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

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.