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

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.