Day 21 of Summer 2019 #Bookaday Challenge: Run Wild

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.