. So, I wanted to mention the classic, A Chair for my Mother by Vera B. Williams. In this book, the little girl and the community work together to buy the mother a chair that she can sit in after work. This is another example of the child and the community coming together to support the parent.

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Day 24 of Summer 2019 Bookaday Challenge: Birds of a Feather: Bowerbirds and Me

8/12/2019

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Vlog Transcript Below

Slide 1: Hi, Everybody! Welcome back to the #Bookaday Challenge. Today I will be talking about Birds of a Feather: Bowerbirds and Me by Susan Roth as well as other excellent picture books about birds that you might want to have in your classroom.

Slide 2: Birds of a Feather: Bowerbirds and Me by Susan Roth is absolutely gorgeous. The artwork is stunning and that alone is reason enough to have it in your classroom. But it’s also a great book to have in hand because you can teach your students about adaptations and how animals have adaptations to help them survive. Male bowerbirds build nests, and they place shiny objects in and around the nests to attract a mate. Of course, this helps them survive. Also, this book is a comparison between bowerbirds and the author/illustrator, Susan Roth. She explains how her hands, and when she uses the tool the tweezers, are very similar to the bird’s feet and his beak. This is an excellent way to get students thinking about how we’re not all that different from the animals that live around us. Finally, this is a great way to introduce your students to the compare/contrast text structure.

Slide 3: Melissa Stewart is the one who told me about Birds of a Feather: Bowerbirds and Me. She has also written an excellent book about birds called Feathers Not Just for Flying, and it is illustrated by Sarah Brannen. This is an excellent book as well to facilitate a discussion about adaptations. Stewart explains the different uses of various feathers. She uses similes in her text to explain that some feathers are used for sunscreen while others are used for umbrellas. This comparison to everyday objects makes the text very accessible for readers. Lastly, Sarah Brannen’s illustrations also engage the reader because she made it look as if the book were a child’s scrapbook.

Slide 4: Another excellent book by Melissa Stewart is Melissa’a A Place for Birds. I mentioned Melissa’s A Place for series earlier this summer, but I wanted to mention it again because it’s truly an excellent resource. The main text is cause and effect, the sidebars are problem and solution, and this is also an excellent text for teaching about the author’s intent or purpose. My class has had many excellent discussions about this book.

Slide 5: Another book that mentions birds is Flower Talk by Sara Levine. Obviously the main subject of this book is flowers, not birds. However, birds are mentioned in this book. In fact, birds are attracted to red flowers which is why the background of this slide is red. This is a great book to have on hand because your students will learn how many different animals are pollinators, and they will learn how important pollinators are for a flower’s survival.

Slide 6: Another great book about birds is Hawk Rising by Maria Gianferrari and illustrated by Brian Floca. We are fortunate to have a hawk that resides around our school. Often times during the day, my students will look outside the window and see the hawk perched nearby. This book compares a girl getting up in the morning to a father hawk getting up in the morning. Throughout the day, the girl watches the hawk through binoculars, and at the end of the day the hawk brings home supper to the nest. At the end of the last school year, we also saw the hawk bring home supper to the nest. It was slightly traumatic for my class for sure, but it was a wonderful opportunity to understand how the natural world works. I think my students will really connect to this text.

Slide 7: The last book I’m going to talk about is not out yet, but it’s coming in October. It’s called Bird Count by Susan Edwards Richmond, and it’s illustrated by Stephanie Fizer Coleman. This is a really fun book to have in your classroom. Many students don’t think about bird watching in the winter. They think about it in the summer. This book introduces students to the Audubon’s Christmas Bird Count. People go out and see how many different types of birds they can count. If your students think bird watching in only available to them in the spring, summer or fall, they will definitely rethink that concept when they read Bird Count by Susan Edwards Richmond.

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Day 23 of Summer 2019 #Bookaday Challenge: Anybody's Game

8/9/2019

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Vlog Transcript Below

Slide 1: Hello, Everybody! Welcome back to the #Bookaday Challenge. I’m Kate Narita, author of 100 Bugs! A Counting Book and fourth grade teacher. Today I will be talking about Anybody’s Game by Heather Lang.

Slide 2: One of our nation’s favorite past times is baseball. I will be featuring many books that talk about baseball. The first one I’m going to start with is Anybody’s Game by Heather Lang. This is the story of Kathryn Johnston. She was the first girl to play little league baseball. This fact really interests my students because a lot of them play baseball or softball. Many of them don’t know that it’s possible to play in little league as a girl. Kathryn ends up cutting her hair and trying out with her nickname “Tubby.” She makes the team, and that’s why it’s possible for girls to play little league today if they choose. Heather has a lot of other great biographies of females in our history such as Swimming with Sharks which features Eugenie Clark (click on the title to see a photo of Heather with Eugenie) . She discovered the importance of sharks back in the 1930’s. Also, Heather wrote The Original Cowgirl which features Lucille Mulhall. My students love this book because many of them ride horses. Lucille Mulhall was the first female to ride horses competitively within the United States.

Slide 3: I also want to talk about Queen of the Diamond: The Lizzy Murphy Story. When many people think about women in baseball, they think about A League of Their Own which is a fictionalized account of the all women’s league that came into being during World War II. But the fact of the matter is there have been female professional baseball players for a long time. The first one was Lizzie Murphy. She signed with a pro team in 1922 when she was only eighteen-years-old. Also, she was so good she played in the major league’s all-star games.

Slide 4: In 1922, Edith Houghton signed with a women’s professional team in Philadelphia, called the Philadelphia Bobbies. What’s super neat about The Kid from Diamond Streest: The Extraordinary Story of Baseball Legend Edith Houghton, is that she was ten when she signed onto the team. Since so many of my students are ten, they really get a kick out of the fact that someone their age played sports at a professional level.

Slide 5: Another great series to have in your class for kids who like baseball is David Kelly’s Ballpark Mysteries. These are the first two books in the series, The Fenway Foul-Up and The Pinstripe Ghost. Currently, there are fifteen books in the series. These mysteries take place at ballparks across our nation. They’re fun, short and full of baseball facts.

Slide 6: Two other books I want to talk about today are April Jones Prince’s Jackie Robinson: He Led the Way and Gail Herman’s Who Was Jackie Robinson? These books pair nicely together. Jackie Robinson: He Led the Way is perfect for first and second grade readers. works well for third and fourth grade readers. Like Who Were the Tuskegee Airmen? Who Was Jackie Robinson? introduces your students to some of the challenges African-Americans faced before and during the civil rights era. Jackie Robinson persevered through many challenges to become the first African-American to play Major League Baseball.

Slide 7: Those two books work really well with Jackie and Me by Dan Gutman. This is not non-fiction. What happens is the main character travels back in time with baseball cards. So, you know right away your students need to be able to tell the difference between non-fiction and fiction. If you pair this novel with a non-fiction book, it’s a really interesting way to learn about the challenges Jackie Robinson had to face in order to play professional baseball. Together, all three of these books speak to Jackie Robinson’s perseverance.

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Day 22 of Summer 2019 #Bookaday Challenge: A Good Kind of Trouble

8/6/2019

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Vlog Transcript Below

Slide 1: Hi, Everybody. Welcome back to the #bookaday challenge. I’m Kate Narita, author of 100 Bugs! A Counting Book and fourth grade teacher. Today I will be talking about the novel A Good Kind of Trouble by Lisa Moore Remee.

Slide 2: A Good Kind of Trouble is a great book to have in your classroom because it highlight’s the power of team sports, it shines a light on the difficulty students have when friendships they’ve had their whole lives change and it explores the topic of racial injustice.

Slide 3: As I mentioned, A Good Kind of Trouble celebrates team sports, particularly track. The main character, Shay, makes new friends on the team and she finds a role model in her coach. The same is true for Ghost in Jason Reynold’s novel, Ghost. He, too, makes new friends and finds a role model in his coach. The neat thing is if you like Ghost and his friends, you can read three other books in the track series. I highly recommend these books.

Slide 4: Another book that A Good Kind of Trouble pairs well with is New Kid by Jerry Craft. In New Kid the main character also makes new friends and navigates a new school. It’s different because he doesn’t have any of his old friends from elementary school with him, but it’s still a nice opportunity to compare/contrast.

Slide 5: The novel A Good Kind of Trouble most reminds me of when taking into account friendships is Amina’s Voice. Amina goes to middle school with friends she’s had from elementary school. All of the sudden she realizes things aren’t the same as they used to be, and she has to navigate that change. Shay has to do the same things in A Good Kind of Trouble.

Slide 6: The reason why I most recommend A Good Kind of Trouble by Lisa Moore Remee is because it’s a good introduction to racial injustice in our society. Now some kids may have had firsthand experience with this while others have not. Whatever the case, A Good Kind of Trouble is an excellent whole-class introduction to this topic. If after introducing the topic of racial injustice and your students want to dig further, I highly recommend Ghost Boys by Jewell Parker Rhodes. I believe it has the most powerful last page in a book that I have ever read. It’s simply stunning. It took my breath away. Ghost Boys’ last page made me really think in a way that other last pages have not.

Slide 7: The last book I’m going to talk about in this text set is The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas. This is a young adult book. So only for teenagers, not for younger students; however, it takes an even more in depth look at racial injustice than Ghost Boys and A Good Kind of Trouble. Also, it’s very similar in many ways to A Good Kind of Trouble. Lots of the same themes such as friendship, and it’s really an excellent read. So, if you do have an older reader you definitely want to check out this book if you haven’t already, or maybe you’ve even seen the movie. Either way, a lot of the same themes that are in A Good Kind of Trouble are also in The Hate U Give.

Slide 8: Lastly, I want to talk about one other aspect of A Good Kind of Trouble that I really enjoyed. There’s a time in the novel where Shay’s mother goes to school and sticks up for Shay’s actions. Her mother confronts the school principal. This was a very powerful moment for me. When I was in middle school there was a teacher who mistreated me, and when I told my mom, she went into school and stuck up for me. I’ll never forget that. Reading that scene in A Good Kind of Trouble made me feel as if I were twelve again.

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Day 21 of Summer 2019 #Bookaday Challenge: Run Wild

8/4/2019

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Vlog Transcript Below

Slide 1: Hello, Everybody! Welcome back to the #Bookaday Challenge. Let’s go ahead and get started. Today, I will be talking about Run Wild by David Covell and other books that celebrate the joy of spending the whole day outside.

Slide 2: Run Wild by David Covell is a joyous celebration of summer, it’s language is lyrical and lovely, and the crayon accents in the illustrations really pull children in. Since this whole book is a poem, you can easily add it to your poetry basket. So, not only can you use the book when school starts to talk about the joy of summer, you can also keep it in your library all year long as an example of a beautiful poem.

Slide 3: My book, 100 Bugs! A Counting Book also celebrates being outside all day long. It starts with Suzanne Kaufman’s gorgeous end papers that start with the sun rising and ends with stunning end papers of the sun setting. It’s also a poem written in iambic pentameter. So, you can add it to your poetry basket. Finally, there’s some really fun, informational scientific back matter about the ten different plants and insects shown in the book which engages older readers as well as younger readers.

Slide 4: Another book I want to recommend is Twilight Chant written by Holly Thompson and Illustrated by Jen Betton. Jen Betton’s illustrations are gorgeous. They actually make you feel as if you’re experiencing twilight when you’re reading the book. It’s also a poem. So, you can keep this book in your poetry basket all year long. Lastly, there’s some excellent scientific back matter about twilight.

Slide 5: One of my favorite all time books that celebrates the joy of being outside together is All the World by Liz Garton Scanlon and illustrated by Marla Frazee. Once again this is also a poem that you can keep in your poetry basket. A lot of times people look for poetry collections to put in their baskets and that’s fantastic. But if you look inside picture books you can often find a gorgeous poem within the book to enrich your collection.

Slide 6: A new book out this year is If I Was the Sunshine by Julie Fogliano, illustrated by Loren Long. They are a stunning team. What Julie does here is she takes two inanimate objects and imagines what they might say to one another as well as what they might call one another. This book reminds me a little bit of Margaret Wise Brown’s The Runaway Bunny. The difference being that the two inanimate objects are not trying to part from one another. They are celebrating the existence of each other.

Slide 7: Finally, I want to talk about Evan Turk’s An Ode to the National Parks: You Are Home. This is a stunning book that I will definitely be buying for my classroom. We teach weathering and erosion each year, and many (probably all!) of our national parks were formed by weathering and erosion. So, we can talk about the different types of weathering and erosion while looking at the pictures in this book. This book is also an excellent book to have for your writer’s workshop because he repeats the phrase, “you are home,” over and over again. This is an excellent book for discussing the power of repetition, theme and the author’s intent. Finally, there is a great map of the United States in the back of the book that is labeled with the different national parks. So, your students can brush up on their geography as well.

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Day 20 of Summer 2019 #Bookaday Challenge: Silver Meadows Summer

8/1/2019

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Vlog Transcript Below

Slide 1: Hi! My name is Kate Narita. I am a fourth grade teacher and the author of 100 Bugs! A Counting Book. Today is day twenty of my 2019 #Bookaday Challenge. I will be talking about Silver Meadows Summer by Emma Otheguy.

Slide 2: Silver Meadows Summer is a great book to have in your classroom because it talks about the magic of nature and the importance of land conservation. It looks at the melding of two cultures, and it celebrates the power of poetry.

Slide 3: Me and Marvin Gardens by Amy Sarig King is another novel that looks at the magic of nature and talks about the importance of land conservation. One major difference between these two novels is that A.S. King takes a good, hard look at our negative impact on the environment—specifically our consumption of plastic.

Slide 4: I also mentioned that Silver Meadows Summer looks at the melding of two different cultures. I talk about this more in days eight and twelve of the summer 2019 #bookaday challenge. Some of the books I mention there are Pie In the Sky by Remy Lai, Inside Out and Back Again by Thanha Lai and Other Words for Home by Jasmine Warga. If you want more books that look at the melding of two cultures, please check out days eight and twelve.

Slide 5: What Emma Otheguy does masterfully in Silver Meadows Summer is she uses poetry to show the melding of two cultures. The main character, Caro, and her father have a favorite poem and it’s Caminante, No Hay Camino by Antonio Machado. He was a Spanish poet who lived in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Loosely translated the title means Traveler, There Is No Path. She juxtaposes this poem with Robert Frost’s The Road Not Taken. “Two roads diverged in the woods, and I took the one less traveled.” It’s really a masterful use of poetry to show that two cultures come together as one in the character. The main character is able to find her own way not by taking the two paths that Robert Frost talks about, but by finding her own path which is what Antonio Machado is telling the reader to do.

Slide 6: I always like to talk about picture books in my text sets, and I wanted to explore this theme of the power of poetry. There is an excellent book that came out in 2018 called Ode to an Onion by Alexandria Giardino. It is a gorgeous book about Pablo Neruda, one of the poems he wrote, and his relationship with his friend, Matilde. This book has a special place in my heart because I lived for ten months in Santiago, Chile. While I was there, I visited Neruda’s house. That’s me in 1994 standing outside Pablo Neruda’s house (photo in vlog). What I love about this book besides the love for Pablo Neruda is the end papers. They look like the skin on an onion, and they’re absolutely gorgeous.

Slide 7: It would be neat to have Ode to an Onion alongside this book, A River of Words, which is a biography of William Carlos Williams. He wrote one of my favorite poems, “This is just to say I have eaten the plums that were in the icebox…” I absolutely love that poem. It would be a nice compare contrast to use these two biographies to study two very different poets.

Slide 8: It’s a good idea to have modern poetry in the classroom. I love When Green Becomes Tomatoes: Poems For All Seasons by Julie Fogliano. It’s a great book to have because there are poems for different dates all throughout the year. So, this is a book you can use in your classroom in every season.

Slide 9: Another wonderful, modern poet is Amy Ludwig Vanderwater. Silver Meadows Summer made me think of her book Forest Has a Song. It highlights the magic of being in a forest. I also want to point out her book that is specifically for teachers called Poems Are Teachers: How Studying Poetry Strengthens Writing in All Genres. This is an excellent title. It’s really fantastic because she has a different poem, by a different author, for several different writing topics. So, if you’re looking for a way to spice up your writer’s workshop or your looking for a way to integrate poetry into your teaching, I highly recommend that you purchase Poems Are Teachers. The other excellent benefit about Poems Are Teachers is she includes all these different poems by all these different authors. If you don’t have a lot of poetry in your library, you can expose your students to several different wonderful authors just by purchasing Poems Are Teachers.

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Day 25 of Summer 2019 #Bookaday Challenge: Mostly the Honest Truth

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Day 24 of Summer 2019 Bookaday Challenge: Birds of a Feather: Bowerbirds and Me

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Day 23 of Summer 2019 #Bookaday Challenge: Anybody's Game

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Day 22 of Summer 2019 #Bookaday Challenge: A Good Kind of Trouble

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Day 21 of Summer 2019 #Bookaday Challenge: Run Wild

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Day 20 of Summer 2019 #Bookaday Challenge: Silver Meadows Summer

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