Bookivore

Summer Lessons -- One Idea

2011-05-25T12:58:00.005-05:00

I sat down and talked with my two oldest to get some rough structure ideas for the summer. We settled on having a library day (Mondays look good for this and help start the week out with new reading material), some pool time, some cleaning time (my idea, of course), some sustained silent reading, and some art time.

Art time?

I had to do a little searching because while Bookivore loves Art, she hates Crafts. So I was looking for something that fell more under Art and less under Cut-Paste-and-Glitter. What I found was a gem of a site that offered me projects based on actual artists (you know -- people who get paid to make art)or on artistic principles.

Woot Woot!

It's called -- appropriately -- Art Projects for Kids, and I love that all the projects have been classroom tested. Some projects need a template, which may only be available for a small fee, but most are free. FREEEEEEE!

Another nice feature is that the projects mostly require stuff you're likely to have at home or can get easily at a local craft store -- paint, oil pastels, chalk. One or two require fancy art stuff like gesso, but there's enough there that you can just skip those and find something else to do. We're going to focus mainly on drawing and painting. As a bonus, some projects upcycle old CDs and CD cases or old magazines.

To make this relevant to the books we're reading, I may adapt some of the projects to include objects or places we're reading about. Or I might just have them write about their art -- the perfect double bonus.

Summer starts in T-minus 3 days and counting!

Summer Reading Programs -- Free Books!

2011-05-16T10:09:00.004-05:00

Where did Bookivore go? Not far, but my life was so crazy-busy this winter/spring that I was forced to take a hiatus. Sorry, peeps. I just could.not.do.it.all.

But I'm back, though maybe not as frequently, and I want to remind everyone that summer is literally right around the corner. Take advantage of these free programs to score some new books for your kids and build their reading skills into the bargain.

Half Price Books Feed Your Brain .

THIS PROGRAM HAS CHANGED: It's for kids 14 and under. Kids need to read 15 minutes a day during June and July. Parents total weekly reading numbers and initial. When kids reach 600 minutes, they can go into the store and trade their logs for a $5 coupon. Not a rewarding as in previous years, but still a worthy goal. Starts June 1, ends July 31, 2011.

Barnes and Noble Summer Reading 2011 Imagination Destination:

This program has not changed. Kids download a reading log and read 8 books. They can bring their book logs into the store and choose a free book from their list of freebies. Runs from May 24 to Sept. 6, 2011. I looked very carefully and could not find either an upper or a lower age limit, but the book choices range from 1st through 5th grade, so that may be the assumption. In the past, the expectation has been that kids will read the books themselves, so kindergarten is probably the lower limit.

Borders/Waldenbooks Summer Reading Challenge:

THIS PROGRAM HAS CHANGED. If you still have a Borders or a Waldenbooks near you, this is another option. Our store is closing because of the company's recent bankruptcy announcement, so my kids can't do this one. Kids 12 and under read 8 books, then bring completed logs into a Borders or Waldenbooks and can save 50% or more on "selected items." These are listed on the worksheet, which you can download here. May 26 - Aug. 1, 2011.

I'll be back later this week with some ideas for summer activities with kids.

Best Books of 2010? Part Deux

2011-01-06T01:10:00.001-06:00

Yesterday I reviewed the first half of Amazon's picks for Best Children's Books of 2010. Today we finish the list. If you like, you can look at the whole Amazon list here, and of course you can read my earlier post on the first 5 books on the list.

Brontorina, by James Howe. I like this one. Brontorina is trying something that may well not work out -- that takes some courage. The other children are portrayed as helpful and encouraging -- something all children need help being from time to time. The illustrations do a lovely job of conveying just how big Brontorina is, filling the page with her, even to the point that parts of her are off the edges and not visible to the reader. And the problem is resolved not when Brontorina changes, but when everyone around her adapts to her differences. A nice selection.

Ladybug Girl at the Beach, by David Soman: This one gets only a tepid response from me. I know some people are enchanted with this series, but it's a "meh" for me. One book about Ladybug Girl was enough, I think. A fourth book seems too much. Sorry, this one's an SMP (Shameless Marketing Plug).

Of Thee I Sing: A letter to my daughters, by Barack Obama: Well, if it's not an SMP, it's certainly an SPP (Shameless Political Plug), but for all that it's actually kind of a nice book. The illustrations are gorgeous, always a good thing, and the subject matter -- all the qualities the writer either sees in or wants for his children, exemplified by Americans of the past. Children are introduced to Georgia O'Keefe, Billie Holliday, Cesar Chavez, Helen Keller, George Washington...it's wonderfully multi-cultural, historical, even inspirational. For older kids, through 3rd grade.

Three Little Kittens, by Jerry Pinkney: Pinkney has been around quite a while, and has tackled classic fairy tales and nursery rhymes before. He's also a Caldecott Medal Winner for his 2009 The Lion and the Mouse, so anything by him packs a lot of talent and expertise. That's why I feel kind of guilty panning this one. The illustrations, normally a highlight in Pinkney's work, fell flat for me. Yes, they're lush, but they somehow looked like he was channelling Jan Brett and the fusion didn't quite work for me. And frankly, as nursery rhymes go, The Three Little Kittens is one of the more annoying ones out there, so for me this whole volume fell flat. Not an SMP, but not, for me, worth a mention on a top 10 list.

Dog Loves Books, by Louise Yates: I'm a sucker for book lovers and this one had me about 3 pages in. Dog does love books -- he loves the smell of them, the feel of them, he loves everything about them. He loves them so much, he decides to open a bookstore. This is a simple story with whimsical, soft watercolor illustrations that capture the imaginative journeys books can take us on. It will appeal to younger children, and maybe even encourage them to love books like dog does.

So there you have it: My highly opinionated take on Amazon's Best Books of 2010.

Best Books of 2010?

2011-01-05T01:03:00.006-06:00

Amazon sends me these lists occasionally -- mainly because I spend enough there to support a small, third-world village -- and occasionally I find those lists helpful and interesting. More often, though, I find them to be shameless plugs for the endless spinoffs and sequels that dog the children's book industry.

Yesterday I got another one entitled Best Books of 2010. These are Amazon's editors' picks for best kids books of 2010. Again, it's a list that looks like a mixture of careful consideration and marketing strategy. There are three entries that are sequels, so only 70% of the list is new stuff, some by established authors and some by relative newcomers.

You can view the list on Amazon's Editor's Picks for Children's Picture Books.

Here's my humble take on it:

Art and Max, by David Wiesener: Yes. Wiesener's artwork makes this one a good choice. He's an established author with really innovative illustrations. Love the lizards, love the focus on art, love the gorgeously illustrated story. Deserves a spot on the list.

Olivia Goes to Venice, by Ian Falconer: I loved the first Olivia book. I liked the second, I liked the third, I liked, mildly, the Christmas book, and then I got a little saturated with Olivia and have had no real desire to learn more about her exploits. There's been so much Olivia that this one doesn't really break new ground or offer anything in the way of freshness. Sorry. This one's a Shameless Marketing Plug (SMP)

The Quiet Book, by Deborah Underwood, illustrated by Renata Liwska: Yes, Yes, Yes! This is a sweet, achingly simple (in the best possible way) book that shows different kinds of quiet. From "Sleeping sister quiet," to "First look at your new hairstyle quiet," this one is beautifully complimented by Liwska's soft paintings. Excellent for toddlers and young children.

City Dog, Country Frog, by Mo Willems, illustrated by Jon Muth: Here's a pair of established writer/illustrators collaborating on a lovely story about a dog and a frog that become friends. Later, when frog is gone (read: dies) dog remembers him and befriends another. It's for younger kids and may offer a nice way to talk about emotional losses with children as they identify with the animals in the story. Deserves to be on the list.

A Bedtime for Bear (Bear and Mouse) by Bonnie Becker: This one is a sequel to Becker's A Visitor for Bear, but I think it deserves a spot on the list for two reasons. One, it's only the second book in the series and has not reached the point of over-saturation like Olivia, and Two, the chracter of Bear cracks me up. I love that he states things so firmly, so categorically, and that his firmness masks a lot of insecurity. He is pitch-perfect, as is his funny relationship with Mouse, who sees through the insecurity and helps Bear navigate his fears.

This post is so long, that I am going to review the second half of the list in my next post. Stay tuned!

Bookivore Takes a Breather

2011-01-04T09:46:00.004-06:00

Where has Bookivore been?

December turned out to be wall-to-wall crazy, so I took a little hiatus during which I made cookies, attended Christmas programs, saw the Nutcracker, wrapped more presents than I could count, listened to my kids play Christmas carols on the piano, spent time with extended family, and dug my way out of this on Christmas Day:

It truly was going to be just a quick break -- like a week or so, but then I caught something that was suspiciously like pneumonia, though no one at my doctor's office called it that. Whatever it was, it flattened me for a while and that put an end to my blogging ambitions.

But, my kids went back to school yesterday and I finally have time (and healthy lungs) to take a breath and think about books again. We/they/I did a lot of reading over break and I am ready to rock -- but not until tomorrow.

See you then!

A Quick Christmas List for 2010

2010-12-06T01:27:00.000-06:00

Bookivore and Mr. Bookivore learned early on that it was impossible (and fruitless) to compete with grandparents in the toy-giving department, so we began giving books to our nieces and nephews instead. When our own kids came along, we found there were always books we wanted to get for them, so why not save them for Christmas and dilute the river of toys a little with some quality literature? After all, every book you buy is one less toy that will break or end up at Goodwill.

So here's the breakdown for 2010:

The Lost Hero: two copies of this for our tween nephew and niece. Hardbacks of this one are reasonable through Amazon. I also saw them at Costco for about the same price.

The Strange Case of Origami Yoda: for my 11 year old nephew. Should be a hit.

Maximum Boy books: a new old series that my 7 year old recently discovered. 11 year old Max Silver accidentally becomes a superhero and has fast paced, silly adventures saving the planet. Humor that is a bit more sophisticated than Captain Underpants (but not much).

Down, Down, Down and Sisters and Brothers: We love Steve Jenkins books and these are two fairly recent ones. Informative text, beautiful collage art. These are for my 7 and 4 year olds.

Ingo: for my 13 year old niece. Loved the dark tone of this mer-people tale.

Hunger Games series: for my 16 year old nephew. He's a total omnivore when it comes to books and has been trying to get these from the library and failing. Not sure if we'll be getting him Mockingjay, but the first two for sure.

Sabotaged: for my 9 year old daughter. She began the Missing series and really likes it, so book three is going to make an appearance under our tree.

The Girl Who Could Fly: this one for my 11 and 13 year old nieces. 11 year old Piper McCloud discovers she can fly, just before she's packed off to a school for special kids called I.N.S.A.N.E. -- nothing ominous in that, right? A gem of a book.

Bobby Vs. Girls (Accidentally): for my 9 year old daughter. She is very into humorous writing now, so this one should work. Fourth-Grade Bobby Ellis-Chan is sandwiched between two sisters and has a girl as his best friend, but this is not something he wants to advertise. He gets into a series of mishaps (like finding his sister's underwear static-clinging to his shirt the day of his speech) that should have my daughter rolling.

The Case for Christ for Kids: my daughter specifically requested this one, so I think Santa is going to bring it. I haven't read it, but if it's anything like the adult volume it should be pretty good.

The Once Upon A Time series: my 12 year old niece really likes these, so we're getting her a couple to round out her gift pile. I have not personally read any of these, but my sister-in-law speaks highly of them. There are a bunch of them, retelling both classic and lesser-known fairy tales.

Here's what I'm NOT getting:

Diary of a Wimpy Kid 5: The Ugly Truth. Although both my son and his cousin want this one, I can't do it. I am not a big fan of the Wimpy Kid books -- I find the characters mean and crude and disrespectful. Sorry, no sale.

Knufflebunny Free: I loved the first two Knufflebunny books, but this one just jarred me. I realize the author is trying to show the passage of time by giving the parents in the story new hairstyles and such, but I found the change really hard to swallow. Hmmmm....maybe I'm more of a toddler than I thought.

Next week is the start of the Scholastic Warehouse Sale, so I may add a few things to my list if I hit some good deals (okay, who are we kidding -- I will almost certainly overbuy in the the book department. Don't judge me). You can check out last year's recommendations for seasonal books if you like and you can check Scholastic's website for a warehouse sale near you.

The Strange Case of Origami Yoda

2010-12-02T01:06:00.001-06:00

The big question: Is Origami Yoda real?
Well, of course he's real. I mean, he's a real finger puppet made out of a real piece of paper.
But I mean: Is he REAL? Does he really know things? Can he see the future? Does he use the Force?
Or is he just a hoax that fooled a whole bunch of us at McQuarrie Middle School?

So begins The Strange Case of Origami Yoda, by Tom Angleberger. And the central question, of whether Origami Yoda really knows things revolves around his "animator," the school's oddest kid, Dwight. The argument is simply that Dwight is too weird to give good advice, otherwise he wouldn't be so weird, right? And yet Tommy and his friends Kellen and Harvey begin tracking Origami Yoda's patients -- or victims -- to see whether he is the real deal or not.

This book brings up a number of middle school issues -- the kid who cries in P.E., the kids with the awful nickname, the kid dealing with an embarrassing crisis, the kid who wants to see an R-rated movie his parents have nixed, the boy who likes the girl who might not like him -- each handled by Origami Yoda. It's nicely done, all woven neatly into the mystery of Origami Yoda, which makes it more factual and less melodramatic than it might have been.

I think this one will play equally well with boys and girls, but especially with boys for a couple reasons. There's the obvious Star Wars theme, which will appeal to boys, it's loaded with doodles ala Wimpy Kid, and the main characters are all boys. Each chapter is a first person account by Tommy or one of his friends; a few are also by girls they know, but most of the story is told by boys. This would make an excellent Christmas gift for 7-12 year olds on your list, especially if they're boys.

The writing style is easier than I expected: Accelerated Reader puts it at a 4.7 (4th grade and 7 months) which seems about right. My 7 year old and my 9 year old read it over the holiday weekend and both really liked it. They especially liked the instructions at the back of the book for folding your own Origami Yoda. Having spent last Saturday folding little paper Yodas, I can offer you this advice if you find yourself in a similar situation: start with half of an 8.5 x 11 sheet of paper cut or torn neatly to a 5.5 x 8.5 rectangle, then follow the approximate proportions shown in the diagrams instead of the measurements as they didn't actually work that well. The author's website offers instructions for folding an origami Yoda like the one on the cover if you're up for a challenge.

Get this book you must. Enjoy it you will.

The TV Experiment

2010-11-29T01:16:00.002-06:00

This post is a confession.

We here at Casa Bookivore do not, in fact, sit around and read to each other all day long. And lately, the lure of the Electronic Babysitter has been strong, so there's been way too much TV watching than is good for young brains (old ones either, come to that).

So just before Thanksgiving, we began the TV Experiment. We weren't going to do the whole binge-purge thing: an all-or-nothing approach didn't seem like a good way to teach our kids about moderation. Instead, we decided to be intentional with our TV watching. No more TV on as a kind of technicolor background noise, no more sliding unmonitored from program to program until we'd realize with a guilty start that the kids had been watching TV for 4 hours.

We started with breakfast. My littlest one likes to watch the PBS morning slate of shows -- about an hour and a half's worth -- while eating her oatmeal. Tuesday morning, we got up and just did. not. turn. on. the. TV.

No one really noticed, maybe because departures from routine are always kind of cool for a while. The older two even broke out a game of Stratego before school. Board games, cooperative play...things were looking very good.

Baby noticed on Wednesday that the TV still wasn't on for breakfast. Could we have it on please? No, was my gentle reply. Let's look at the new Your Big Backyard magazine instead. Your brother will help read it to you. And he did.

We have been doing this for 5 days now, and my children have done the following things: built an elaborate 3-room fort in the dining room, cleaned when I asked them to, painted together for a solid hour, read to the baby, made origami Yodas, helped set the table for Thanksgiving dinner, played card games and board games with each other, played with the dog, practiced their piano lessons and played the piano for fun, picked up their rooms, got out toys they haven't played with in months and played with them, made their beds, read lots of books, and generally spread peace and joy throughout the world.

Okay, maybe not that last bit.

We have watched a bit of TV here and there: we watched Charlie Brown on Thanksgiving night, a couple football games, an hour of Sponge Bob. But every time we did, we made it an event and we turned the TV off when the show was over (or the timer went on Sponge Bob). It was all very intentional.

Not only have my children been more creative and cooperative, but I myself am calmer, maybe because I am not having to compete with the TV for their attention. The kids seem to be listening better, probably for the same reason. I like that we are in control of the TV instead of the other way around. We're going to keep things this way for the foreseeable future.

It's a good way to head into the holiday season, don't you think?

Sobering Statistics

2010-11-26T01:39:00.000-06:00

Before kindergarten:

More than 30% of low-income children have no familiarity with print -- they don't know which way up to hold a book, or where the story starts and ends, or that we read from left to right. 17% of middle-income kids and 8% of those with college-educated parents also lack this knowledge.

About 60% of low-income kids don't know the alphabet. More than 30% of middle-income kids don't know it either. That's one in three for middle-income kids.

Only a mere 6% of low-income and 18% of middle-income kids understand numerical sequence. (Stats compliments of Kappan Magazine, Nov. 2010)

What does this mean? It means that children don't all start at the same point when they begin kindergarten. And it means that a lot more kids are falling through the cracks than we used to think.

The good news is that we have the tools to fix all these problems right at home.

Read to your child every day. 20 minutes is an absolute minimum. Aim for 30 or 40. Spread it out during the day, if possible. If your child is in daycare, ask how often the daycare provider reads to the kids. Talk about how we hold books, point out which side we start reading from, look for the beginning and the end of each book.

Invest in or check out some alphabet books. Read them. Get or make some alphabet flash cards (use 3x5 index cards, write each letter on one card in clear, block form. Cut out magazine pictures of things that start with that letter, or draw a picture if you're artsy.) Sing the alphabet song -- here's a whole bunch of people singing the classic version, or watch this version on YouTube, or SuperWhy's version.

I don't say this very often, but some TV shows do a nice job of reinforcing letter and number concepts. On PBS, Sesame Street, SuperWhy and Between the Lions would be my picks for the basics. Martha Speaks and Word Girl are good vocabulary builders. On Nick Jr., Dora the Explorer does a lot with counting, so that might be a good choice. The classic Blues Clues (the Steve years) also does a lot of counting and some letter recognition. Be intentional with TV and videos here: most kid's shows aren't really all that educational in nature.

Look for counting books at the library or bookstore. Here are some titles to get you started. Count stuff. Count socks as you put them in drawers. Count your child's toes. Count plates as you set the table. Count the burgers in your fast food order. Count stoplights on the way home. Buy or make number flashcards just like the alphabet ones. Have your child put stickers on each card to represent the number shown.

Some people disagree with this, but Bookivore is a firm believer in the importance of preschool. If your state offers universal preschool, take advantage of it. Participation in a preschool program offers tons of literacy benefits, as well as social benefits. If you don't have universal preschool, consider enrolling your child for at least one year in a private program. Even if you are a homeschooler, consider sending your child to a preschool program. Keep in mind that the focus of preschool is not academics -- it's learning through play and experience -- and some of that experience is hard to provide at home, at least not to the same scope and degree to which a good preschool can. Experiences are a huge part of cultural capital. I realize this is not a home-tool per se, but it is a big predictor of whether kids will begin kindergarten with gaps, so I would not be doing my job if if didn't mention it

Keep reading to your kids. Keep offering them whatever experiences you can. We're getting there.

Thankful

2010-11-22T02:39:00.001-06:00

Bookivore is thankful for a mother and a mother-in-law who are bringing about half the feast to my house on Thursday so all I have to do is pie and turkey and rolls.

Bookivore is also thankful for a long, mild fall that allowed her to wear flip flops well into October.

Also, Bookivore is profoundly thankful for her three babies and their father. Mr. Bookivore is the keeper of my sanity most of the time.

Here are some Thanksgiving selections for your little ones (just in case you have a bucketload of spare time between now and Turkey Day).

Not strictly a Thanksgiving book, I'm Thankful Each Day is just a book about being thankful and finding things in our everyday lives to be thankful for.

Bookivore likes Alphabet books and seasonal alphabet books take advantage of a child's increased interest around the holidays to reinforce letter concepts. Check out P is for Pilgrim from your library.

For new readers, you can't beat Magic Tree House: Thanksgiving on Thursday. This is an early chapter book level on a par with Junie B. Jones. Nice story of Jack and Annie and the preparations for the first Thanksgiving.

Squanto's Journey -- after all he went through, it's hard to see why he'd want to help any Europeans do anything except jump off a cliff. But he did and this gorgeously illustrated book written by Joseph Bruchac, a Native American, tells the story. A picture book, but lots of text, so probably for older kids.

N.C. Wyeth's Pilgrims is similar to Squanto's Journey -- lots of text and beautiful artwork, this time by an American Master. Reading it is like taking a little art appreciation class.

Last, here's a pair of books from the If You...series, one about the Mayflower and the other about the first Thanksgiving. Great non-fiction for older kids, say 2nd - 5th grade. Tons of information, diagrams and detail. Excellent.

Happy Thanksgiving from Bookivore's house to yours!

Great Authors: Jean Ferris

2010-11-18T01:38:00.001-06:00

Jean Ferris is probably best known for Once Upon a Marigold and its sequel Twice Upon a Marigold, her updated fairy tales about a mind-reading princess, a runaway boy and the dwarf who cares for him, an evil queen, and the tooth fairy. However, Ms. Ferris has been around for quite a while and is deserving of a wider audience. Her fiction is wonderful for young adults and upper elementary kids -- full of humor and emotion and exiting action.

What I love most about Jean Ferris is her selection of quirky, screwball comedies. The two Marigolds fall into this category, as do Love Among the Walnuts and Much Ado About Grubstake. There's a quality to them that makes me think of John Irving (The World According to Garp); they are full of characters that in other novels would be hopeless misfits and yet in Ferris's stories they are valued individuals and important to the resolution of the story.

It's practically impossible to describe the plot of Love Among the Walnuts, other than to say that it involves a mental institution, a pair of evil uncles, and two people and a chicken who've been put in a coma. In Much Ado About Grubstake, 16 year old Arley has to outsmart a powerful businessman who is trying to buy up all the played-out mines in tiny, run-down Grubstake. That she has to manage this with a misfit collection of townspeople and reformed bad guys is part of the novel's charm.

Her comedies always bring together strange assortments of people with all their quirks and oddities and over the course of the story they manage to find family in each other. I love that about her work.

All of her comedies are suitable for younger readers -- say 3rd grade and up -- but would also work for older readers right through high school. They are great vocabulary stretchers, too, so much so that I had my 9 year old start making lists of words she wasn't sure about. She's probably added 50 new words to her vocabulary thanks to Jean Ferris.

Ferris also has some more serious novels and these would be more appropriate for a little older audience. Of Sound Mind is a fascinating book about a boy who is hearing but has been raised by deaf parents. Theo's role as family interpreter is explored even as it changes when his father has a stroke and his self-absorbed mother can't bear to take care of him. Once again, Ferris does a nice job of portraying people with all their warts, though this time with a more serious bent.

Into the Wind is part one of a three-part series which is more or less a romance for high schoolers, complete with an orphaned heroine and a dashing pirate who rescues her. It takes place in 1814, is loaded with action, and provides some historical detail, all in a wholesome, totally-appropriate-for-older-teens story (no bodice ripping here, folks).

Underground is another historical novel, this time exploring slavery. The main character, Charlotte, is a slave at the Mammoth Cave Hotel. When she discovers runaway slave sometimes come to the hotel on their way north, Charlotte has to decide whether she, too, will run away or stay with Stephen, another slave who doesn't feel the need or desire to leave. Another one which would be good for junior high and up.

Ferris does a wonderful job of creating memorable, original characters in compelling, entertaining stories. It's definitely work looking her up the next time you need reading material for your older kids.

Say What?

2010-11-15T01:36:00.002-06:00

Does anyone else feel like they've been had on this one?

Anyone? Bueller? Bueller?

I willingly bought into (and bought) the 39 Clues books because my 4th grader loved them. My husband and I read them, too, and liked them, though they weren't the same caliber as the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series. I was pleased that Amy and Dan's adventures were able to end gracefully and coherently. Good closure and all that.

But now they're back. And I am not sure how I feel about that.

Wait -- I am sure how I feel about it: I feel like they're merely trying to extend a lucrative franchise, that it's less about compelling storytelling than it is about the cha-ching. And maybe I wouldn't feel like I'm being pumped for whatever else might be in my wallet if we hadn't already bought all the 39 clues books (oh yeah, all 10).

Hmmmm. Since I have a bad habit of mouthing of without a ton of thought beforehand, I'm going to officially state that BOOKIVORE RESERVES JUDGEMENT ON THE NEW VESPERS SERIES UNTIL SHE READS THE FIRST BOOK.

Then I'm going to remind myself when I get all twitchy and miffy and such that I have RESERVED JUDGEMENT.

Right. Glad we cleared that up.

NOTE: yes, I read about the "other, powerful family" in the last 39 Clues book, but for some reason I just didn't think they'd be starting a new series so soon after the first one. But I did grasp that there would be a new series. Truly, I are not so dumb.

Literacy Bags

2010-11-11T01:03:00.002-06:00

Literacy bags go by different names: Book Bags, Story Bags, and Book Buddies are just a few. The basic idea behind them, though, is to provide story enrichment activities around a particular theme. They can be used in the home or as part of literacy centers in the classroom. In the home setting, they help you, the parent, show your child that reading is both desirable and fun.

Literacy bags work well in preschool and kindergarten settings, and even in up to 3rd grade if the activities are carefully selected. Above and below are some pictures of the contents of a literacy bag my 4 year old brought home from preschool.

The book was Down By the Bay, which is based on the Raffi song by the same name. The literacy bag contained 3 types of activities: a matching activity with rhyming words, a puzzle activity, and a second rhyming activity that went beyond the rhymes in the book. The picture above is the first rhyming activity -- matching a picture with another picture that rhymes. We had a picture of a pear and a bear, a bat and a hat, and so on.

Then we had a set of very simple puzzles -- just line drawings of animals from the story cut into pieces and laminated. The final activity, below, was to come up with some objects from around the house and then think of words that rhyme with them. The theme here was "things that rhyme."

Another bag that she brought home the following week was for the book The Gingerbread Boy. This one was even more simple -- just the book and a selection of felt pieces depicting characters or objects necessary to the story.

We used the pieces to retell the story, then we used them to sequence the events of the story -- first the Gingerbread Boy met the cow, then the horse, then the farmer, then the fox. First he sat on the fox's tail, then his back, then his head, then his nose...and we moved the gingerbread boy each time to the right position.

If you are a homeschooler, or a teacher, or a parent volunteer, Literacy Bags are something you can make yourself. You could even throw some together for vacation days and summer activities if, like me, you are desperate for stuff your kids can do when there's no school. Below are a couple of resources for creating your own bags. Neither are in print anymore, but they are readily available from Amazon and Barnes and Noble's used book sellers and from Better World Books.

Also, here's a link to a teachers' discussion board with some interesting ideas for literacy bags (also math and science bags, though that's out of the scope of this blog). Some of the discussion assumes training in teaching methods, but several entries are basic, easy-to-apply suggestions.

Literacy bags are wonderful tools to make stories come alive, to help kids think more deeply about what happened in the story, to practice retelling and sequencing, and to build those connections that increase their chances of success in school.

The Missing

2010-11-08T01:15:00.004-06:00

The Missing is Margaret Peterson Haddix's newest series and I have to say, it's a original idea. In fact, as I was reading volume one, Found, I couldn't predict what was actually going on. When the twist was revealed, I was intrigued.

Jonah was adopted as a baby. He's always known he was adopted and he is not much bothered by this fact. His parents obviously love him and Haddix pokes gentle fun at them for their perhaps overly-earnest desire to be sensitive to Jonah's adoption "issues," should he ever begin to have any. However, things begin to happen that lead Jonah to wonder just what the circumstances surrounding his adoption were. He meets Chip, a new kid in his neighborhood, and then he gets a bizarre letter. It's a simple piece of white paper that says "You are one of the missing."

Jonah dismisses it as a prank, but when Chip gets the same letter, the boys begin to wonder what it means. Jonah thinks it might have something to do with his adoption, but Chip isn't adopted -- is he? Turns out he is, and his parents have kept that fact from him his entire life. Then the boys get another letter: "Beware. They're coming back to get you."

With Jonah's younger sister Katherine, they begin to investigate where they might have come from and discover they're part of a group of 36 kids who were all adopted and who now, mysteriously, have migrated from all over the country to the community where Jonah and Chip live.

I'm going to give some spoilers here, so if you don't want to know the twist on which this whole series rests, stop reading now and go check out Found from your local library.

What is it all about? In a word, time travel. I know -- you didn't see that coming, did you? Me neither. Turns out Jonah and Chip and the other kids were kidnapped out of time in a cosmic baby-smuggling ring. And they were kidnapped because they were important personages in history -- the Princes in the Tower, Virginia Dare, Anastasia Romanoff, Chinese princesses, philosophers...people who would have died too soon but instead were "rescued" to be adopted by prestige-seeking parents in the distant future. In a bungled baby-snatch, the 36 kids were accidentally crash landed in the late 20th century -- a plane-load of babies, mysteriously appearing on a small regional runway.

Unfortunately, their kidnappings have wounded Time and while one faction of time travellers is trying to snatch them back so they can be adopted in the future, another faction is equally determined to return them to their proper times so they can die as they were meant to do. Neither option is very appealing to the kids. If they go forward, they'll be regressed to babies and have to grow up all over again. If they go back, well...they die.

Eventually, the faction trying to restore Time to its proper path wins and Chip is sent back to 15th century England with another boy, Alex, to fulfill their destiny as the Princes in the Tower. But Jonah and Katherine manage to hitch a ride with Chip and are also catapulted back to the 1400s. They are reluctantly given the chance to "put things right" in a way that heals Time and spares their friends. And that is the subject of the second book, Sent.

Haddix has laid the groundwork for a very ambitious series here -- at lot of books, if she truly plans to cover each child on the plane (one child doesn't show up for the big adoption reunion and Jonah's sister, Katherine, who is not adopted, takes her place; Alex and Chip are handled in one book, but still, there are a lot of kids to cover). That ought to be enough to keep her busy for a while. The books are well written and do a nice job of combining the time-travel elements with actual history. These are books that do a lot to illuminate events and people from the past, so they get my vote just for that.

I don't know what adopted kids will make of this series. Certainly there's a kind of wish fulfillment here, finding out that your birth parents were royalty or famous or whatever -- like everyone wanting to believe they were Napoleon or Lady Godiva or Cleopatra in a former life instead of Joe the Pig Farmer. It might pass completely below the radar for adopted kids, or it might open some doors to talk about birth parents and what you actually know about them. Jonah and Chip present different adoption experiences, with Jonah's all very open and above-board and Chip's hidden as though it were completely immaterial, or even embarassing. Chip also feels "out of place," which is put down to his being literally "out of time," but his feelings may provoke a response in some adopted kids (and bio kids as well; feeling out of place can just be a teenage condition, too). I think parents of adopted kids should read this first so they know what kinds of ideas or questions or issues might be raised by the story.

39 Clues: Into the Gauntlet

2010-11-04T01:43:00.002-05:00

Maybe I should have called this Rick Riordan Week because even though this particular book isn't authored by Riordan, the whole series and kickoff book were his brainchild. The final volume was actually written by Margaret Peterson Haddix, another well-known kid lit author, and it's a solid ending to a series that I, at least, wasn't sure could be brought to a satisfactory close.

The story picks up after Dan and Amy's Very Bad Day in Jamaica, where an innocent dies and they discover they're Madrigals. Now their task is to somehow unite the branches of the Cahill family and stop the competitive bloodshed that has spanned centuries. A pretty tall task, and one that on the face of it seems difficult for them to achieve. And I'll tell you straight out that this ending wouldn't make it in an adult book because it's a bit too pat, a bit too "now the world's a better place," a bit too Scooby Doo-ish to be completely plausible. But it's helpful to remember the target audience here: middle school and younger. For kids of that age, I think it works, and if it's a tad naive, it doesn't insult their intelligence.

The action moves to England, where it turns out that William Shakespeare was a Madrigal as well and clues at his grave point the Cahill sibs to the Madrigal stronghold. Haddix does a good job of incorporating the cryptic inscription on Shakespeare's monument at Stratford-Upon-Avon into part of a greater Madrigal code -- that actually made me smile, since that inscription has baffled scholars for years precisely because it makes no sense. Now, in a Cahill context, it does. Very neat.

This is the first book of the series where it felt like Haddix was struggling to catch the rhythm and pace of the previous books. The opening chapters are somewhat clunky and awkward, but eventually the book levels out and seems to find its mojo. Haddix moves the point of view around in the book so we see events not just through Dan and Amy's eyes but also through Hamilton Holt's, Ian Kabra's, Alistair Oh's and a surprise returnee from book one, Sinead Starling of the Starling triplets. Getting into their heads, this next generation of Cahills, allows the reader to see the shift in their attitudes, which does ultimately make the ending work.

Book 10 is a tidy wrap-up of what's basically an extended geography and history lesson. It's kind of a lightweight series, mainly action without a ton of substance, but it was a good read and one that my 9 year old really enjoyed.

The Lost Hero

2010-11-01T16:42:00.007-05:00

Okay, I know I'm a little late to the party. This book came out about a month ago and I am only just now getting around to writing about it.

But wow, what a book!

If you liked the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series, this one picks up just a few months after The Last Olympian left off, with a trio of demigods visiting the Grand Canyon. Jason wakes up on a bus, completely unsure who he is. On one side of him is Leo, his best buddy. On the other is Piper, his girlfriend. All good -- if he could just remember them.

Eventually the three are "extracted" from their field trip and brought to Camp Half Blood, where the mystery around Jason deepens further: Chiron tells him he's supposed to be dead. In Cabin One, where the children of Zeus are housed, Jason sees a picture of Thalia and realizes that she's his sister. But how is this possible? Chiron knows but is sworn not to talk about it. No less mysterious is Jason's ability to speak Latin and the odd tattoo on his arm. Who is this guy?

Add to this the fact that Zeus has closed Olympus -- no communication in, no communication out -- and Hera appears to have been kidnapped. Jason, Leo and Piper are sent on a quest to rescue the queen of heaven and hopefully prevent the rising of someone or something that will make Kronos look like a Sunday School Picnic. A nice touch is that the story is told from three viewpoints: Jason's, Leo's and Pipers. It's a good move away from the Percy Jackson series that makes this one feel more like it's a new series, albeit with many familiar characters.

Like all Riordan's books, this one's a thrill ride. Action comes thick and fast and it's a compelling read, not least because of the tantalizing clues to the mystery surrounding Jason. This one is targeted for older kids -- the heroes are 15 and act it. There are a few OMGs, but it's otherwise clean. Violence is, as before, somewhat softened by monsters turning to dust when struck. Themes are a little more serious; the infidelities the gods indulge in are touched on with a little more directness and the consequences of those infidelities are played out in people's lives to negative effect. This one might be best for 7th or 8th grade and up.

The Lost Hero is what I like best about kid lit. It's pure entertainment, well written and leaves you dying to find out more. I can't wait for the sequel, due out in the Fall of 2011, and am hoping it's just the beginning of a nice long series.

Sequencing

2010-10-28T15:08:00.007-05:00

Sequencing is the ability to put events in order -- first, middle, last. Generally this is organized by how events must occur logically, or how they actually occurred in a story.

Sequencing is something kids often need help figuring out: what seems logical to an adult is by no means obvious to a child. It is especially important that kids learn to identify the parts of a story and place them in the order they happened. The ability to sequence is necessary to almost all types of writing and to many mathematical processes as well.

Fortunately, this is easy to teach and there are many, many books out there that lend themselves to this kind of activity very well.

Here's a very short list:

The Lady With the Alligator Purse, by Nadine Bernard Westcott

There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly (or a Shell, or a Bat, or any of the bazillion variations on this traditional tale), by Various

Good Night Gorilla, by Peggy Rathman

Rabbit's Pajama Party, by Stuart Murphy

Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day, by Judith Viorst

Manana, Iguana, by Ann Whitford Paul

The Tiny Seed/The Very Lonely Firefly/The Very Quiet Cricket, by Eric Carle

Really almost any book can be used to teach this skill, but when you're dealing with preschoolers it's best to keep things simple. Here's the activity in a nutshell: Read the book, talk about what happened first, what happened in the middle, what happened last or at the end. Boom -- done.

How come none of this looks like chicken nuggets?

For older children, recipes are a good way to practice sequencing. Have your reading child read a recipe as you both prepare it OR find a favorite dish and let your child write out the steps as you cook it. Any activity that has to occur in steps can be good practice for sequencing -- just talking through the steps.

It takes all of about 2 minutes to talk through a story and point out the order of events. Give this one a try next time you read to your little ones.

Creating a Culture of Reading

2010-10-19T15:22:00.008-05:00

Part of helping kids learn to read is creating a culture of reading. Even though you read read read to them, if you, yourself, aren't much of a reader, chances are very good that your child will grow up to be someone who regards reading as something you do only when you have to.

This may seem very obvious, but the first step toward creating a culture of reading in your home is to have books. I know ---DUH. But do you have books for you? Do you have magazines you like to read? Do you ever turn off the TV at night and just read? Are there books on your nightstand or beside the bed? If your house has kid books and nothing else, eventually your kids may decide that reading isn't something grown ups do.

Do you have bookshelves full of lovely, color coordinated books? If not, call Nate Berkus and have him get you a set up like this one:

Pretty, no? But probably not used. If you pulled one out to read it, you'd mess up the arrangement. I will tell you a hard truth: people who aren't readers have cleaner houses than those of us who love books.

Get some shelves for your kids' books and then put them where the kids can reach them. Make books available whenever they want them. Make a rule that unless you're tying a tourniquet or landing the space shuttle you will drop what you're doing and read to your child when they ask you to at least once a day. Notice that I am not saying you have to do this all day long. The laundry, the cooking, these have to be done, but they're not so critical that they can't wait 10 minutes while you read Chicka Chicka Boom Boom.

Take your kids to the library or the used book store and make a big deal out of it -- act like you're going to Disneyland...or at least act like you're going to Starbucks. Anticipation is everything. Make sure you get some books for you, too. Take them to story time at your library, or at your local Barnes and Noble. Don't take them to story time at Pottery Barn Kids. Totally wrong message.

Let them catch you reading. Read a magazine while you drink coffee in the morning. Or read while you dry your hair. Turn off the TV and read in the evening (say whaaaaa?). Read a book in the afternoon just before they come home from school so they walk in and catch you reading. I often read when I'm waiting to pick up my youngest from preschool. I read in doctors' offices, I read in the bathtub, I read before bed. My kids know I read.

Pretend you're in a book club with your kids. Read the same books and talk about what you're reading. Talk about what you liked or didn't, what surprised you, what you predicted. Recommend books to each other -- kids love to do this and they love it even more when you take their suggestions. My kids are always tickled pink when they see me reading a book they recommended to me.

Make them read for information. This is something you can do when they get fairly competent: have them read recipes to you, or directions to a specific location or for a specific task, or the announcements from the church bulletin, or junk mail that looks interesting.

All these things underscore the message that reading is important in your house. If you can also convey that it's enjoyable, even desirable, you will keep your child pointed in the right direction.

Not for the Faint of Heart

2010-10-15T12:38:00.004-05:00

Or the clinically depressed. Or anyone under the age of 13, though even that may be a bit young.

Finally the library came through with my hold -- Mockingjay was mine for 2 weeks. Naturally, I put the laundry on hold, quit feeding the kids, gave my husband the cold shoulder, and read it cover to cover.

It's good. Very good. But it's dark. Very dark. I could give you a dozen spoilers, but I think the best thing to say about it is that it very accurately portrays the effects and after-effects of war -- even a necessary war such as Katniss is fighting. It does a fabulous job of showing how both sides manipulate people and information for their own ends. And a good, if depressing, job of showing the mental unraveling of those who make it through.

There's no storybook ending. There is survival, but those who manage this do so in profoundly damaged states -- both emotionally and physically. It's well done, but it pulls no punches. You're not going to read this book and come out of it feeling light and buoyant. Be aware that this one deals with themes of murder, torture, suicide, loss, abandonment and betrayal. You will come out of it sobered by the stark, unflinching portrait of war.

Because of its mature nature, I think this one should be for 13 and up, absolutely no younger. And I really have reservations about 13 year olds reading this, so in my house, everyone who wants to read it has to be in high school.

But don't miss it -- it's a brilliant, moving read.

Favorite Authors: Dav Pilkey

2010-10-12T01:26:00.001-05:00

If the name Dav Pilkey immediately conjures up the image of a superhero in his underpants, then let me be the first to show you the wonderful range of this very appealing author.

While he's perhaps best known for Captain Underpants and its ever-expanding franchise of books (Super Diaper Baby, Ook and Gluk), Pilkey (who's been around for years) has a nice repertoire of other books that are worth a look.

Let's get the comic-book and low-brow stuff out of the way first. Ricky Ricotta's Mighty Robot and all its sequels are very much like a comic book without the frames. The pictures are cartoonish, the action is very much the **CRASH!** **POW!** **BAM!** type and the storylines are like a very silly vintage Batman episode. However, the text is just right for beginning readers -- not too much on each page, a little repetitive but not boringly so, amply illustrated so pictures can help with comprehension. These are great books, especially for boys.

The low-brow would be the Dumb Bunnies. And before you ask: yes, they are dumb. They may remind you of Amelia Bedelia in that they often take things very very literally, but they have their own loopy charm. They also have some egregious nose-picking, some mild toilet humor, and the weird sight of Papa Bunny strolling everywhere in his tighty-whities. These look like picture books, but are good for Kindergarten/1st Grade kids who can read the fairly simple text and get the textual/visual jokes in the artwork. Kids love the dumb humor, especially the nose-picking.

Also under the category of dumb humor, but more along the lines of groaners, are Dogzilla, Kat Kong, The Hallo-Wiener, The Night Before Thanksgiving and Dog Breath. Some -- like Dogzilla and Kat Kong -- are full of bad puns and plays on words, but the basic stories are appealing to kids and the bad jokes aren't a deterrent for them. Hallo-Wiener and Thanksgiving are holiday tie-in books.

One of my favorites is Pilkey's Dragon series -- a very nice set of books that are at an early reader level but very colorfully illustrated. Again, they're like comics without the frames. The character of Dragon is childlike -- sometimes impulsive in a negative way (like when he makes a Christmas wreath of candy and then eats all of it) and sometimes in a positive way (like when he rescues a cat stuck in the snow and ends up adopting it). He's very sweet and likable. These are often available at Scholastic Warehouse sales if you keep your eyes open.

Another fave around here is Pilkey's Big Dog and Little Dog series. These work as read-alouds or early readers; we read this one aloud at bedtime a lot. It's the adventures of Big Dog and Little Dog, and all the ways they manage to either get in trouble (like chasing a cat that turns out to be a skunk) or help each other (like Little Dog helping find a sweater for Big Dog so they can both have one). Again, very sweet and likable. The stories are available in board book format, and in a collected edition, which is pictured here.

Then there's Dav Pilkey the Caldecott Honor author of The Paperboy, a lovely story of a boy up before the rest of the world, delivering papers. The artwork is more painterly, less comic-book, and very nice.

Last, there are a few lesser-known Pilkey books, like God Bless the Gargoyles, When Cats Dream and The Moonglow Roll-O-Rama. These are picture books for 4-8 year olds which certainly might be worth a look at your library.

I promise you there's more to this guy than potty jokes. Go check him out.

20 Minutes Worth of Ideas

2010-10-07T09:01:00.011-05:00

Remember on Monday when I said it's tough sometimes to carve out those 20 minutes for reading practice?

Well, sometimes it's also hard to carve out 20 minutes for blogging. I certainly meant to post these ideas yesterday, but Life, as they say, intervened.

So here they are, a day late but no less valuable. Twenty minutes of reading can be very intimidating for a child, so the purpose here is to mix things up a bit so they don't feel any overwhelming sense of pressure. Let me clarify that these are for kids who are school age -- 1st, 2nd, even 3rd grade. Possibly Kindergarten if your child is really smokin' hot in the reading department.

1. Partner read. Mom or Dad reads a paragraph, then the child reads a paragraph. Alternate for several minutes or for the whole time. My son often forgets where he's supposed to stop and will sometimes keep reading to the end of the page (which is a much more obvious break than a paragraph when you're 7). For short books or books with a little text on each page, you could alternate pages.

2. Popcorn read. The child begins reading and then stops at some random point. When s/he stops, s/he says "Mom, go!" and the parent picks up at that point and reads for awhile. Then the parent stops at a random point and says "Go!" to the child, and so on. This really forces the child (and the parent) to follow along as the other one is reading.

3. Stop and Go. This is for when your child is maxed out on reading aloud. The parent does all the reading, but stops at random points in the text. The child must then point to where the parent stopped.

4. Whisper read. Either the parent, or the child, or both, read the text in a whisper. Kids usually love this one because it's different -- like making pancakes in the shape of a mouse. They're still pancakes but they seem exotically different. The kids are still reading, but whispering brings it a nice sense of novelty.

5. Shout it out. If you can stand the noise, you could read the text as loudly as possible. Obviously not good right before bedtime.

6. Out Loud/In Loud. Alternate silent and out-loud reading. This is a good one as their reading skills improve. The child reads a page or a paragraph to him/herself and then says "done." The parent picks up the reading from that point out loud. Have the child alternate silent and out-loud reading -- in other words, the child shouldn't be only reading silently.

7. Mixer. Combine any or all of the above ideas. Popcorn read for a bit, then alternate paragraphs, then whisper for a while, then have the child read silently, etc.

There's no magic formula that's going to work -- it's just practice. And changing things up a bit to keep your child interested. And then more practice.

But it does work, if you put in the time.

20 Minutes a Day...

2010-10-04T02:05:00.001-05:00

That's the minimum recommended length of time a parent should read to a child, or a child should read to a parent EACH DAY to achieve reading competence and fluency. For a very young child, say under 5, that's about 4-5 books before bed. For an older child, it's usually a straight measure of time.

Twenty minutes: it doesn't seem like so much.

However, we all know that sometimes it IS hard to carve 20 minutes of dedicated reading time out of our busy schedules. Especially if you have multiple children. And especially if your kids are in activities. And especially if you like them to go to bed before you do (can I get an amen?)

When you take out the actual school day (about 7.5 hours if your kids ride a bus; longer if they go to before/after care) then remove the time needed for activities -- an hour for soccer practice, a 1/2 hour for piano or guitar, 30-90 minutes for dance or gymnastics, 2 hours for church activities; and then take out the 30-60 minutes of driving time and the 30-60 minutes for eating, brushing teeth, getting that last drink of water, etc.; and the 9-10 hours (please God) that they're actually sleeping, you're not left with a whole heck of a lot. About 2-3 hours, in little chunks throughout the day.

One of those chunks has to be devoted to reading.

And not because Bookivore says so, because it just IS so.

And yes, you have to make room for it even if the best time to do it is while you're making dinner or right about when you want to put your own feet up and just be for a little while, or you've just gotten home from work and all you can think about is what the score might be in the game you were listening to on sports radio on the way home, or when you've spent most of the day running people to and from here and there and THEY don't want to read to YOU and you have to make them although secretly you'd rather just go take a long hot bath but the teacher says they have to read to you.

Oh baby, Bookivore feels your pain.

And yes, teachers understand that we have busy lives. They have busy lives, too. But it still has to be done. Not because they're mean or unfeeling, but because it's best for your child. If you have a first or second grader, even a third grader, it's critical to their development as readers.

So suck it up, baby.

You can do this.

Wednesday I'm going to post a few ideas for those 20 minutes to help pass the time as constructively as possible.

I've Got a Crush...

2010-09-29T02:14:00.001-05:00

On Jon Berkeley.

I have blogged before about his very excellent book The Hidden Boy, so I was tickled pink to find the first book in his Wednesday Tales series, The Palace of Laughter. And I am here to tell you, it did not disappoint.

It's fantasy, but it's so fresh, and told in such a novel way...I am almost at a loss for words (and that never happens. Seriously.)

Miles Wednesday, who lives in a barrel outside the town of Larde, meets a tiger one day in the woods. A talking tiger. Who decides not to eat him. The next morning, the tiger is gone and Miles, who has run away from the orphanage (Pinchbucket House -- how's that for a name?) sneaks into the circus to see if the tiger is real or not.

Instead of a tiger, he meets an angel. A real angel named Little who's in trouble. He rescues her from the evil ringmaster, the Great Cortado, and this begins their cross country adventure. They are searching for the Palace of Laughter -- though they don't know what or where it is. They hope to find Little's angel companion, Stormpoint, but they are sidetracked by a number of odd and sometimes frankly bizarre happenings.

Love Love Love Jon Berkeley. Love his originality, love the mesmerizing rhythm of his prose. I get lost in his finely drawn, almost-modern-yet-curiously-old-fashioned-worlds. I can picture each one of his oddball characters -- from Little, whose skin glows faintly, to fat Lady Partridge, who lives in a tree house with a hundred cats, to Tangerine, the bear Miles has had since he was left at the orphanage and who is brought to life by some magic of Little's.

Seriously, give this one a try. Or read The Hidden Boy -- if you like fantasy or even just oddball fiction, Jon Berkeley won't let you down.

The Magic Half

2010-09-27T01:51:00.001-05:00

Annie Barrows (Ivy and Bean) is a good writer. I like her storytelling, love her use of detail, enjoy the way she unfolds her characters. However, Annie Barrows does one thing that gets under my skin. She has her characters swear. She doesn't do it a lot, but that fact that she does it at all annoys the heck out of me because it's always completely gratuitous.

gratuitous: lacking in benefit; uncalled for or lacking a reasonable basis. In other words, NOT NECESSARY.

Sometimes swearing is critical to the realism of the story. Mexican Whiteboy wouldn't work without a certain grittiness that the swearing adds to the characters and events. It's a tough neighborhood and it wouldn't be believable for the characters to run around saying "Fudge!" But The Magic Half would work just fine without the OMGs and the one "Christ Almighty" which marred an otherwise excellent story.

Eleven year old Miri is the middle child between two sets of twins -- "a one-in-50,000 family" her dad likes to say. But Miri feels isolated. Now in their new house, Miri finds a piece of glass stuck to the wall of her room. She looks through it and finds herself in 1935. Here she meets Molly, who has "called her" to help "set things right" -- though precisely how they're going to do that, neither of them is sure. Molly is similarly isolated, living with an aunt and two cousins who see her as a nuisance and a burden. One cousin, Horst, loses no opportunity to make Molly's life as miserable as possible, even to the point of physically harming her when he can get away with it.

The story does a nice job of transitioning back and forth from the present to 1935. Molly and Miri are believable, as are the other kids in the story, Miri's twin sisters and brothers. It's suspenseful, it's well written, it's got a nice ending. It's such a great story...

Just wish Annie Barrows would lose the swearing.

Nibbles, Bites and Chomps: Leveled Readers

2010-09-24T01:53:00.000-05:00

I am always on the hunt for readers -- chapter books that are targeted for a certain level. Even better if they are leveled from easy to harder. I was happy to run across the Nibbles, Bites, Chomps books from Running Press at my local Half Price Books, and even happier to pick up a couple of "Nibbles" and a "Bite" for about 5 bucks.

As the name suggests, the "Nibbles" are easier: big print, lots of pictures, not too long. Probably appropriate for 1st or 2nd grade. "Bites" are a little harder: smaller print, longer paragraphs, not so many pictures, a bit longer overall. Probably best for readers who can read mostly independently, but might need some help here and there. And of course the "Chomps" are harder still, more like a traditional novel, and intended for independent readers.

What really struck me with this series is how many titles would be appealing to boys. Let it Rip is a story about two boys who sell farts in a jar. My Amazing Poo Plant is the story of a girl who grows a plant from a pot where a bird pooped. Walter Wants to be a Werewolf is the story of a family of werewolves who all change when the moon is full -- except Walter. The subject material just seems more targeted to boys, though there's stuff in there that girls will like, too. You can see the whole collection at the Running Press website. It's not huge, but it's got a nice number of titles. Even at full price, they're not too bad. And it's always nice to have a few more ~~weapons in your arsenal~~ choices in your library when the kids run out of stuff to read.

Note: what really appealed to my son was the bite-sized chunk that's cut out of each book. That, more than anything else, made him pick these up and flip through them. Sometimes novelty is your friend.

Skippyjon Jones: Lost in Spice

2010-09-22T01:58:00.002-05:00

The original Skippyjon Jones was a lot of fun. My kids and I had a ball doing cheesy Mexican accents for all the chihuahuas and we laughed when Skippito Friskito punctured the Great Bumblebeeto.

The second Skippyjon book, Skippyjon Jones: In the Doghouse was a little trip into...well, trippiness. I'm not going to say anyone was smoking crack when they wrote that one, but it didn't make a ton of sense. In fact, the subsequent books made less and less sense, even for the delusional daydreams of a Siamese cat who thinks he's a chihuahua.

So now we have Skippyjon Jones: Lost in Spice and at last there's another SJ book that makes some sense. In this book, Skippyjon blast into space where he encounters an alien twin -- a Martian Skippyjon in glowing green. And why is he lost in spice (an inside joke only for parents)? Because the Red Planet is covered in chili powder, of course. That's why it's red.

The pictures are bright and attractive; I do like Judy Schachner's artwork. The story makes about as much sense as the first book, and considerably more sense than the second book. Worth buying in hardback? Probably not, but perhaps worth it in paperback and certainly worth checking out from the library.

I Regret to Inform You...

2010-09-20T01:27:00.001-05:00

I failed.

It doesn't happen often, this type of failure. But occasionally there's a book I just. can. not. get. into.

Linger was that book.

I tried, I really did. But I just couldn't bring myself to care what happened to Sam and Grace and all the werewolves. You can read my thoughts on Shiver, the first volume of the series here. I still have some objections because of the premarital sex. Other than that, Maggie Stiefvater is a fine writer, but the whole thing just left me saying "meh."

Apparently in this volume, Grace turns into a wolf and that's the big cliffhanger.

Meh.

At least they'll get a trilogy out of it. Whoo hoo.

Buyer Beware

2010-09-17T01:12:00.002-05:00

I've got devotions on the brain this week. Bear with me.

Here's one I didn't like: Sticky Situations is meant to present kids with the kinds of moral and spiritual dilemmas they might encounter in their everyday lives. The little stories that make up each devotion do just that: pose a moral dilemma. The possible responses are given in multiple-choice format, and then there is a Bible verse to look up which will guide the reader to the correct answer.

I want my kids to learn to apply their Bible reading to their lives, but this is not the tool to teach that skill. I have a degree in English and I taught literary interpretation for 10 years and I had trouble seeing the connections between the stories and the verses that were supposed to guide their responses to the situations.

This one had so much potential. What a bummer that it falls so short. I think there is some value in the stories themselves. They would be nice jumping-off points for family discussion and even role playing, but the spiritual content is sorely lacking and that means it's entirely up to the parent to supply Bible verses, stories, etc. to lay a foundation underpinning the moral choices.

If you feel up to that, by all means buy this book. But if, like me, you might have trouble providing a biblical foundation for every sticky situation, you might want to look elsewhere.

Devotional Picks

2010-09-15T01:45:00.002-05:00

I have been on the hunt recently for another family devotions book to do with my kids around the dinner table. The one above was recommended by a friend from church, so I picked it up at a local Bible bookstore.

It's listed as an 8-12 year old book, but it's probably not going to hold the interest of anyone over the age of 11. It certainly is full of odd and interesting animals -- each devotion is along the lines of a "What am I?" quiz, with lots of info about the animal, but not revealing what it is until the very end. Then there's a scripture and an application lesson followed by a prayer. The devotions are short -- maybe even too short -- and they feel light on content, especially spiritual. In fact, the spiritual content almost feels like an afterthought. The devotions seem targeted for much younger kids; I think a child as young as 5 could probably track with this pretty well, though the social/spiritual issues might not ring any bells with them quite yet. It does have some pictures, but they're cartoony, not meant to faithfully render the animals in the devotions. Still, any pictures are helpful with smaller kids.

I am going to try this one for a few more days with my kids, but I think it may go back to the store. My hunch is that it might work better as a read-on-your-own book than as a family devotion.

Did You Know Devotions was option two. I liked this one, maybe because I'm kind of a trivia geek. It's actually quite similar in format to Weird and Wacky, but instead of wild animal facts, it tells little stories about odd occurrences in history -- like a recipe book sent out with a recipe for caramel which was missing a key ingredient. Without that ingredient (water) the mixture would actually explode on the stove. The story is then tied to a biblical truth and a life lesson. It's for 6-8 year olds, but I think it could go a little older -- maybe to 10 or 11, depending on interest level. It seems to be better adapted for family devotions and it seemed to have a little more spiritual heft than the first book. No pictures in this one, so not as little kid-friendly.

Still looking for the perfect devotional....

Ingo: A Series for Mermaid Lovers

2010-09-13T01:58:00.001-05:00

Mermaids, I suspect, are a perennial favorite among girls. Unfortunately, books about mermaids tend to be a bit light on literary merit. In a word, they often stink. What a great thing, then, is the Ingo series by Helen Dunmore.

11 year old Sapphire and her brother Connor live in Cornwall, growing up "in sight of the sea," as their mother puts it. One midsummer's night, their father, a fisherman, leaves the family to go for a walk by the ocean and disappears. The family is fractured by his disappearance. When his boat washes ashore some days later, rumors abound -- he drank too much that night and fell overboard, he only made it look like he drowned and he's left them for another woman. But there is one possibility that Sapphire is forced to consider: that he went into the sea of his own free will, lured by something out there, something irresistible.

Her suspicions are sharpened when her brother Connor begins disappearing for hours at a time; in fact, he seems barely conscious of the time he is gone and his manner tells Sapphy that he is being pulled toward the sea as their father was. She sees him sitting on a rock just off the shore, talking to a strange girl, but he denies later that he was with anyone. Then one day, she herself feels drawn, pulled like a magnet toward the ocean, and there she meets Faro, a boy who takes her into the realm of Ingo beneath the sea.

Ingo is a step up from books like The Tale of Emily Windsnap (and for comparison, Emily Windsnap is a step up from the Tinkerbell books). The writing is better, the plot is richer and more complex. The characters and their motives are more finely drawn and more multi-faceted. Even Ingo itself is a riddle: is it good? Is it evil? Do Faro and his sister mean well or ill? It all adds to the tension and the conflict. There's a parallel plot involving Sapphire and Connor's mum, who is beginning to date again and the book explores their feelings for her new friend, who they both like and detest in equal measure. He's a likable guy, but he's not their dad. And they both feel very strongly that their father is still alive, perhaps is even in Ingo.

here are four books in the series. It's been around for a while -- Ingo was published in 2005 -- but the last book was only recently made available in the US. If you have a strong reader, this one could go as young as 9 or 10, and I think its appeal would hold into 8th or even 9th grade. If you have a daughter who likes magic and fantasy, this is a good one to try.

How to Train Your Dragon -- Bookivore's Choice for a Good Read-Aloud

2010-09-10T01:53:00.001-05:00

Read alouds can serve several purposes: they can introduce kids to more difficult language, they can expose kids to forms of language that might otherwise be unfamiliar or intimidating, like poetry, or they can stimulate kids' interest in reading by just being a rollicking good time. How to Train Your Dragon falls into this last category.

Great literature it ain't, but it is unapologetic about that. In fact, it revels in distinctly un-literary characters like Snotface Snotlout and Gobber the Belch and my personal favorite, Baggybum the Beerbelly. The hero, or perhaps anti-hero, is Hiccup Horrendous Haddock III, son of Stoick the Vast, chieftain of the Hairy Hooligans, a tribe of Vikings inhabiting a dreary, difficult island in the North Sea called Berk (for those not in the know, Berk is a British slang term for an idiot).

Hiccup is rather a failure at all the traditional Viking pursuits; he is particularly bad at yelling, which is a handicap for his task in this book, capturing and training a dragon. Hiccup, you see, usually tries to do the right thing, which is not always the same as doing the Viking thing, and quite often is exactly the opposite. In this case, because he tries to save his friend Fishlegs from being eaten as he kidnaps a dragon, he himself ends up with the smallest, laziest, most contrary and ordinary dragon ever -- not a stellar achievement for the son of the chief and possible future chieftain himself someday. Hiccup manages to get himself thrown out of the tribe and almost simultaneously reinstated in order to save the Hooligans from the greatest dragon threat they've ever encountered. Hiccup manages it using his brains -- something the Hooligans are a bit short on -- and becomes a hero in the process.

We took this one on vacation with us and it was a huge hit with my children, particularly my seven year old son. The book is peppered with goofy drawings of the various characters which my children liked. And of course, the names and the references to belching, farting, and otherwise being kind of gross and impolite were a big hit as well.

Note, this is very different from the movie, so if your children saw the film, this isn't going to be as dramatic, nor is there as much emphasis on the viking-dragon relationship. Dragons in the book are supremely selfish and Hiccup's dragon is no different.

It's good fun as a family read aloud, and worth a look for reluctant readers, too. And if your kids like it, there are 4 more books in the series, enough to fill lots of nights with laughs.

Planning for Success: A Good Breakfast

2010-09-08T01:19:00.001-05:00

Image courtesy of the Pittsburgh Post

Sometimes, things interfere with a child's ability to learn. One thing that has a powerful impact is hunger. Hungry children don't learn as well as children who are well-fed because their brains become consumed with the need to eat. Instead of focusing on what happens when you encounter silent e, they are thinking, "What can I eat? When can I eat? How can I get my stomach to stop hurting RIGHT NOW?" Children who are persistently hungry tend to perform worse on standardized tests (Tufts University Center on Hunger Poverty and Nutrition Policy). One study that examined hungry kindergarteners found that hunger was directly linked to a drop in math scores. Probably reading, too, but they didn't look at that (Food Insecurity and Hunger in the Kindergarten Classroom: Its Effect on Learning and Growth, Winicki and Jemison, 1999).

This may seem like a no-brainer, but it really is important for kids to have a good, healthy breakfast before they go to school, and I would submit that they need a mid-morning snack if their lunch period is more than 3.5 hours from when they ate breakfast. Unfortunately, some schools seem unable to grasp this idea and act like snacks are an unforgivable inconvenience. This is particularly true as you move into the higher grades -- 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th -- but not when you get to junior high or high school -- children that age can usually eat during their passing time between classes without anyone going into a tizzy over contraband food. It's bizarre to me that adults will wander an elementary building with a cup of coffee and a donut or bagel, seldom going more than 2 hours without eating, yet deny kids the same opportunity.

Image courtesy of The Daily Green

So, what can parents do to maximize their children's chance of success in the classroom?

1. Find something healthy (read: balanced) for them to eat at breakfast. If you need some ideas, try The Daily Green and Family Fun for some recipes. Sweet rolls are yummy, but not the best choice to start the day. Ditto for that bowl of Cocoa Puffs.

2. Lobby for snacks in the classroom if your child has to wait more than 3.5 hours between breakfast and lunch. Be respectful, but be firm. Sometimes, you can even make it a medical issue. One of my children gets migraines, which are occasionally triggered by hunger. She is now able to go to the nurse's office and have a snack at 11 o'clock, a full 1.5 hours before her lunch (her breakfast-to-lunch waiting period is 5 hours -- waaaaay too long). Her classmates, however, are out of luck.

Image courtesy of Reader's Digest.com. Go there for the recipe -- yummy!

3. Pack a snack with some substance. This is not the time for fruit snacks and YoGos (these are just candy with a good marketing rep, folks). Pack cheese sticks, peanut butter on crackers (check your school's peanut policy first -- a lot of schools are peanut-free because of allergy issues), protein bars, a bagel with cream cheese, a bag of granola... something that will hold your child until lunch.

4. Pack a good lunch and/or monitor their selections for school lunch. Sometimes the problem is on the other end of the day -- your child has an early lunch and then has a long wait until he arrives home. Be sure to pack lunches high in protein and complex carbohydrates which take the body more time to digest. It's okay to pack treats, but if your kids are like mine, they eat the treat first and may actually ignore their sandwich or cheese or whatever healthy stuff is in there to keep them going. If you pack a treat, make it small. Here are some fun sites for lunch ideas: Family Fun, Raising a Healthy Family, What's for Lunch at Our House (Bento Boxes -- so cool, but maybe a little intimidating), a more down-to-earth take on Bentos at Just a Girl, and lunches for kids with severe food allergies at To The Moon and Back.

Food. It's important. Make sure your kids are getting what they need when they need it.

I am a Genius of Unspeakable Evil and I Want to be your Class President

2010-09-06T03:48:00.000-05:00

I am a sucker for a good title, and this one caught my eye at Barnes and Noble (who don't pay me to mention them at all. Although they should. 'Cuz I shop there. A lot. And I wouldn't say no to some free books. Or whatever.). I tracked it down at the public library and was more than rewarded for my effort. This is one of the funniest books I've ever read. Ever.

I am a long-time fan of The Daily Show -- it's one of the few things I regret about not having cable. And this book, written by Josh Lieb, an executive producer for The Daily Show, has all the earmarks of a great Daily Show episode. The humor is edgy, it pokes fun at everyone and everything, and it is merciless. Really, the whole book felt like it was channeling Jon Stewart, only through 12 year olds.

Seventh grader Oliver Watson, the dumbest kid in school, is actually a genius masterminding a worldwide empire, both legitimate and criminal, from a bunker he excavated below his family's home while they were on a trip to Hawaii. From there he orchestrates kidnappings, the overthrow of a corrupt African dictator, the love life of his English teacher, and the eighth grade student council elections. Or at least, that's what's supposed to happen. But life in 7th grade doesn't always work out quite the way one hopes.

I am a Genius may remind some people of Artemis Fowl, but without the distraction of fairies and leprechauns. However, unlike Artemis, Oliver is not a nice person. Really, really not a nice person. But he is a funny person. And being inside his head, once you recover from the initial shock, is funny, too. Much of the book is pure fantasy -- what wouldn't we have given to have a tool that could give our teachers a little electric shock every time they zinged us verbally in class? Or blow darts that our private bodyguards shoot at kids who pick on us -- darts that make those bullies suddenly flatulent in front of the whole school?

Here's my problem with this book: it's billed as a book for 12-14 year olds. That's because Oliver is 12. By this reasoning, we should be letting 8 year olds watch The Exorcist. That's a movie about an 8 year old, right? That should be okay for kids, right?

I so wanted to put a picture from The Exorcist here, but I just can't. That movie still scares the CRAP out of me.

The themes this book deals with, the satire, the relentless skewering of every junior high stereotype, is going to go right over the heads of kids who are actually in junior high. This book is deeply disrespectful of teachers, parents, basically anyone in authority. This is fine if your audience can grasp that it's satire. Otherwise, Oliver and his evil plans are just mean. There are cultural references that many kids aren't going to get, and there's a lot of crude language and mild swearing that seems not very appropriate for this age. I do think this would be fine for high school students and I highly recommend it for adults who have lived through the hell-on-earth that is junior high. It will make you laugh. A lot.

Potential distractions: Oliver likes to footnote himself quite a bit, and going back and forth from the story to the footnotes might be disruptive for less able readers. Also, Oliver writes like an adult (he's a genius, remember) so the vocabulary may be a little above some kids.

Seriously funny, but seriously not for junior high aged kids. Save this one for the 9th grade and up crowd.

Guardians of Ga'Hoole -- Coming to a Theatre Near You

2010-09-02T00:42:00.001-05:00

My oldest daughter got started on the Guardians of Ga'Hoole series by Kathryn Lasky over the summer, mainly because it was one of the selections she could choose from for the Barnes and Noble reading program. She picked it because nothing else looked very interesting and although she wasn't sure she'd like it, she brought it home.

8 weeks later, she has read ten of the 15 or so books in the series and can't wait to get her hands on the rest. She has browbeaten her parents into reading the first few books as well, so I am now able to tell you that if you read these books, you will know a great deal about owls -- maybe more than you ever thought possible (or necessary).

The books -- at least the first few -- follow Soren, a young barn owl who has fallen from his nest in the forest. He is captured by some owls from an 'orphanage' called St. Aggie's, but this 'orphanage' has a sinister intent. With his friend Gylfie, an elf owl, Soren escapes St. Aggie's and sets off to find the Guardians of Ga'Hoole -- a legendary order of owls said to protect the weak, right wrongs, and do noble deeds.

The series is coming out in film September 24 and so far the stills and trailers look gorgeous. However, this is the same bunch that brought us Happy Feet, which didn't impress me a whole lot, so I am not getting my hopes up. I generally have low expectations for book-to-film adaptations.

What I like about the books is that they drove my daughter to ask so many questions -- what do sooty owls look like? How about burrowing owls? What does an owl pellet look like? What's inside it? Are there really blind nest snakes that take care of the owls' nests? (yes). Questioning, we know, is one of the habits of a good reader, so this was a very good thing. We spent several busy hours on the Internet satisfying her curiosity and building her understanding and knowledge into the bargain.

The other thing I liked was the size of the series -- 15 books are a God-send when you have a child that reads constantly. I spent the first half of the summer scrambling around trying to keep her supplied with books. After we found these, I could put my feet up and drink iced tea on the deck while I ate my bon-bons. Whew!

Already my daughter is begging to see the movie, so I am crossing my fingers that it's at least passably good. In the mean time, if you have a little nature lover who's between 8 and 12 years of age, you might want to give this series a try.

Book 10 Is Here!

2010-08-31T01:44:00.002-05:00

Released today.

Are you running to the bookstore so your little readers can have it by the time they get home from school, or did you pre-order it so you can stroll leisurely to the mailbox and pick it up that way? Or are you cheap like Bookivore and planning to wait for the next Scholastic Book Warehouse Sale to get it for half price? Of course, this means we have to take our chances with the public library, so I might have to cave and go to the bookstore for this one...

I can't wait to see how Amy and Dan fare in the final book of the series.

O Bookivore, Where Art Thou?

2010-08-09T14:34:00.003-05:00

Sorry for the long absence. Bookivore is taking August off, mainly because my brain is very full these days, trying to get my kiddies ready for school, and since my basement flooded this week, I think blogging just won't resume until after school starts.

But I'm still reading! I'll have new books to share when I return.

See you then!

Purchasing Cultural Capital

2010-07-21T01:22:00.007-05:00

Cultural capital, you will remember, is the bank of experience kids bring to the table when they go to school, and learn to read and write and compute sums, and generally navigate life. The more experiences kids have, the more "money" in their "banks." Research shows that the more actual money in the parents' bank accounts, the more experiences they can afford to purchase for their children -- things like zoo trips, museums, sports experiences, travel, computer usage, etc.

Trouble is, some of us want to give our kids these things but are living on one income. How, then, do we give our kids experiences?

Bookivore and her husband realized a while ago that birthdays and Christmas were becoming Toy Explosion Events: it was like Toys R Us threw up in our house. We were swamped with toys, drowning in toys, caught in giant sinkholes of toys from which there was no escape.

One too many Polly Pockets -- the Horror!

So Bookivore and Mr. Bookivore (who actually prefers to be known as Big Truck) started asking grandparents and aunts and uncles to start giving the kids experiences rather than stuff.

I won't lie to you: there was consternation, especially among the grandparents, for whom the role of fairy godmother was very very pleasant. However, we were as firm as we could be without actually bonking anyone on the head and shouting "Get OVER it!" And some very nice things began to happen.

My sister-in-law quit giving gifts entirely in favor of a Day of Fun: the birthday child goes to their home for the day and chooses any activity he or she wants: ice skating, zoo, pool, roller skating, ceramics decorating shop, tennis, golf...whatever. The child also chooses a lunch destination and a dinner destination (always fast food), and can add in activities like Wii, cookie making and decorating, dress up or art projects of some sort. And here's the super-coolio part: she then makes a DVD of the day using some magically awesome program on her computer that transitions photos, blends in video, and sets it all to music. Then the birthday kid can re-live the day over and over. Fabulous.

One set of grandparents has given mini-memberships to a rock-climbing facility near our house for the last 2 years. That has the added bonuses of being fun and good exercise. They also give magazine subscriptions that we would not ordinarily be able to afford. Another aunt makes about half her gifts books, which of course, Bookivore thinks is totally awesome. We still have one hold- out that can't let go of giving toys, but the balance between experiences and stuff has shifted in a good way.

Unfortunately, the starting line for kids isn't always the same, but we can help our kids stay in the game by making some changes that allow them to have more experiences, rather than just more toys to store, break, and give to Goodwill.

Off to Vietnam...

2010-07-19T01:28:00.001-05:00

Passport to the World actually didn't have a book listed for Vietnam, but I thought it was worthwhile to add it since our own history was so bound up in some of the events there. I had a hard time finding books, not because there aren't any, but because my library didn't have them. Grrr!

As it turns out, they did have a few, but for some reason their cataloguing system does not allow users to search picture books by terms like "Vietnam" or "Asia." Kind of a critical failing, I'd say. How else are we supposed to find picture books about Vietnam? Or India? Or Korea? Or pretty-much-insert-any-country-name-here?

At any rate, I ended up with two very nice books about Vietnam, one about a family trying to bring back the cranes that disappeared during the war, and the other about a little girl travelling to Vietnam to visit her grandparents. Both invite extra exploration of the country through some supplemental activities.

We will make origami cranes (instructions here) and we'll Google some sarus crane images. These cranes are a symbol of long life and happiness, and they really were driven off during the Vietnam war, so we may talk a little about how people affect habitat and what that means to the animals. We'll also talk about what makes a home and whether you can feel at home when you're someplace far away (the subject of the second book shown above).

We'll track how far Vietnam is from our town on our graph and we'll talk about how rice is grown, since it's so prevalent in Southeast Asia. There are good sites for this here and here. This last site is a video showing how the paddies are planted by hand. We'll probably make some rice for dinner. We'll do other supplementary stuff -- math and handwriting and practicing time-telling. I have a lovely book called Somewhere in the World Right Now that introduces kids to the idea of time zones, which I think we'll also take a look at to see what time it is in these countries we're talking about. The books are a great way to put some context and content around the other activities so we're not just doing math in a vacuum, or practicing meaningless handwriting sentences.

Next up: Cambodia and Thailand!

Books vs. Movies

2010-07-17T01:07:00.003-05:00

Lately it seems like children's books are being made into movies so quickly, kids barely have time to finish reading a novel before it appears on the big screen. Bookivore personally thinks this is because Hollywood had run out of ideas for films, so is desperate to put anything out there that might equal the success of the Twilight books, or Harry Potter.

The problem is, these movie renditions often fall far short of the books. Bookivore will concede that there have been a few -- a very few -- movies that did justice to the books they were based on, and that there have been one or two movies total that improved on their book sources. One example of a movie that at least did justice to its source work was Holes. It's a straighforward retelling of the book -- the book in visual form, actually. The casting gurus completely missed the boat using Shia Labeouf as Stanley Yelnats, who was supposed to be overweight in the book. Not that Shia was bad, just that I think he should have played the first half of the movie in some padding. And of course, the movie loses the lyrical quality of the book -- the beautiful language and the fabulous characterizations of the boys at camp. But otherwise, it's a solid effort. Another similar movie would be Twilight -- although some of the casting struck me as a bit off. The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe surprised me by being a pretty nice adaptation as well.

A movie that improved on its book -- and I know I'm going to get zinged for this -- was Fellowship of the Ring. I know it committed the heresy of leaving out some beloved characters, but I always felt Tolkien needed a better editor anyway and the movie cut out a lot of stuff that, while nice, just didn't do it for me. What emerged was a leaner, more streamlined, dramatic story, rather than the meandering trip down a river that the book is. Another good example is Horton Hears a Who.

But the largest category by far is Movies that Fell Short of the Books. Into this I can toss scads of examples: Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief; How to Train Your Dragon; The Black Cauldron; the Harry Potter movies (all of them); the Pride and Prejudice remake with Keira Knightly (so, so bad...not stictly a kids' book, I know, bu t it does appear on some high school reading lists); Nim's Island (so close, but just didn't quite measure up to the book); The Cat in the Hat... and the list goes on.

Sometimes the problem is in casting -- Pierce Brosnan as Chiron? Are you kidding me? And sometimes the problem is that the book is just too big, too rich, to adapt well to the screen (like all the Harry Potter movies). Sometimes Hollywood takes just a shred of an idea from the book and goes off at right angles to it, producing something that resembles the book only in that they have the same title (How to Train Your Dragon). Sometimes a book just shouldn't be made into a movie, period. I think The Cat in the Hat proves that beyond a doubt.

The worst thing about movies based on books, though, is that they may prevent kids from reading the books at all. Why read Harry Potter when you've seen the movies? This is my 11 year old nephew's opinion and it drives me crazy. You read the book because it is so much better than the movie.

Duh.

There are so many more -- Because of Winn Dixie, Despereaux, Hoot, Guardians of Ga'hoole (coming in September), City of Ember, Ella Enchanted (ugh!), Diary of a Wimpy Kid, Freak the Mighty, How to Eat Fried Worms, The Princess Diaries, Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, Inkheart -- all made into movies that kids may see and think are the be-all and end-all of the story. They're not bad, necessarily, just not good substitutes for the literature that inspired them.

An Excellent Read-Aloud

2010-07-15T01:58:00.004-05:00

Whittington, by Alan Armstrong, is the story of a stray cat who finds a home in a barn with an assortment of oddball animals, mostly strays and abandoned creatures who had nowhere else to go. There's a chicken who can't walk, a pair of retired horses, a band of vicious rats, and the leader of them all, a Muscovy duck called the Lady. Into this mixture come a pair of similarly abandoned children, whose friendship with the animals paves the way for them to heal and grow past their hurt and confusion.

Whittington fits all my qualifications for a good read-aloud book: it's a nice length, it's got engaging characters, and its use of language is sometimes striking. Bookivore likes kids to hear good writing, to get their ears attuned to spectacular turns of phrase and expose their minds to particularly apt imagery. Consider these two examples from Whittington:

"'Why don't you try for another family?'

'Because I'm not cute anymore,' said Whittington. 'My voice is harsh, I've got the shakes, I have opinions, I like to stay out, I stink, I like to fight. I'm not a house pet.'

The Lady nodded. 'I guess not.'

The wind picked up. The Lady shifted into it like a moored dory."

"When they arrived, it was snug in the barn, pungent with damp dung and hay. The bantams murmured and cackled together like they were telling jokes. Now and then Coraggio crowed. He always startled folks when he crowed because they never knew when he'd do it, and he didn't either."

Blended with the story of the children, Abby and Ben, is the much older traditional tale of Dick Whittington and his cat. His rise from poverty to wealth with the help of his cat is woven throughout Ben's struggle to overcome his learning disability. He draws inspiration from Dick's travels and his triumphs over adversity.

The story is a compelling one, hard to put down even for an adult. The relationships between the animals and between the animals and the children is part of the charm; it touches that part of us that wanted (and still wants) animals to talk. The beautiful language makes the read-aloud even more powerful.

Note that there is a reference to opium and hashish in one part of the book as a bit of historical information about the merchants in Dick Whittington's day. If this bothers you, you could easily skip it as it only appears in a list of commodities brought to England from the East during the Middle Ages.

OOPS! I Forgot This One

2010-07-14T16:27:00.002-05:00

Another summer reading incentive for kids, this one from Half Price Books: kids get a $3 book coupon for every week they read at least 15 minutes per day. Go here for details. I can't believe I forgot to include this one, since we did it last summer and practically lived at the store. Lots of books for kids available for under $3, and plenty more can be had for very little with the coupon.

There's still time to participate in these incentives as well.

Sustained Silent Reading

2010-07-13T09:36:00.007-05:00

Bookivore has talked ad nauseum about the benefits of reading to your children. If you can't get enough of my harping, you can re-read it here, here and here.

But today I want to tell you about the natural partner of reading aloud, Sustained Silent Reading (SSR), and how it can help your children improve both their attitudes about reading and their reading ability.

SSR is a period of time between 10 and 30 minutes in which a child reads recreationally. There is no limitation placed on what he or she chooses to read, other than that it should be interesting to the child. If they want to read the newspaper, great. Magazine? Okay. Serialized Pokemon novels? Knock yourself out. Generally, of course, they're going to be reading books, and that's mainly what should be available, but other forms of text are fine. The only "rule" is that they do nothing but read to themselves for a sustained period (which at its minimum, isn't all that long).

What will SSR do for your kids? In a study on kids who were reading 2 years behind grade level, the children were divided into 2 groups: one group spent 10 weeks doing SSR, the other group spent 10 weeks using a basal reader (a book used to teach reading and reading skills). In other words, one group was being "taught" reading, while the other group was just reading. The result of the study was that the SSR group scored significantly higher in measures of reading and attitudes toward reading than the basal reader group (Holt and O'Tuel, 1988).

Similarly, The Condition of Education, 1997 reported that 9, 13, and 17-year old students who reported reading for fun at least once a week had higher average reading proficiency scores than those who reported never or hardly ever reading for fun.

The more you read, the better you get at it. Amazing!

So in the midst of your busy summer, grab a stack of books, set aside a 10 -30 minute period and tell your kids they're going to spend it reading. Let them read whatever they want. Don't grill them on what they read afterward. Aim to do it 3 times a week. Bookivore humbly suggests you drop what you're doing and join in. There's nothing more powerful than the very-present model of a parent reading for fun right along with the kids.

Yes, Virginia, There are Unicorns...

2010-07-09T03:24:00.005-05:00

If you were in junior high or high school in the late 70s and 80s, the word unicorn is going to conjure up images of afros, rollerskating in short shorts, and sparkly tee-shirts with rainbows and such like. They belong in the same category as Care Bears and Trolls-- a collective interest that we're now just a little ashamed to admit we actually liked back when we were young and impressionable.

At least, that's the baggage I had to get over when I picked up the first volume of The Unicorn Chronicles, by Bruce Coville. I had very low expectations for this series, but agreed to read it because my then-10 year old niece really wanted me to.

Now would be a good time to say, I was completely wrong. This is no sappy, sugary unicorn tale; it's a fully realized fantasy with complex characters and a compelling plot that follows so many twists and turns I won't even begin to attempt to untangle it all here. The fact that it spans four largish books would make that task pretty unrealistic anyway.

Here's an ultra-short teaser: Cara Diana Hunter has been thrust into another world to escape a Hunter. Why she is being hunted, she doesn't know. She only knows that she and her grandmother, Ivy, are always on the run. Now she finds herself in a world where the trees have blue leaves and odd creatures are roaming about, some friendly and some not. She meets a unicorn named Lightfoot and learns about the Hunters and their "grandmother" Beloved, a woman who is being simultaneously wounded and healed constantly by a shattered unicorn horn in her heart. She is consumed with hatred for the unicorns, and although the unicorns left earth centuries earlier, Beloved can't rest until she finds a way into Luster to finally carry out the genocide she has dreamt about for so long.

Along the way, Cara meets a variety of creatures and characters -- dragons, delvers, dwarves, centaurs, a gryphon, a geomancer, an assortment of humans, and the squijum (don't ask me what it is -- some kind of squirly thing, I think). It's at least partially a coming-of-age story about Cara, but it's so enmeshed in the fantasy that it doesn't feel like that at all. It's really the story of the unicorns and Beloved. The fourth book, last in the series, is finally out some twenty years after the series began. I can only be glad I was introduced to these books now and didn't have to wait two decades to see how it all turned out.

HOTCHA BIG SPOILER ALERT: SERIOUSLY DON'T READ THE NEXT PARAGRAPH IF YOU DON"T WANT SOME CRITICAL STUFF REVEALED!

There are some things in the final book that some readers might find disturbing. Cara's grandmother, we learn in Book 2, is actually a unicorn. She became human when she stumbled back to Earth while pursued by hunters. This makes Cara 1/4 unicorn. In the last book, Cara is offered the chance to become a unicorn to escape a large party of hunters who are tracking her. She accepts, but I found this really unsettling, the idea of losing your human-ness. I was particularly bothered by her lack of hands and found myself feeling rather claustrophobic about her transformation. Another theme developed in the last book is that of the Great Powers, the immortal beings who created the world of Luster and at least some of its inhabitants. The Great Powers are portrayed as essentially human in nature, just very much more powerful. Two of them have been exiled because of the illegal creation of Luster -- something the Great Powers aren't actually great enough to be permitted to do. One of them was exiled to earth, where he must "do enough good to earn my way back into paradise." So, running around in the narrative you have these beings that are, for lack of a better explanation, the gods of this world who subscibe to a kind of "do good, get good" philosophy. It's probably more mature than I'd be comfortable with for a child under 12.

It's epic, it's sweeping, it's long, but it's well worth the effort. Good reading for 10-15 year olds, maybe a little younger if your reader isn't intimidated by big books. Just bear in mind that the last book is for an older child -- perhaps 7th grade or so -- because of the themes and events it contains.

Hello Korea!

2010-07-07T15:11:00.006-05:00

Stop number 3 on our Library World Tour is South Korea. I have to say that I couldn't find any of the recommended books for Korea in our library, and the ones I found on Amazon were suspiciously absent as well. In fact, my local library was woefully understocked in children's books about Korea in general. I did manage to find this one (above) at the larger Metro library. I like the story of the little girl moving from Korea to the U.S. and thought it did a nice job conveying the differences and similarities between the two. There were other books on Amazon that looked better, but this one did the job and was free -- so I am trying not to pout about it. It's a lovely book, but I'm annoyed by the scarcity of choice.

We also picked up Bee-bim Bop from our library, which is geared for much younger children, but which I thought could work in the context of seeing how the food was cooked and the people ate. I love that the family says grace before their meal -- it really highlights the fact that one of the largest faith groups in Korea is actually Presbyterianism.

To enrich this lesson, we are going to use the recipe for Bee-bim Bop at the back of the book. We'll track how far away Korea is from our town on our graph and find Korea on our world map. I have to say, there aren't a ton of kid-friendly resources that I could locate on the web; most of the stuff was aimed at older children writing reports for school. My baby will do a Letter K coloring sheet and my son will copy some sentences about Korea for handwriting.

Next Stop: Vietnam

11 Birthdays

2010-06-21T02:40:00.000-05:00

11 Birthdays, by Wendy Mass, is kind of like Groundhog Day for kids: the characters are experiencing the same day over and over and over again, but this time, the characters are a pair of 11 year olds.

Amanda and Leo have known each other since, well, since birth. And every year, they've celebrated their birthdays together. Until their 10th birthday, when Amanda overheard Leo tell some boys that he didn't really like hanging out with a girl so much anymore. Devastated, Amanda runs away from their party and cuts off contact with Leo completely.

It's one year later and Amanda is facing her 11th birthday alone. Worse, she and Leo are having competing parties on the same night and it's looking like Amanda's is going to be the losing venue. She botches her gymnastics team try-out, her party flops, her mom gets fired and all Amanda can be glad of is that the day is finally over. Except that it's not. She wakes up the following morning to discover that it's her birthday again. No one seems to realize that the day is repeating itself but Amanda and she's too weirded out to know what to do.

Eventually, Leo and Amanda make up and find a way to mend the repeating loop in their lives, but not before they learn some lessons about friendship and finding your place in the world and forgiveness and understanding.

This was a lovely book, one that I passed on to my 9 year old immediately. It's perfect for the 9-13 crowd and it's blessedly free of the OMGs that seem to be everywhere in tween literature. Because the main characters are male and female, this one could work for either boys or girls, but it may seem more like a girl's book because the story is narrated by Amanda.

The Red Pyramid OR Percy Jackson Goes to Egypt

2010-06-19T13:13:00.004-05:00

The Red Pyramid is Rick Riordan's newest novel for the pre-teen and teen set. In it, Carter and Sadie Kane find out they are members of an ancient family of magicians, entangled for millenia with the Egyptian gods. If this sounds a little reminiscent of the Percy Jackson and Olympians series, that's because it is.

Some things are quite different: there's the obvious difference between the Egyptian and Olympian gods, the heroes are a brother and sister, there's a society for magicians which is distinctly unwelcoming to the pair, and there's a persistent theme of possession -- gods possessing humans to achieve their own ends, or humans "hosting" gods to achieve their own ends.

But the action -- fast and well done -- is the same, as is the light, humorous storytelling and the need for the characters to find out about/explain the Egyptian myths. Likewise, there's a long-imprisoned monster who is longing to break free into the mortal world again, thus bringing about the destruction of life as we know it.

There are enough differences to make the book mostly feel like a separate adventure; the narrative bounces back and forth between Carter and Sadie, which allows the reader to see more sides to the story; but there are many places that felt similar to the Percy Jackson books. There are many more OMGs in this book, but no other swearing, and the violence is again mitigated by the monsters turning to dust when they're killed. I was uncomfortable with the possession theme and with the minions, who are occasionally referred to as demons, so would probably not let a child under 10 read this one, and possibly not a child under 12 without some discussion about how contrary to our beliefs this book runs.

It was a good, fast-paced read and very enjoyable, so here's my verdict: if your child read the Percy Jackson books and loved them, this will give them a hit of what they liked. If, like me, you're uncomfortable with some of the themes, you might want to hold off on it until your child is older or give it a miss entirely.

Runaway

2010-06-16T03:34:00.002-05:00

"What happened to that book you were reading about
China?"

"Lost on Planet China? I finished it. Now I'm reading
a book about a girl who had a brain transplant against her will."

"What?"

"A brain transplant."

"You're kidding me, right?"

"Um...no."

"Who in their right mind would buy a plot about a brain
transplant?"

Yep, it's book three in Meg Cabot's Airhead trilogy. Runaway follows the further adventures of Emerson Watts, whose brain was transplanted into the body of supermodel Nikki Howard after a freak accident at a Stark Megastores' grand opening. Book one, Airhead, is mostly concerned with Em learning to live as Nikki. In book two, Being Nikki, Em learns that Nikki didn't die of an aneurysm as she'd been told, but is very much alive and the victim of attempted murder because of something she'd overheard about Stark Megastores and the launch of their new, low-cost laptops. She tried to blackmail her boss and wound up as nothing more than a brain to be discarded until a compassionate doctor transplanted her into yet another available body, this one much too average for Nikki's taste.

Book three opens with Nikki, her mother and brother, and Em all being held prisoner by Brandon Stark, Nikki's one-time boyfriend. He wants Nikki's secret so he can blackmail his father. Nikki wants her old body back. Lulu, Em's roommate, wants Nikki's brother, Steven. And Em? She wants Christopher, her best friend, to be more than a best friend.

Got that?

It's barely plausible as a plot, but it is very readable and funny in a campy, conspiracy-theory kind of way. I like Meg Cabot's writing style -- she's like a Sophie Kinsella for the high school set -- but she doesn't quite make it past my mom-filter on this one. My biggest objection throughout this whole series has been the implication that Nikki is no sexual innocent. Em is, there's no question of that, but many references are made to Nikki's body and its sexuality. Em is confused by the sensations and signals her new body sends her. In book three, we find out that Nikki really isn't an innocent -- Brandon admits he'd only stayed with Nikki "for sex." And Nikki's been a bit of a skank, sneaking around behind Brandon's back to hook up with Lulu's boyfriend at the time, Justin. But now she wants to get back together with Brandon because she's convinced he'll be able to help her get a reverse-brain transplant so she can go back to being Nikki, even though the operation would almost certainly kill either her or Em or both.

Got that?

Em has to deal with the fallout from their infidelity, has to make sense of her body's messages, has to find a way to get Christopher to see that she loves him (though I have to say, this is pretty obvious and I found myself wondering how she could miss something so glaringly clear). While I like Cabot's easy, breezy style, and I very much liked the realization Em has that being pretty on the outside doesn't really make up for being a jerk on the inside, I have all the same objections I had to the first book; there's just too much sexuality in this for me to be comfortable with it as a junior high book, and almost too much for me to be comfortable with it below age 16.

What Do You Get a 7 Year Old...

2010-06-14T11:17:00.010-05:00

who's a reluctant reader?

It's tricky, sometimes, to find something they're interested in that isn't too babyish, or too difficult. Here's what I came up with for my somewhat reluctant boy for his 7th birthday:

Since he loves all things Pokemon, I found this activity book. It's full of puzzles -- crosswords, word finds, secret codes to crack, that sort of thing. It's reading masquerading as something else and he was excited to get it. It will come in very handy on our vacation in a couple weeks.

Some people love Dav Pilkey, others hate him. I once heard a librarian make a disgusted noise over the number of Dav Pilkey books kids were checking out of the library. I, on the other hand, am thrilled that my son wants to read his books and am willing to put up with a certain amount of corny humor and pee pee jokes. Ricky Ricotta, it should be noted, is light on the pee pee humor. It's more of a comic-book style book, highly graphic (by which I mean the action is illustrated pretty thoroughly) and written in larger text at a level that falls between Henry and Mudge and Magic Tree House.

Ricky Ricotta is geared for 1st and 2nd graders and is like brain candy for my son. I wanted something he could read to himself (he is very big on this now -- reading to himself silently), something I knew he could read with no external support, and Ricky Ricotta fits the bill perfectly.

For a step up in reading level and pee pee jokes, he got a Captain Underpants. These are really 3rd-5th grade level books, and for boys they appeal because of the plentiful illustrations and the bathroom humor. Yes, it's full of wedgies and boogers, but don't make the mistake of thinking these books are pure dumb -- the language level in them will surprise you. My son thinks they're hilarious, but can't read them without some help. He was quite happy to get another one as a gift.

This last one was a shot in the dark for me: I am completely unfamiliar with this series, but thought it looked like something I could read to my son. It's billed as "laugh-out-loud," which I am taking with a grain of salt. I'll review it later after I see how it plays with my son.

The search for high-quality, high-interest reading material continues....

Where the Mountain Meets the Moon

2010-06-12T00:41:00.001-05:00

How fitting that I should pick up this little gem to read just as we're embarking on our World Tour for summer lessons. Where the Mountain Meets the Moon is a perfect pearl of a book, deftly blending Chinese folklore and tradition with an almost modern, very accessible, heroine.

Minli lives with her parents in a dreary little village where life is just barely eked out of the barren soil. Inspired by her father's stories, Minli decides to set off for the Neverending Mountain to ask the Old Man of the Moon how she can change her family's fortune. Along the way, she is guided by a talking goldfish, meets a dragon born of a painting, watches the Goddess of Weaving flirt with an oxherd, has dinner with a king, and meets the happiest people in the land. In the end, she changes the fortunes of her whole village, but not at all the way she thought she would. Woven throughout are the stories Minli has heard from her father, as well as the stories of the people she meets, which you can't help feeling are going to become fairy tales for future generations.

The story is amply enriched by Grace Lin's beautiful paintings, which are reminiscent of traditional Chinese illustration techniques, and the little woodcut-style pictures that adorn each chapter. Other Grace Lin books we've encountered have been artistically much simpler; these are really a step up in both style and impact.

The story is magical, simple and rich at the same time. The whole thing was just charming. I have been bugging my 9 year old to finish what she's reading because she's got to read this next. My sense of this one is that it would make an excellent read-aloud book, too, because of the fairy tale nature of the text, so I may try it out on my son as well. Probably best for 3rd grade and up, though, if reading independently.

On to China

2010-06-10T00:15:00.002-05:00

Our next stop on our round the world tour is China. I couldn't find the book listed in the original library curriculum, so I started surfing Amazon to see what was out there, then hit the Library to see what they had.

There were quite a few picture books on China, possibly because there are so many Chinese adoptees in the States now. I narrowed it down to three books, chosen for three separate reasons. The Pet Dragon I chose because it shows Chinese characters. I wanted my kids to see how different our systems of writing are and maybe adapt this activity of making old Chinese scrolls to one involving Chinese characters.

I chose Beyond the Great Mountains for its artwork, which is reminiscent of Chinese painting. It also incorporates Chinese characters and it's a poem, which is a nice way to expose my kids to a different literary form. I found some nice poetry prompts here so they could try writing a poem about China, and also some word searches and other activities. I particularly like the Venn diagram and I think we'll use that to compare China to Japan, or China to the U.S.

Jin Jin the Dragon I chose because in China, dragons are helpful. They bring rain and control rivers. I thought it would be nice to look at dragons from a Chinese perspective. I found two great dragon crafts here and here. Not sure which I'll be using. This would be a good place to say that I LOVE THE INTERNET.

I mean really, how awesome is it that all these resources are at your fingertips?

For food we're going to make Green Onion Pancakes, which I think my kids might actually eat. I may also try a stir fry recipe and let them help cut veggies.

My baby will be working on the letter C with some activities from this site. She'll also do some coloring -- here's a link to my search result of China coloring pages.

Next Stop: South Korea

Next Stop: Asia

2010-06-07T15:04:00.023-05:00

This summer, I'm tackling a new study program to keep my kids thinking and reading while they're not in school. It's called Passport to the World.

I spent a good long while on my local library's online catalogue trying to find the books on the list and discovered that my library is shamefully lacking in multicultural picture books. I was forced to substitute other books (this is okay, just more work for me) and trek across town to get a library card at the much bigger metro library (ours is a suburban library) in order to get books to fit the program. They were also rather thin on Asian picture books, something I find rather frustrating, but I was able to find enough to make for a workable set of lessons. We're starting with Japan and this book (left). This was not a book on the list.

Mainly the lessons call for observation of life in a particular country, then pick up on some custom or food and use that to extend the lesson. Since I haven't seen this book yet, I am winging it a bit as I plan. I did, however, find some nice complimentary crafts.

We can either make windsock fish (like those on the cover) or origami windsock fish. Or we can make Japanese paper dolls. Since I have a son to consider, we'll probably do the fish. For food, we could do fishless sushi, which interests me but is very complicated to make and requires special ingredients that might be hard to find. Or we could just go to Target and pick up some Udon noodles and make those, maybe chilled with a sesame dressing.

I am going to have my older child (9) look up some simple Japanese vocabulary. There is a good site for this here. I also found some other good upper elementary activities here. My littlest one (4) will do a coloring sheet or two -- I found some nice ones of people in native dress for lots of different countries (these are the kind you color online) and a site that has lots of cultural coloring pages. We'll talk about the letter J, too, and the sound it makes. We may do a coloring sheet of J words also.

I'm going to have my son (7) build something from the book out of Legos -- a carp, perhaps, or a building of some sort. He will be practicing his handwriting with some sentences about Japan. Also, there are some word searches here that he likes to do.

I'm looking for a recipe of some sort that we can make, particularly one my son can read and follow. Or, we may make our own recipe and write it out so we can remember it for another time. We may have a Japanese meal (everyone eating on the floor) although my kids are not what you'd call adventurous eaters. At any rate, we're planning to spend a week on Japan before moving on to China.

A Reader is Born -- I mean Made

2010-06-03T08:20:00.007-05:00

I brought this book home from the library, thinking my son might be interested in it as a read-aloud for bedtimes. After much cajoling, he let me read the first chapter, just to see if it would be any good.

Boring, Mom. No dice.

However, after lights-out, my husband caught him in his closet, reading it by flashlight. Normally, we'd just consider this a highly advanced attempt at staying up later, but he went on and on about how good it was, how funny, how he just wanted to read it a little bit longer, just another minute, just ONE MORE .... come ON!

not my kid, but cute, eh?

Next morning he got up early and finished it.

For months I've been waiting for a "breakthrough" for him -- that shift between the labor of decoding text and the joy of reading a story. It has been a slow process. Decoding is so much more work for him than it was for his older sister. He skips words, he skips whole lines, he's so focused on spelling out each word, he sometimes loses the thread of the story. He has consistently been at least 5 months behind where his sister was at the same age.

Now, I want to tell you that it would have been easier for Bookivore to just say, "Well, I guess he's not going to be much of a reader" and let it slide. Que sera, sera. Sing it, Doris.

But Bookivore knows that readers are MADE, not BORN. And reading takes work. And patience. And repetition. And repetition some more. And eventually, you will see improvement. But it may take a while. It may take much longer than you're comfortable with. I know I passed comfortable about 4 months ago.

Finally, we're seeing results. But know this: he still skips words, still skips lines, still misses really crucial parts of the story -- after reading The Dragon in the Sock Drawer, he couldn't tell me the dragon's name or how they finally got the egg open. So obviously we have more work to do. But the motivation is there, and it wasn't there before, so that's a step in the right direction.

Here are some other steps I'm going to take:

I'm having his eyes checked at his physical this summer. I think they're OK, but it's best to be sure.
I'm having him summarize (verbally) everything he reads so I can get a sense of what he's understanding from the story.
I'm still making him read aloud to me, for the same reason.
I'm encouraging him to use his finger to follow the text as he reads so he doesn't skip things.
I'm talking through the Good Reader's Habits as we read.

And I'm keeping at it.

The Silver Spoon For Children

2010-05-29T08:27:00.001-05:00

Bookivore is always looking for ways to help her children enjoy foods that are real; i.e. not shaped into a nugget first and then fried into oblivion. The children, naturally, resist. But this book, this book just might give them the nudge they need to start seeing food as, well food, rather than spending whole meals accusing me of trying to kill them with vegetables.

The Silver Spoon for Children is delightful. It's loaded with luscious recipes and even more loaded with cooking technique -- how to chop, dice, slice, whip....it even gives a little background on Italian cooking.

While the dishes are photographed, the instructions are all meticulously illustrated. They made me think of the kind of field guides you'd find in a nature book. They're child-friendly without being patronizing. You feel like you're reading a 'real' cookbook, and you are.

The recipes cover a range of things, from classics like spaghetti and tomato sauce to risotto and caprese salad (which I noticed was light on the basil -- definitely something that would have a high ick-factor for my kids). But it also covers snacks , lunches, and, most importantly, desserts. I liked that it wasn't gimmicky -- no cartoon characters, no celebrities, just yummy food.

I can't vouch for the recipes, whether they work or taste great, but they look yummy and I am itching to try them. This strikes me as a great gift for a child who's just old enough to truly help out in the kitchen and is eager to make stuff herself (or himself, for that matter). It might also be fun as a summer project, teaching your child or children to make a few things that fall within their ability level.

The cover price is $19.95, but Amazon has it for $13.39 online and it would be worth checking with your public library -- they often have awesome collections of cookbooks. And what the heck, it might even get them to try something new.

Hot Town, Summer in the City

2010-05-27T09:15:00.001-05:00

Bookivore doesn't like to have kids wandering around aimlessly all summer. It's bad for their brains. More importantly, it's bad for my sanity. So for the last few summers I have done something that if it were really structured and thought-out would be called Home School, but since I am just sort of winging it, we call it "Lessons."

Generally, I pick a theme of some sort and go wherever that takes me. One year we did the Ocean, one year it was the Rainforest, another year we did the Desert. However, aside from the ocean unit, which I devoted a ton of energy and thought to, the last few summers have suffered from a lack of cohesion. We'd start out like gangbusters, then gradually the challenge of engaging children with widely separated ages and abilities would get to be too much and we'd just decide to skip lessons and go to the pool.

Not so this year. I found a wonderful study program that lends itself to all three kids. I can plug in as many additional activities as I want, or just roll with it as written.

It's called Passport to the World and you can find it here. Not only does it have an impressive and comprehensive book list, it also provides sample lessons for most of the books and printable "passports" for kids to record the places they visit through literature.

What I like about it is that it's literature based. Each lesson revolves around a book, which we will find at one of our public libraries (I already checked and only 5 books on the list aren't available. I will make a decision later about whether I want to buy them or find an acceptable substitute that we can check out).

By virtue of the books selected, it's geared toward 4-8 year olds, which just barely covers the span of my kids' ages. It will be a little tough for the almost-4-year-old and a little easy for the almost-9-year-old, but I think with the right activities it can work and be fun.

The point is to "visit" other countries and cultures through the medium of books and I thought it would be fun to do both the activities in the lesson plans and also add a few of my own -- like maybe earning enough money to buy a goat for an African family, planting squash, cooking soba noodles or cornmeal porridge. Whatever pops into my head. One of the books is about releasing birds to make wishes, so maybe we could make origami birds -- there are lots of good tutorials for that sort of thing online. Our big, downtown farmers' market has lots of multicultural food booths, so we may take a little field trip down there some Saturday, or we could visit a specific ethnic restaurant. I can also add on things I want my kids to work on over the summer like handwriting and math and of course, we'll be reading.

I figure we can do one book a week with several activities or two books a week with one or two activities. That should last us easily through the summer. The goal is to spend about an hour each time, including reading and activities, about 2-3 times per week.

It's low pressure, it has the potential for lots of interesting exploration and fun, it's multicultural, and it's mostly laid out for me already so the really hard work is done.

I'll let you know how it goes.

Mini Books: A Summer Reading Activity

2010-05-25T09:04:00.014-05:00

Summer is almost here! Have you got your summer reading plans in place? If not, here's an easy, high-interest way to get your kids reading. Start with a simple 2-up photo book. The one above is a cheapy from Target, but you can find them anywhere. Just make sure it's CHEAP, because it's going to become the property of your kids. I used some leftover stickers to do the title, but you could write it in with a sharpie or print something out and slip it in.

Next, you need some cardstock. I used scraps from my scrapbooking stash, but you can buy it from Hobby Lobby or Michaels. If you buy it for this purpose, get the 12x12 sheets: they cut down into an even number of 4x6 pieces, which is what you're going to do with them. I would recommend actually cutting them slightly smaller than 4x6 so they slide into the sleeves more easily, but 4x6 proper works as well, just a little tighter. Technically, you could skip this step if you use actual photo paper -- the idea here is to have something with more substance (and stiffness) than just typing paper.

Find some pictures on the Internet that your child is interested in. This book was for my nearly-4 year old daughter who is completely obsessed with bugs. There are many, many talented photographers out there posting images on the web. It's a simple matter to Google "Katydid images" or "dump truck" images, or "red-eyed tree frog images" and get tons of great results. As long as they're not copyrighted, you can right-click on them and paste them into another program. I use powerpoint because I think it's pretty flexible -- it lets you move things around on the page so you can maximize your paper usage. I am all about maximizing my paper usage. But you could use Microsoft Publisher or Word, too.

Do use better quality paper with a higher mil rating. Not photo paper, but printer paper with more thickness to it. Thinner paper tends to buckle under the moisture from ink-jet printers and the colors tend to bleed through the back, making the whole picture look a little muddy. Better quality paper will give you crisper pictures. I use a paper with a 4.9 mil rating. If your paper doesn't show a mil rating, like my HP Multipurpose paper that I let the kids mess with, it's probably too thin.

When you get your pictures into a document, size them to fit your 4x6 mats -- about 3.5x5.5 is right. You can do this by grabbing the corners and pulling in or out, or right clicking on the image, selecting "Format Object" from the drop-down menu, and clicking on the size tab. Then just enter the dimensions you want. If you have to make an image a lot bigger, your going to get that pixelly look, so try to avoid really small pictures.

Add a text box and type in a caption for your picture. I used the names of the bugs. Change the text to white if necessary. You want it to show up clearly against the image. For younger children and beginning readers, use a larger font -- at least 24 point, but even bigger if you can fit it in. You want it large enough that their eyes can follow it. I used 36 point font on my book. Make sure you choose a simple font, like Times New Roman or Arial. Fancy, curly fonts are hard for little eyes to interpret.

Get you some glue. Don't use Elmer's white or school or gel glue: it's got a ton of water in it and will make your paper pucker. Glue sticks work fine. I couldn't find my craft glue stick, so I had to resort to scrapping glue. Normally I wouldn't use this, but it's all I could find.

Mount your pictures on your cardstock. This is so they don't get creased and bent when little hands are looking at the book. Again, you could use heavy photo paper, but it's so expensive, I prefer to do it this way.

Slide your pictures into their sleeves.

Note: if the plastic seams on your cheapo photo book split (mine did in the first 10 minutes my daughter was "reading" it) just use a little clear packing tape to repair them.

Sit down with your child and read 'her' book. Kids love these books and they really motivate them to read because they're so intensely personal. As soon as my older two saw the baby's book, they both said "What kind of book are you going to make for me?" You can adapt it in dozens of ways, for any age child. Choose stuff your child is interested in: trucks, frogs, trees, ocean creatures, puzzles, space, farms, baseball, soccer, the NFL or NBA, a particular sports team. You can make an alphabet book of weather, or flowers, or ballet moves. The list is practically endless.

For older kids, print off a bunch of pictures of a family event or pet and have them write the story to go with it. This summer I am printing off 15-20 pictures of our puppy and then my oldest daughter (9) is going to write the story of how we got her, how silly she is, and how she's changed our family. You could also use pictures from a family vacation or from a sport -- like pictures from your child's soccer season: s/he could tell the story of the skills they worked on and the games they played. My son (7) is going to do 9 pictures from a family trip we took in February. He'll write 2 sentences for each picture. Or they could make a book of friends, describing each one. In this type of set up, you put a picture in one sleeve and leave a blank or lined sheet in the other for the child to write on. Then they can read their story to you or to younger siblings.

Here's a really low-tech version of the same project, completed on a day when I was desperate to entertain my 3 year old. I used 4x6 scraps of cardstock, punched with a hole-punch and tied with string.

Then I let her stick stickers in the book and wrote a little text on each page. This book is a little beat up because it got carried everywhere for about 2 weeks.

Excuse my goofy handwriting. I was desperate. Also, please excuse my messy counter. I'm lazy.

Books like this are great projects for a summer day and keep kids reading and writing. The writing is a nice addition because it helps kids synthesize an event or activity. It also helps them prioritize events as they try to tell the story. Writing also helps them with hand-eye coordination and fine-motor skills. All good brain-builders.

Later this week I'm going to share what we're going to be doing this summer to keep our brains from melting into puddles of goo, but while you're waiting, don't forget to check out these reading incentives -- they start this week.

I'm linking this post to A Soft Place to Land for DIY Day and to Just A Girl for Show and Share Day AND to Fireflies and Jellybeans for Show Off Your Stuff Day.

That Rabbit Belongs to Emily Brown

2010-05-23T01:36:00.002-05:00

I picked this up at the Scholastic Warehouse Sale for my almost-4 year old and it has become an instant favorite. That Rabbit Belongs to Emily Brown is written by Cressida Cowell, of How to Train Your Dragon fame; like those books, this one has a little edge and quite a lot of humor.

Emily Brown and her rabbit, Stanley, have many adventures. So many, that they catch the eye of the queen, who immediately decides she wants Stanley (or Bunnywunny, as she insists on calling him) for herself. She sends the army, the navy, even the air force, begging, bribing and finally commanding Emily Brown to turn him over. Naturally, Emily refuses. At last, the "silly, naughty queen" sends her special commandos to steal Stanley in the night.

Emily storms the castle, rescues the now-pink Stanley -- "His name is not Bunnywunny!" -- and explains to the queen the secret of creating a real toy of her own.

Emily is strong and likable, the plot is funny with lots of opportunity for silly accents if you're into that sort of thing for your bedtime reading, and the illustrations by Neal Layton are a nice blend of collage and sketch and watercolor. Having read it every night for the last week, I can tell you that it hasn't gotten old for me yet, which is a good thing, because my daughter shows no signs of letting it go anytime soon.

A great book for any child with a special "lovey." It's been around for a while, so it may be at your public library. Otherwise, snag a paperback at your local Scholastic Warehouse Sale. It's a cutie.

The Hidden Boy

2010-05-21T03:51:00.002-05:00

"When Bea Flint opened the front door, just a few days before her little brother imploded, she found a stocky man in a sea captain's uniform waiting on the doormat. "

I am a sucker for a good opening line; that one starts things off with a nice off the wall touch. The Hidden Boy, by Jon Berkeley, just gets weirder, but in a unique, inspired sort of way.

Imploding brothers aside, Bea and her family are not your average bunch. Her mother is a tattoo artist, her father is a mountain who used to ride with a motorcycle gang. And then there's Clockwork Gaby, who needs to be wound every day to keep functioning. No one know where she came from: she was simply there when they moved into the apartment. Granny Delphine stares at everyone through her owlish spectacles, which Bea suspects show more than they ought. Add to this the semi-kidnapped neighbor's daughter, several people with some sort of psychic powers, a presumed-dead leader, a missing parrot, and a clan of menacing, dough-faced burglars and you have a recipe for a highly original, can't-tell-where-it's-going-next sort of book.

When Theo disappears on the "crossing" to Bell Hoot, only Bea can hear his voice, first through the "Squeak Jar" and then in her dreams. Bea, it turns out, may be the only one who can find Theo and bring him home. This turns out to be very complicated indeed, especially since someone sinister is invading her dreams, searching just like Bea for the Hidden Boy, who may or may not be Theo.

I loved that this book was so different than the average run of kids' fantasy books. That the fantasy is rooted in the real world simply added to the mystery. I especially loved the Gummint (for which, read: government) men and their shadowy persecution of Mumbo Jumbo, the powers of observation and intuition that Granny Delphine has studied for years. The book plays with language; everything from the anagrams that Phoebe (or Blue Hope) fiddles with (even Bell Hoot turns out to be an anagram), to the descriptions of the countryside and the strange people Bea and her family are encountering.

A good one for middle school or junior high, possibly a little younger as well if your child likes fantasy.

Super Steals at the Scholastic Warehouse Sale

2010-05-19T01:18:00.001-05:00

I have blogged before about my love affair with the Scholastic Warehouse Sale. If you live in an area that has a Scholastic warehouse, they put on a couple of these sales each year, sometimes more often. The deals you can find are tremendous -- good enough that if I were within an hour of a warehouse, I would make the trip. Ours is running right now and we had a great time there on Saturday, sifting through the shelves.

For my baby, I picked up this darling book:

It was $2.50. Pretty good deal for a nice paperback.

I got both of Suzanne Collins' Hunger Games books, in hardback, for $9 each. These are $18 books and I got them half off. Score!

My son chose this Pokemon book. Normally, I hate to pay money for this sort of thing, but since it was half off, I caved. Everything you ever wanted to know about Pokemon for $4. He was happy.

My son also chose a book called Real Life Monsters, which I can't find a picture of, but it's 48 pages of sharks, scorpions, jellyfish and spiders -- basically anything that can kill or maim you, or gross out your mom. It's packed with information and cost us $4.

My older daughter chose the boxed set of Dragon Princess books. Three paperbacks for $8. That's a deal. It also came with a dragon charm, which she was ga-ga over.

We also picked up the most recent 39 Clues book, Emperor's Code, for $6.50. That's half off the cover price, in case you're wondering. The next cheapest price I could find for this was $7.29 at Amazon before shipping.

A couple of reminders:

Paperbacks are of variable quality. Some are really cheaply bound. The ones that have staples along the spine usually fall apart pretty quickly. I would pass on those unless they're free. Trust me on this: you will be spending a lot of time trying to reattach pages with packing tape, which is both Not Very Fun and Not Very Effective.

Not everything is 50% off; some new releases are only 25% off, but the staff will usually provide you with a printed list of which books aren't half off, so you can pick and choose around them. They have a great selection of books to choose from and we never fail to get some bargains. You can also plan ahead: for instance, I know that Mockingjay, the third Hunger Games book, is coming out in August. I will check it out from the library so I don't die of suspense wondering what happens to everyone, but I will wait until the December Warehouse Sale to buy it.

Half off, naturally.

The Hunger Games Series

2010-05-15T03:04:00.004-05:00

Quite often I read two books at the same time; one I keep upstairs for reading at bedtime or while I'm blow drying my hair (I hold the book open with my toes and dry my hair more or less upside down) and the other I keep downstairs for reading during the odd moments that I'm not doing something else. This only works, however, if the two books are about equally interesting. When I started Suzanne Collins' The Hunger Games, it was my downstairs book. But then it started migrating upstairs with me, and then I just had to stop everything and finish it because it was just. that. good.

Collins is a veteran writer and I greatly enjoyed her Gregor the Overlander books, so I expected this one to be good. I did not expect to be carried away by it to the point that I almost couldn't bear to make dinner because I was frantic to find out what happened next.

Katniss Everdeen lives in a post-apocalyptic North America in which the the country has been divided into 13 districts, all subjugated by The Capitol. Except for District 13, which has been obliterated by the Capitol in reprisal for their rebellion. As part of their subjugation, each district must send tributes -- a boy and girl between the ages of 12 and 17 -- to participate in the Hunger Games each year. Games in which the tributes must fight to the death. By this means does the Capitol exercise its power over the districts. This year, Katniss's 12 year old sister, Prim, is chosen. Unhesitatingly, Katniss volunteers to take her place.

The rest is a roller coaster ride of strategy, stylists, ambushes, alliances and lots and lots of death. I'm not going to explain the details, only say that once Katniss enters the arena, I defy you to put this book down until you've seen it through to the end. There are classical echos here: it brings to mind the Athenian tributes sent to face the Minotaur, and the gladiators who fought each other in ancient Rome. Many of the characters have Latin names, so the parallel isn't accidental. The entire society of the Capitol is a bizarre blend of frivolity and violence -- one minute people are dying their hair purple and tattooing themselves, the next they're screaming for blood during the games.

The second book, Catching Fire, which deals with uprisings throughout the districts, is even more absorbing than the first, which makes it breathtakingly good. Unfortunately, I now have to wait until August -- AUGUST! -- for the third book, Mockingjay, to come out. I'm not sure I can make it that long.

They are violent books -- the premise is such that they can hardly be anything else -- but there's real poignancy and pathos in most of the deaths. And beyond the violence, the books are thought-provoking in a timely way. The terrible waste of life and the terrible cruelty of the Capitol serve as backdrop for Katniss's coming of age, in which she is forced to weigh issues many people never face. At what point does life become so terrible that rebellion is preferable to living? These are for Junior High and up, because of their violent nature, but don't let the violence cause you to pass these by. They are truly, among the best books I've ever had the good fortune to read.

Summer Reading Incentives

2010-05-13T10:42:00.003-05:00

Summer's just around the corner. Have you thought about how you're going to keep your kids reading through the no-school months? Here's a quick suggestion:

Both Barnes and Noble and Borders Books and Music are running Summer Reading Programs for kids 12 and under. Kids read a set number of books --8 for Barnes and Noble, 10 for Borders -- and fill out their titles on a downloadable form. They take the form into a store and Presto! They get to choose a free book from the store's list.

To access Barnes and Noble's form and list of free books, go here.

To access Border's form and list, go here.

Forms may also be available at your local stores. Note that these programs are for kids who are reading independently (more or less). In other words, don't sign up your preschooler. These are great programs to encourage kids to read, and great ways to build your home library.

Good Reader's Habit #6: Synthesis

2010-05-05T02:38:00.001-05:00

My son asked me what I was writing about, and when I told him "Synthesis," he was convinced this had something to do with Star Wars (doesn't everything?).

Sorry, kiddo.

Synthesis is the coming together of all the other habits: the connecting, the visualizing, the questioning and predicting, the inferring, and the determining of importance. Synthesis is when you've done all those things and they've linked together in your brain to give you whole new ideas.

Notice in the image above how the colors, by overlapping, create new colors. In effect, synthesis is growing your brain, creating new scaffolds on which to hang still more information. It's the moment when it all comes together, makes sense, crystallizes, gels -- your A-Ha! moment. The a-ha moment can be monumental (you want to move to Ethiopia and help people build wells for clean water) or very small (you realize that you would have handled the situation differently). It can be an observation about human (or non-human) behavior, a observation about patterns, a generalization about how similar situations might play out, or a lesson that you draw from the story. It may simply make you want to rush out and tell other people about the book. Synthesis is a varied as the people experiencing it.

Can it be taught? Kind of. You can't really force someone to have a realization, an a-ha moment. But, it can be encouraged and it can be modeled. By helping kids develop the other six habits, you increase their chances of achieving the a-ha moment. And when you're reading something to them, particularly something longer and more complex, modeling your own a-ha moment is helpful. It tells kids that this is what they're shooting for, this is desirable behavior, a desirable result, of reading.

When you have an a-ha moment while reading, talk through it with your child. Explain what led up to your realization. One way to spark conversation that might lead to an a-ha moment is to have your child think about what the story makes them want to do...or what it makes them think about...or what has changed in the way they see themselves or the world.

Kids express synthesis differently. My 8-year old has an a-ha moment with virtually every book she reads: The Mysterious Benedict Society had her strapping a pail to her waist and climbing trees for 2 weeks straight. Just this week she read ER Vets and now she wants to be a veterinarian. She's been giving the dog physicals all week. My son, on the other hand, rarely has this kind of a-ha moment and if you asked him what he felt motivated to do after reading something, he'd tell you "Nothing. Whatever." I am not overly concerned about this because a) he's 6, b) he's kind of private about his feelings, and c) he's not reading anything earth-shattering right now. I don't really expect him to draw great life inspiration from Captain Underpants.

Don't sweat it if you read something that doesn't have an a-ha moment -- not everything is going to rock your world and cause your brain to double in size. But do encourage reflection, do talk about what the story might make them want to do or what it makes them realize. And keep modeling your own motivations and realizations as you go along.

Classic Monday: Dear Zoo

2010-05-03T01:37:00.000-05:00

Here's a super cute book that kids adore: Dear Zoo, by Rod Campbell, is a lift-the-flap book about a child who writes to the zoo asking them to send a pet. The zoo sends an elephant, but "He was too big. I sent him back." Next comes a lion, but "He was too fierce. I sent him back." Later comes a camel, unfortunately "He was too grumpy. I sent him back."and so on.

The text is spare, the pictures are simple, and the flaps are medium-sized for smaller hands. Kids memorize this one quickly and take great delight in finishing the sentences. It's appropriate for babies right through the toddler years and makes a great baby shower gift for parents-to-be.

Good Reader's Habit #5 -- Determining Importance

2010-04-30T01:01:00.005-05:00

Good readers, we now know, have habits that make them better at reading. They make connections, they visualize, they question and predict, and they make inferences about what they're reading. Today we're going to look at another habit: determining importance.

When we read, we need to have an idea of what's important in the story. At first, this isn't a critical need -- stories for very young children are simple and the focus of the story is usually clear. But as children get older, stories become more complex. They begin to have extensive detail, subplots, themes, symbolism...all that stuff that made you run screaming from English class in high school. But, if you teach your child how to determine what's important in the story, chances are you can keep the screaming to a minimum.

My 3rd grader recently had to read the opening chapters of Dear Austin, a book about the underground railroad, and pull out 3 important details. She had to do this without really knowing what was going to happen next in the book. In this sense, she was predicting, but in another sense the exercise forced her to examine how the author wrote to try to figure out if any weight was being given to particular details, details which might be central to the story.

In the first few chapters we learn that 1. Levi has been left behind when his family went to Oregon because he was ill. 2. His friend, Jupiter, is the son of former slaves. 3. Levi hates dancing. 4. Levi lives with a guardian, Miss Amelia. 5. Levi is often in trouble for boyish pranks. 6. Jupiter never speaks and that some people say he saw something terrible when he was a baby that scared the voice right out of him. 7. Levi has a friend named Possum. 8. Jupiter has a sister named Darcy who sings all the time.

Now we have to weigh that information. We know quite a bit about Levi and his life, but what qualifies as important? What's going to impact the story later on? Even without having read the book, you can guess from the above list that points 2 and 6 are likely to be important to the rest of the story. Partly we know this because we have wide experience with books --we know how a book is 'set up' and we can guess where it might be taking us. We gather clues from the back cover, from things our teacher or parent says, from the cover picture, and we use that to help filter and rank the details as they come in. Also, we can guess at their importance because the author devotes just a skosh more description to them than to the other pieces of information she gives us. And, those things seem the most likely ones that you could build a story around. We sense that there's a deeper mystery here to Jupiter's silence.

One way to thinkk about this is to consider which details you would include if you had to tell someone about a book. What details of the plot would you include? As soon as you can, even with picture books, get your child to re-tell you the story. This helps them with their ability to pull out the plot of the book. Keep doing this as the books get longer and more complex. Talk about the details of the book and try to figure out which might be most important to the story. Look at the cover, the back cover, the pictures in the book -- in picture books, the most important parts of the story are usually the ones that are illustrated. In a sense, you are determining importance backwards: you read the story and then decide what was critical. BUT, this is fine because it gives kids a picture of how books work, how details contribute to the overall story. Eventually, they'll develop a sense of which details are likely to be important and be able to predict with a fair amount of accuracy.

Determining importance is easy to do with a good writer. Good authors will often spend more time on important details -- describing a place or person very thoroughly -- if they're going to figure prominently later in the book. They tend to spend less time on minor characters and unimportant details. Also, they'll often repeat things that are important or contribute to the theme.

Now, this is where Bookivore has to tell you the ugly truth about books. Just because it's in a bookstore with a nice shiny cover and some good press on the back doesn't mean it's well written. The same is true of textbooks. In fact, a study about 20 years ago concluded that some of the worst written books out there, in terms of clarity, were textbooks.

If your child is struggling with determining importance, it may be that the writing really isn't that good. As a parent, it's your job to get in there and read it with them to help them figure out what's important. This is particularly true with textbooks. Never assume that because your district has purchased it that it's the best thing since sliced bread.

Learning to determine importance is a process; don't be discouraged if your child doesn't get it right away. My 3rd grader, who is a very proficient reader, was completely stumped by her Dear Austin assignment. But that's okay: it was a teaching moment. And now, when she encounters a similar assignment, she'll have that experience to fall back on.

Next Up: Good Reader's Habit #6: Synthesis

Learning to Get Along

2010-04-27T00:00:00.001-05:00

I really like this series. We got the first three books ages ago when they comprised the whole series, but now it's grown to about 15 books, covering topics like politeness, sharing, empathy, safety, fears, anger, listening, acceptance, giving, and participation. The author, Cheri Meiners, is a former elementary educator who now teaches at the university level. She does a nice job of breaking these topics down so they're approachable for the preschool/kindergarten set.

Pictures are bright and nicely rendered. They do an especially good job of conveying emotions through facial expressions. Also, the pictures are very multicultural: the central character of Understand and Care is Asian; Be Polite and Kind's central character is Latino. Other books do a similarly good job of including children of many races.

These books are also good ones for starting conversations about feelings, reactions, other people's feelings, behaviors...just about anything you might need to talk to your 2-6 year old about. My almost-4-year-old loves Understand and Care; she enjoys identifying how people feel from their facial expressions and we spent some time talking about what you might say to someone who felt afraid or sad or angry. Such a great springboard to talking about and teaching empathy -- how do other people feel? How can you use your imagination to figure out what they're feeling? We've been having a lot of tantrums around here lately, so Cool Down and Work Through Anger is looking like a good title for us to pick up. And we've been talking about blessing other people, so Reach Out and Give might be another possibility.

These may be available at your public library -- ours carries the first three titles -- and they're all available in paperback through your favorite bookseller. It might even be worth checking your church library, as they were popular with churches when they first came out.

Images courtesy of BarnesandNoble.com

Magazines for Kids

2010-04-25T00:00:00.003-05:00

Access to books is a critical aspect of cultural capital. But equally important is exposure to a range of texts and formats -- it allows children to transfer the skills they learn reading fiction to other mediums, and adapt them to works of different format and lengths.

Magazines are a great way to give kids experience with different kinds of texts -- poems, non-fiction articles, short stories, song lyrics.

Back in the stone age, when Bookivore was a kid, there was one magazine for kids: Highlights. That was it, folks. Now there is a veritable feast of magazines for children, some quite excellent, some just thinly-veiled advertisements for products, TV shows and movies. Highlights is still a favorite at our house: it's far more colorful than what it was when I was a kid, and nicely multicultural too, teaching about Diwali, Ramadan, Chinese New Year and a host of other cultural celebrations and traditions. The magazine works hard at promoting good values and good behavior, which it does this from a sense of fair play rather than from any particular belief system. It's a nice blend of fiction, non-fiction, poetry, comic strips and puzzles that appeals to kids from 3 to 10.

A nice addition to the Highlights stable is High Five, their magazine for 2-5 year olds. The text is much simpler, pictures are larger and fill the pages. It has the same focus on good morals, though the message is obviously greatly simplified. One lovely feature of both these magazines is no advertising.

I absolutely love these next three, put out by the National Wildlife Federation: Ranger Rick (at the top of this post) Your Big Backyard, and Wild Animal Baby.

Like the two Highlights magazines, the NWF's offerings are stepped for different age groups. Ranger Rick is for ages 7 and up, though for independent reading your child might need to be a little older. Your Big Backyard is for 3-7 year olds, and Wild Animal Baby is for 1-4 year olds.

One nice feature about Wild Animal Baby is that it comes in a board book format of heavier cardboard, rather than flimsy magazine pages. It's perfect for little hands to hold. The photography in all these magazines is fantastic and the range of articles is impressive -- whatever animals your little ones like, they'll show up eventually in these pages, one way or another. Another blessing: no ads to disrupt your reading.

National Geographic Kids is another one we get, but I would be lying if I said it was a favorite. It was a gift, otherwise I'd cancel my subscription. I find the layout overly busy and it's loaded with ads for candy and video games. Additionally, it contains feature articles on movies -- special effects, actor interviews, etc. Not strictly National Geographic stuff -- more along the lines of paid endorsements. In and among the plugs are some interesting articles about animal rescues, critter cams, and habitats, but it's pretty buried in junk. Ostensibly for 6-14 year olds, but I can't see kids sticking with it that long.

Another one for 2-6 year olds that gets good reviews is Ladybug. It's colorful and full of stories, poems. The publishers also have a magazine called Babybug, which is made of heavy stock like Wild Animal Baby. They also publish one called Click! which is geared more towards science and nature.

Of a similar nature is Spider, which is for 6-9 year olds. It includes stories, poems, articles and illustrations from around the world.

For older kids, there are magazines about science, like Odyssey.

And magazines about world history, like Calliope.

If you have a sports nut, Sports Illustrated for Kids might be a good choice. Parents rated this one very highly because it focuses on the positive achievements of athletes and their good sportsmanship, rather than on their questionable activities and sexual antics. One word of caution here would be that kids may assume the adult version of SI is okay because of their exposure to SIKids. Obviously the articles in SI are going to burst some bubbles, so that's something to consider.

Appleseeds is a magazine full of non-fiction and social studies articles for kids ages 7-9. Each issue covers a particular theme: Becoming President, Whiz Kids, Unusual Structures, Halloween. Rather a narrow age range, but the content makes it of use in giving kids experience with non-fiction text.

Ask is for 7-10 year olds covering science, inventions, recipes, web activities, projects, and other activities. Each issue is devoted to a particular theme -- water, camouflage, migration, the musical brain, etc.

Cricket has been around since the '70s and is another publication that celebrates fiction, though this time from established, even classical writers like Shakespeare, Robert Frost, Shel Silverstein, and Lloyd Alexander. It also includes games and puzzles. It's geared for 9-14 year olds.

This is really just a sampling. There are many more publications for kids, of varying quality: American Girl Magazine, Kids Discover, Boy's Life, Cobblestone, Girl's Life, Disney Princess, Dig, Nick Jr. Preschool Playroom. The list goes on and on.

Before subscribing, go to your library and see what these magazines offer -- look at several issues, if possible, to get a sense of the kind of content they regularly offer. Be leery of magazine that contain a lot of ads: they really will encourage your kids to pester you for Yogos, or whatever. And if the subscription prices seem too high, remember that magazine subscriptions make excellent birthday and Christmas gifts from Grandma and Grandpa. All of our subscriptions have been gifts and they are very much appreciated.

Images courtesy of Amazon.com and National Wildlife Federation

Happy Earth Day: Pond Circle

2010-04-22T12:27:00.007-05:00

In honor of Earth Day, here's a book for the preschool/kindergarten set that clarifies, very simply and beautifully, the circle of life in a pond. Pond Circle, by Betsy Franco, is written on a "This is the House that Jack Built" model: "This is the algae, the jade green algae," and "This is the skunk, the shy striped skunk," etc. Each animal depends on the others for food, and they all depend, directly or indirectly, on the algae, which is the foundation of the whole pond.

If there were no algae, there would be no mayfly nymph; without the nymph, there would be no diving beetle; without the beetle, no frogs would eat, and so on through snakes and owls and raccoons until at last we meet the stalking coyote. At the very back of the book are a couple pages with more facts about each animal or plant in the story.

Love the pictures on this one; they're either painted on wood or painted to look like wood grain, the grain itself suggesting the ripples in the pond water or the eddying colors of a sunset. Pictures are all on 2-page spreads, very large and colorful, making this a good choice for a group read-aloud. This one will play especially well with preschoolers because of its engaging rhythm and repeated word patterns.

The publisher says this one is good from age 4 up through 3rd grade, but I doubt you'd find many 9 year olds wanting to read it. On the other hand, I bet they'd listen in if you were reading it to a younger child. A nice book to introduce children to the idea of the interconnectedness of our environment.

Images courtesy of BarnesandNoble.com

Mexican Whiteboy

2010-04-22T01:25:00.002-05:00

This one took some getting into. It's a rough read -- the author, Matt De La Pena, more or less drops you into Danny Lopez' world without a lot of background. And Danny is a kid caught between two cultures, neither one of which feels precisely like home. Hence the title.

But it could have been called Mexican Blackboy just as easily, because the story passes back and forth between Danny, who is half white, half Mexican, and Uno, who is half Mexican, half black. Both long for their fathers: Uno to live with his, away from his abusive stepfather, and Danny just to find his, who's gone off the radar, possibly to Mexico.

I chose this one to review, not because it's new -- it's from 2008 -- but because it recently showed up on a list of books for reluctant readers and boys, which are sometimes the same thing. It has a lot of baseball stuff in it; Danny is a pitcher with a golden arm but he can't control his delivery in clutch situations. He is socially awkward, never feeling like he belongs. He is too dark, too Mexican for his San Diego prep school, and among his Mexican relatives in National City, he is too light. Also, he speaks no Spanish; he is completely left out of about 50% of their conversations. Still, he chooses to spend the summer with his Mexican family.

The language in this book is very coarse, but authentic. Having grown up in the Southwest and having attended a high school that was about 15% Hispanic, the characters' voices are true-to-life as I remember them, and having taught high school for 10 years, I can vouch for the swearing -- there's a lot of it, just as you'd hear in most high school corridors. There's also drinking, pot smoking, and drug dealing (talked about, not actually done). And there's poverty. Most of the people in National City are poor. And many of them are hopeless in their poverty.

The language was hard to get over, but there is much in this story to recommend it. I found myself really bleeding for Danny, who wants so much to know his dad and can't figure out what he did to make him leave. One possibility, he thinks, is that he's just not Mexican enough for his dad. His distress runs very deep. He has more or less quit talking, fading into the background. But at the same time, he's developed a habit of digging his fingernails into his forearm to remind himself he's human. He's done it so often, his arm is scarred. And he writes long, imaginary letters to his dad in his head; letters in which he tells his dad how successful he is, how popular. None of it is true: it's his deep, deep longing for his father to want him, to approve of him. His emptiness, his fractured spirit, got to me. I wanted to deck his stupid mom, gushing on and on about her new (white) boyfriend, the successful San Francisco businessman, while totally ignoring her son's pain, his utter lostness. Her selfishness was hard to take.

There's a subplot with a girl named Liberty, another "halfie" who speaks no English. It's part of Danny's oeuvre that he longs for her and yet can't communicate with her at all, both because he can't speak Spanish and because he can barely speak around people anyway. Danny does resolve some of his issues, both with Liberty and his dad (who (SPOILER ALERT) he discovers is actually in prison). It puts a different complexion on things to know his dad isn't staying away because he doesn't love him. However, before he figures out where his dad is, there's a scene of breathtaking violence in which Danny witnesses his uncle run a man down and then beat him senseless, and then run over him again, breaking his legs. It's meant to give Danny (and the reader) a glimpse into the psyche that landed his dad in jail, although Danny doesn't understand it that way yet -- he only knows that this violence somehow reminds him of his dad. Danny is so horrified, he vomits, and frankly, I got a little queasy myself. It's a powerful, visceral scene, not for the faint of heart.

I'm on the fence with this one. On the one hand, it's authentic, it's compelling, it's got real emotional depth and is an insightful portrait of what abandonment, divorce, and parental selfishness do to kids. On the other hand, it's authentic in the roughest possible way, and that isn't a pretty thing. So I'm going to be a weenie and not come down on either side of this one, except to say that it's a high school book ONLY -- no lower. And an upper high school book at that. It's rough, but it has its merits. Just be aware of what your child might be in for if this one pops up on a booklist and consider well whether your child has the maturity to deal with it.

Challenged Books

2010-04-20T08:01:00.000-05:00

Yahoo! News reported recently that Stephenie Meyer's Twilight books are now on the list of most frequently challenged books put out by the American Library Association.

In this, she joins the Harry Potter books (which actually fell out of the top ten most challenged books this year). I bring you this information for a particular reason.

If you have a tween girl, she has probably either read, or asked to read, the Twilight books. Yes, they are about vampires. Yes, there's a lot of sexual tension in the books, but the characters remain steadfastly chaste until they marry in book 4 and even then, nothing is explicitly described. Yes, they're somewhat violent. But really, in the greater context of young adult and teen lit, they're pretty tame. How do I know this?

I've read them.

Another perennial member of the ALA challenged list is The Color Purple. I read this one as a freshman in college about a million years ago when it was still new and fresh. It is a very good book, and I might be okay with a senior English class reading it, but probably not much lower. It's got some very brutal themes -- child rape, separation, lesbianism, abuse. Perhaps it's popping up in high schools because it's a handy book-movie combo.

Other challenged books are for younger kids, like one about two male penguins adopting a baby. This one is in many elementary libraries, possibly unbeknownst to district parents.

Now, I am not writing this to send you marching, insurgent-style, to your school libraries to demand the removal of these texts. You are certainly free to do that, but that's not my point. My point is this: you the parent, need to know what your child is bringing home to read, either from the library or from teacher-distributed texts in class.

Last year my kindergarten son brought home a book in which the charming little animal characters decided to conduct a seance. We sent that one back to the library after explaining to him that we didn't like stories about spooky, icky stuff like that. And of course, there was the incident with the middle school book assigned to my eight year old. In the nicest possible way, I objected to this book and my daughter didn't have to read it.

You don't get to be like this. Unless, of course, you don't care what your kids might be absorbing from what they read. Keep tabs on what they're reading, object in a nice way if you don't like it. Send library books back unread if they don't fit your geo-political or religious views. And always be nice, be nice, be nice.

You don't do anyone any favors if you act like a jerk.

Good Reader's Habit #4: Inferring

2010-04-18T00:11:00.004-05:00

Today you need to put on your Sherlock Holmes hat and pull out your magnifying glass. Or get out your CSI kit. Or your CSI Miami kit. Or whatever. Today we're going to play detective. Making Inferences is a lot like being a detective. It's also a lot like making predictions. However, when you make inferences you are making them about things in the present, rather than about the future. Another way to put it is to say that you are drawing conclusions about something.

We actually do this all the time, with varying degrees of accuracy. If you're in a conversation with someone talking about husbands and she suddenly bursts out crying, you may infer that something is wrong with her marriage. You may or may not be correct -- it could be something totally different -- but usually we try to fill in the gaps to better understand events or behaviors. The critical aspect here is that we follow some line of reasoning, some trail of evidence, that leads us to this conclusion.

Children make inferences, too. When they arrive home off the bus and Mom is standing in the doorway, hands on hips, tapping her foot and scowling, they may infer that she has discovered they left the lid off the hamster cage again and Mister Nibbles is loose in the house somewhere. Or they may infer that the principal called and she now knows about the gum incident on the bus that morning. Or they may just infer that she is mad about something and hope it's not something they've done.

Like detectives, we have to examine all the details and come up with a conclusion -- an inference -- that fits the evidence. The same is true in reading. Really good writers seldom tell you exactly how a character is feeling or explain the character's motives completely. We are left to figure all that out by ourselves, using the clues from descriptions and actions.

Wordless picture books rely almost entirely on making inferences to understand the story. Take Good Night Gorilla, by Peggy Rathman. The little gorilla is following after the zookeeper as he puts the animals to bed, but the little gorilla has gotten hold of the zookeeper's keys. What is he doing with the keys? The gorilla is pictured more than once with his finger to his lips, telling the audience "Shhh!" Why does he do this? Children can look at the pictures and infer 1) the little gorilla is letting the animals out, and 2) he doesn't want the zookeeper to know. It's up to the parent to pose the questions that allow the child to make those inferences. You are showing them both the evidence, and that there's something to be concluded from it.

Here's another scenario, one that's a little more complex in terms of the conclusions that can be drawn. In the book The Night Fairy Flory has been practicing her stinging spell. She has practiced it so much she is begining to change physically -- her chin and ears are growing sharper and pointier the more she practices. From this we can infer several things. Flory is practicing her stinging spell so often because she is afraid. She wants to protect herself, so she practices it a lot. We can also infer that growing pointy around the edges is probably not normal for a fairy. Flory is alone, except for Skuggle, who she knows would eat her if it weren't for her stinging ability. We can infer that she needs a friend who cares about her.

In picture books, draw your child's attention to the illustrations and ask questions to get at the characters' feelings or motives. In David Gets In Trouble, David tells his mother he wasn't responsible for taking the big bite out of the cake. However, since he's saying it with chocolate crumbs all over his face, get your child to make an inference: do you think he's telling the truth? (no) How can you tell he's lying? (he has crumbs all over him, he has cake on his mouth) Later, David fesses up. Ask: why do you think he told his mom the truth? (he felt bad, he felt guilty, he's sorry he lied, he's afraid she won't love him). Or just model the process for them: "Oh, David has crumbs all over his face -- I think he ate the cake and is telling a lie about it."

With older kids, stop the flow of the narrative and point out the evidence that leads you (and them, watching you) to a certain conclusion. "See, Edmund is trying to make himself seem more grown up, more like the older kids, by selling Lucy out. He's telling them Narnia was all a game -- lying about it -- so he can feel better and bigger than her." In about 3 seconds, you've traced the chain of evidence and drawn some conclusions about it.

This one, I'll freely admit, is trickier than the other habits because it requires a little more thought on the part of the parent. But it's a hugely important critical thinking skill that will serve them well in everything they read -- fiction and non-fiction alike.

Next Up: Good Reader's Habit #5: Determining Importance

When You Reach Me

2010-04-16T06:45:00.000-05:00

When You Reach Me is a book about surprises, but not necessarily the kind of suprises you'd expect, or even feel very comfortable with. Twelve-year-old Miranda lives in New York City with her single mom, she has a best-friend-since-babyhood in Sal, she likes her mom's boyfriend, she's content. And then, things start to fall apart.

First, there's a traumatic incident where Sal is hurt. After that, he refuses to see her. Their friendship, he tells her, is over. She has to explore new territory by navigating the world of girl friendships, something she's never bothered to do before. It's tricky. Then Miranda's apartment is broken into but nothing seems to have been stolen. Unsettling, weird. But not as weird as finding the notes.

The notes are unsigned and they tell her things that haven't happened yet. Are they from the future? Who is sending them? This mystery plays out against the backdrop of Miranda's normal, 'average' life -- the minefield of middle-school relationships, girl-rivalry, and tentative steps toward maturity. Somehow it's all linked together, but Miranda can't quite see how until a moment of utter clarity that comes to her at a taping of the $20,000 Pyramid.

Oh, I liked this book. I didn't realize it was the 2009 Newbery winner until I sat down to write this post, but having read it, I can see why it won. It resonated for me on so many levels, not least of which was the fact that the story takes place in 1979, when I myself was 13, so all Miranda's issues occur in a context that felt very familiar, right down to t-shirts with rainbows and Dick Clark hosting the Pyramid.

But beyond the middle-school stuff, it's got some elements of science fiction too: it's kind of like The Time Traveler's Wife Jr. -- there's some mind-blowing plot stuff that follows the same it-will-happen-because-it-already-has-happened logic. There are many references to Miranda's favorite book, the sci-fi children's classic A Wrinkle in Time, which adds more layers to the mystery. And when the mystery does become clear, it's one of those "ah-ha!" moments, closely followed by an "oh!" moment when you realize all the implications of what you've just realized.

Whew!

There's some mild swearing, a hell, a G-d, but nothing else, and although Miranda's mom has a boyfriend and there is prolonged discussion about whether he should be given a key to their apartment, things don't get more explicit than that and he never seems to sleep over. There's a little scene where Miranda imagines the evolution of man (which I remember still being taught in conjunction with creationism in 1979), but she's using it to try to gain some perspective on her troubles, not to hammer home any belief system.

It's middle school lit, it's sci-fi, it's tragedy, and yet it defies being placed in a narrow little category. Miranda's voice is compelling and the book ended up being a very fast read. It's good, people. Really good.

For 5th grade and up, maybe 4th grade although I think the subject matter might be a little over their heads. Seriously, don't miss this one.

Good Reader's Habit #3: Questioning and Predicting

2010-04-14T00:38:00.003-05:00

You wake up in the morning, already a little late. The sky is cloudy, even a little dark. You don't have time to catch the weather forecast so you grab your umbrella -- it looks like rain and you may as well be prepared.

In your head, you've just engaged in two behaviors that good readers often exhibit: questioning and predicting. You are wondering what the weather will be like, then you predict it might rain and prepare accordingly. This sort of thing is automatic -- you barely register it as conscious thought -- but some readers need a little push to engage in similar activities while they read.
I should say that technically, questioning and predicting are two separate habits, but they are closely linked, so I am including them together. Questioning is just that -- the reader poses questions about the text. The questions may be about anything: why is the character doing that? How fast can a whitetail deer run? What is behind the black door? Is the river going to flood? What does honeycomb feel like? How tall is Mt. Kilimanjaro?

Questions don't have to have set or specific answers; they're merely an indication that the reader is thinking more deeply about the text than just a surface read. Consider this: if your child is spending all of his or her time decoding the text (see the Quick Guide if you don't know what this means) then it's doubtful s/he is taking the time to think deeply about the content of the story. All his or her energy is going toward decoding and not toward comprehension. Questioning is a way to encourage that deeper thinking.

Somewhat similar is Predicting. Predicting is a way for the reader to become invested in the outcome of the story. As soon as your child makes a prediction about a story, s/he will immediately become more interested in finishing the story -- to see whether his or her prediction was correct. Good readers make lots of predictions, about both big and small things. Ever read a mystery novel? If you've ever thought "The parking garage attendant did it," or "It's going to be the sister-in-law," then you've engaged in predicting. And you can't wait to get to the end to see if you were right. And then you have to tell everyone you figured it out by the end of chapter 6.

It feels good when we predict correctly. Take the rain analogy from the beginning paragraph: if it doesn't rain, you'll shrug and say "well, at least I was prepared." but if it does rain, you'll think "HA! I knew it!" and you'll either be unbearably smug or quietly self-satisfied for the rest of the day.

Good readers make predictions about the story as they go along. Let's take one story and see how questioning and predicting might play out. Prince Caspian, by C.S. Lewis begins with a mystery. The Pevensie children have returned, they think, to Narnia, but nothing is familiar. The questions and predictions that follow cover the whole book, not just the opening mystery.

Questions: Where are the children? Why is everything unfamiliar? What has happened? Why is everyone afraid of the dwarves? How did Cair Paravel become an island? I wonder how hard it is to shoot a bow and arrow? I wonder what bear meat tastes like? What do dwarves really look like? Why does King Miraz want to kill Caspian? How will Caspian escape? What happened to Caspian's horse? Who is Dr. Cornelius really? Why can't anyone see Aslan but Lucy? How will she get them to follow her? Will the others ever see Aslan? I wonder if it would be scary to stand next to Aslan? What will they find in Aslan's How? What does a werewolf look like? Will the Penvensies go home to England?

Prediction: They are in Narnia, they just don't know it. Aslan is hiding from them because he's mad at them. They're going to find some bad guys in Aslan's How -- maybe some of Miraz's soldiers. Caspian's army will beat Miraz's. Susan is going to marry Prince Caspian. The Pevensies are going to stay in Narnia now.

This is just a short list -- and notice that the questioning list is much bigger and wider-ranging. Predictions are more specific and answerable.

Like any habit, this can be modeled by the parent. Find places in the text where you can ask questions -- remember, these can be anything; don't feel like you have to come up with something deep or profound, just roll with it. It's an expression of curiosity, not a doctoral dissertation. One of my all-time favorite questions which one of my kids asked one night when we were reading fairy tales was "What does porridge taste like?" It's all about curiosity. For predicting, just stopping periodically and asking "What do you think is going to happen?" is a good place to start. As you get comfortable with it, you can make your predicting questions more specific: "How do you think Frog will get Toad to wake up?" or "What do you think is wrong with Old Yeller?" or "Do you think Gregor is going to die at the end of Code of Claw?" The more you do it, the more skilled you will get at it, and the more you model it externally for your children, the more likely they will be to do it internally as they read.

Next Up: Good Reader's Habit #4: Inferring

Classic Monday: The Borrowers

2010-04-12T00:12:00.002-05:00

The Borrowers, by Mary Norton, is about tiny people, no bigger than dollhouse dolls, who "borrow" from the Human Beans. In fact, they're sure that the Human Beans are put on the earth simply to provide for borrowers. But the borrowers in this novel have fallen on hard times -- all the many little folk who used to live in the great country house have had to leave (or 'emigrate,' as one of them puts it) either for lack of food to borrow or because the worst of all fates has befallen them: they've been 'seen.'

All that's left are Pod, his wife Homily, and their daughter Arietty. They manage to eke out a living on scraps from the kitchen and other things they scavenge from the rest of the house, all the while avoiding the Human Beans. Until one day when Pod, on a borrowing mission upstairs, is 'seen' by an unexpected house guest -- a boy, the owner's nephew, who has been sent into the country to recuperate from an illness.

Fearful that their lives will be up-ended beyond recall, Pod and Homily finally tell Arietty, who is 12, about borrowing, the Human Beans, the whole world above their little hidey-hole under the floor in the kitchen. Arietty, tired of living underground where it's always dark, begs to be allowed to go borrowing. Her parents at first refuse: girls don't borrow (the story, after all, takes place at the end of the Victorian period), but finally they relent because, they realize, if anything were to happen to them, Arietty would be quite alone and unable to take care of herself.

On her first foray into the world upstairs, Arietty is herself 'seen' by the same boy, and far from being afraid, she is emboldened and even more curious. What follows is the story of how their relationship does turn everything topsy-turvy and nearly costs the Borrowers their lives.

There is an implication in the book that some of the Human Beans over indulge in alcohol -- this is how they explain away the sightings of the little people. It's glancingly handled, and went right over my 8 year old's head, but it's there. Most of the characters who are supposed to be drinking too heavily (and thus seeing tiny people where they shouldn't) are fairly unappealing people -- an their supposed drinking is also treated as a failing, not glorified in any way.

This is a great book for a read-aloud. The language is a little more formal than kids will be used to -- a product of an earlier era, but easy enough for an adult to navigate. Books like this really tune the ear do different rhythms and expose children to different syntax (word order) and sentence structures, all of which build cultural capital which will be important as they move up the grades.

More than that, it's a great story. If your child loved The Littles chapter book series, or has a thing for fairies, give this one a try. Much of the tiny-creature appeal is here as well, but on a more sophisticated level.

Good Reader's Habit #2: Visualize

2010-04-10T00:56:00.005-05:00

Whoa -- that's a little mind blowing, isn't it? But it has much to do with today's habit: visualizing as you read. So think of this as an inner eye.

Good readers, remember, are made, not born. Nurture is all, when it comes to reading. No one wakes up one morning, spontaneously able to read. And anyone can learn to read better. Kids are a blank slate here; you can mold their little brains into efficient, competent readers with only a few little tweaks in how you're doing things already.

Visualizing is simply picturing in your mind the events, settings and characters of a story as you read it. It's like showing a little movie in your head. Some kids do this very naturally, but it is easy enough to teach if you don't mind a little weirdness at the outset.

You, the parent, need to "think aloud" for the child and model the process of visualizing. You can't invite them into your head for popcorn and a flick, so you have to speak the movie to them, so they can see how it's done.

Visualizing doesn't become critical until children move away from picture books. In picture books, the visualizing is done for them. Every page visually represents the story for them. You can, however, use picture books to show how the action, characters and settings are reflected in the artwork. "Look, there's Mudge shaking all the water off his coat! Oh, now Henry is really wet!. Henry sure doesn't look happy." or "Oh look, there's the puffy white circle on Henry's hand. That's where the bee stung him. That sure looks like it hurts!" This also teaches kids to look at the pictures for cues and clues about the story. When they begin reading independently, they will naturally look to the pictures to help them comprehend the text.

Later, though, the pictures become few and far between. That's when true visualization has to step in and provide a clear inner picture of what's going on.

When I was reading How to Eat Fried Worms to my 6 year old, we read a scene in which the main character's mother makes a worm sundae. We took a minute to "build" the sundae in our minds -- first the ice cream scoops, then the marshmallow sauce, then the whipped cream, then the cherries on top, and on either end, the plump, fleshy head and tail of a nightcrawler sticking out. My son scrinched up his face and shuddered. It was sooooo gross! He had a very clear, mental image of that sundae, complete with the worm and that is good practice for when he has to picture something more complex, like the encounter between Harry Potter and the giant spiders in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, or the "confession" scene from The Scarlet Letter, or the living arrangements inside a Yurt, or the true nastiness of the winter at Valley Forge, or whatever -- the applications are endless.

It feels weird, at first, to stop the reading and talk through a mental image with your child. But it will feel more natural with a little practice. Don't feel like you have to do it for every facet of every book. Choose events or characters or settings that seem important to the story, or particularly colorful and start there. Or if something strikes you as particularly beautiful, try that. Or pick something that's unclear and work on picturing it together -- that's what good readers do when they aren't quite sure about something they've read; they go back and re-visualize it so they've got it clear in their heads. I think it's particularly helpful to take something unclear to you, the parent, and let your child listen to you talk through your visualizing process. It makes the point that everyone runs into reading snags from time to time, and here's one way to get out of them.

Visualizing dovetails nicely with Making Connections; it's easy to say something like "remember when we went to the zoo and the lions were out? I can just picture Aslan stalking around so silently, like that big lion we saw. Remember how big his teeth were? Can you just picture how much bigger Aslan's teeth must be?"

Next Up: Questioning and Predicting

Good Reader's Habit #1: Making Connections

2010-04-08T00:16:00.003-05:00

Good readers are made, not born.

Their parents read to them often, for longer periods of time, starting at an early age. They have access to children's books and magazines. They often have a wider experience with different types of print media. And they all display certain habits as they read; habits that increase their ability to understand and apply the text.

These habits, too, are learned. They may learn them from their teachers -- many schools teach these habits now as a matter of course. But the habits aren't so highly specialized that a parent can't model them at home. And this is the key: if you model the habits for your child, your child will learn to internalize them and will rely on them all his or her life to help deconstruct and understand text.

The first habit that good readers exhibit is Making Connections. This simply means that the reader finds a point of relationship between what s/he is reading now and something s/he experienced earlier.

Connections can be further broken down by type:

Text to Text: something the child reads reminds him of something he read or saw in another book, article or story, or an audio or video edition of a story.

My 3 year old and I were reading the book Marshmallow last night, which is a story about a cat and a bunny. In it, there's a picture of the cat curled up in a cardboard box. I pointed out to her that he looked just like the cat in another book of hers called Ginger. "Yeah!" she agreed. Connection made.

Text to Self: something the child reads reminds her of a previous personal experience. This can be anything -- a character that reminds her of someone she knows, a setting she has visited (or that is similar to one she has visited), a topic that reminds her of something she's done or seen.

My 6 year old read a book called Daniel's Mystery Egg, in which the egg turns out to be a lizard. When he saw the final illustration, my son commented that this lizard didn't look at all like his cousin's lizard. He was making a connection with his personal experience of lizards and at the same time widening his understanding of what a lizard can look like.

Text to World: this is similar to text-to-self, except that the child is reminded of something in the wider world, not just his personal experiences. This can include settings, themes or messages, or events.

My 8 year old just finished a report on Coretta Scott King and is now very aware of civil rights. When she read a story about South Africa that mentioned apartheid, she was able to make a connection between apartheid and the American civil rights struggle. Her understanding of both concepts was enhanced.

Connections are very important, and some children are more adept at making them than others. My oldest is constantly saying "I have a connection to that..." to the point that it drives us bananas. However, she is a phenomenally competent reader and her ability to see connections to herself, other texts and the world is part of what makes her so successful. Other children need to have this habit modeled for them. My 3 year old didn't immediately see the similarity between the two cats in her books, but I pointed it out to her and made sure we read Ginger again the next night and pointed out the connection again, this time in reverse: "Doesn't Ginger in the box remind you of Oliver from Marshmallow?"

This may feel a little funny at first, but it gets easier and if you're a good reader yourself, it's probably something you're doing in your head anyway. You just need to do it out loud for your child so they can see it being done. "That basement is really dark and creepy, just like Grandma's. That puppy reminds me of the neighbor's dog -- do you remember when she was small? Hey, they have really tall trees out back just like we do! Boy, she sure asks a lot of questions, just like you do!" The connections don't have to be earth-shattering; they're just connections -- places where you can latch on to the story a little better.

Alternatively, you can do this with an older child by encouraging them to find their own connections: "What does this remind you of? Have you ever done anything like that? Who else do you know that tells jokes like that? That's really different from our vacation, but maybe you can think of a few things that are similar. I'm trying to remember if I've ever had to solve a mystery. Have you ever had to solve a mystery?"

You can start this at any age, but it's going to be easier with younger children as you read with them together more than you do with older kids. That being said, though, I am a firm believer in reading aloud to kids until they won't let you do it anymore. Even my 8-year old, who doesn't really need me to read to her at all, still listens to me read and I take those opportunities to reinforce the habits that have made her a good reader already.

Next Up: Good Readers' Habit #2: Visualizing

For Those in the Trenches

2010-04-06T09:00:00.004-05:00

Oh yes it is! And more than that, it's so good for your kids. Here are some guidelines for at-home reading:

START EARLY

In a study of neighborhoods where children tended to do well in school, almost half the children were read to regularly before they were two years old and in neighborhoods where children tended to do poorly in school none of the children were read to until they were four years old (Feitelson and Goldstein, 1986). Bookivore wholeheartedly recommends reading to your children from birth. Or earlier, if reading to your pregnant belly floats your boat. If you are pregnant and have other children, you are doing this anyway.

DO IT OFTEN AND STRETCH IT OUT

A study conducted in 1986 found that among children who did well in school, 96% were read to daily and 45% were read to for 30 minutes or more a day. In neighborhoods where children tended to do poorly in school, 61% of the children were not read to at all (Feitelson and Goldstein). That's a pretty meaningful correlation. In this case, less is not more; less is just...less. Frequency and duration are the watchwords here.

CHECK FOR UNDERSTANDING

An earlier study in 1982 found that children who did well in reading throughout school tended to come from homes where they were both provided with children's books and read to interactively -- meaning that their parents made sure (through questions, pointing out text and picture cues, etc.) that they understood what was going on in the stories they read. Parents who provided books but did not read interactively tended to have children who did well in early elementary, but not as well in later elementary. Parents who valued education but didn't provide books for their preschoolers or read to them tended to have children who did poorly in reading (Heath, Language in Society). Books are good. Books are wonderful. But books aren't enough. Interactive reading is the key to improving comprehension.

SPARK THEIR INTEREST

A different study of first grade classrooms in which some classrooms were read stories at the end of their day and other classrooms were not read stories demonstrated that reading to the children led directly to the children reading more on their own. By the end of the study period, the students who were read to were reading better independently than those who had not been read to. More than that, the act of reading to the children increased their overall interest in reading (Feitelson and Goldstein, 1986). The more they're read to, the more they'll read. Like putting money in the bank. I mean, you know, a good bank.

BUILD THEIR BRAINS

When you read to your child, thousands of cells in his or her brain respond. Some get turned "on" because they relate to this particular experience. Connections already established in the brain are strengthened and new brain cells are formed, adding refinement and complexity to the very structure of the brain. This new complexity will remain in place for the rest of the child's life. (University of Chicago). When you read to a child, you are quite literally growing their brains.

I bet the Obamas read to their kids.

I'm just saying.

Not a Classic -- Yet: The Night Fairy

2010-04-05T14:17:00.011-05:00

The Night Fairy, by Laura Amy Schlitz, is one of those books that reach out and grab hold of you. Not in a flip, Percy Jackson sort of way, or a hell-for-leather Maximum Ride sort of way, but in a quietly intense way that draws you into the character's life.

Flory is a night fairy -- she wakes at night, eats and plays at night, even has a silver shadow so she can blend into the moonlight. She has beautiful wings like a luna moth, and one night the unthinkable happens: a bat seizes her by the wings and in an instant, her ability to fly is gone.

Wingless, she falls into a garden where she must now fend for herself without the one ability that makes it possible for one so tiny to get around quickly and safely. Even her magic can't help her much -- she is only a very young fairy and fairies grow into their magic, their spells welling up when they're old enough and need them.

Her life now fraught with danger, she decides to abandon the night and become a day fairy. It will be safer in the daytime, she reasons. There will be fewer predators on the hunt for a tiny fairy to eat, and there will be no bats. Flory decides that she will hate bats forever. She meets a squirrel named Skuggle, who she manipulates with a combination of food and pain -- for Flory is not a compassionate fairy and any way, she knows full well that Skuggle would eat her if he could.

Her struggles to survive and her journey to compassion and responsibility and forgiveness are beautifully complimented by Angela Barrett's exquisite paintings. These give the reader a sense of Flory's tininess, but also convey her spirit and determination. Their contribution to the magic of the story is considerable.

This story is compact, no more than 130 pages, but richly written. It's got an emotional quality to it, and a genuine conflict that Flory must resolve, both in her world and inside herself. If you've exhausted the Tinkerbelle genre, this is an excellent step up -- not so much in difficulty, but in content. Flory's world is real, it's dangerous and scary, and her struggles and decisions have so much more meaning, particularly the struggle to be selfless and the even more difficult struggle to forgive.

Equally excellent as a read-aloud or an independent read, this book deserves to be a classic.

Pictures courtesy of Amazon.com and TheNightFairy.com

Classic Monday: How to Eat Fried Worms

2010-03-29T00:00:00.003-05:00

How to Eat Fried Worms, by Thomas Rockwell, was first published in 1953. You might think that a book this old just wouldn't translate well for modern kids, but the premise -- a bet between some boys that one of them will eat fifteen worms in fifteen days -- possesses just enough of that gross-out factor to still be attractive to kids everywhere.

Billy accepts the challenge from his friends Joe and Alan. On the line is Alan's savings -- $50. Most of the book is consumed with Billy eating worms and Alan and Joe trying to trick or otherwise prevent him from doing it so they won't lose the bet.

This isn't a long book, only about 145 pages, and in some ways not a lot happens. A full chapter is devoted to the first worm Billy manages to eat, and it's mainly description of him chewing and swallowing with great determination. Other chapters are similarly devoted to Alan and Joe's tactics -- sometimes straightforward, sometimes underhanded -- as they try to keep Billy from eating his worms. Worms are boiled, fried, slathered in horseradish sauce, buried in ice cream -- whatever necessary for Billy to get them down. And he can't just swallow them: he has to chew them up.

I read this one aloud to my 6 year old about a month ago and he really liked it. Our edition had the original illustrations in it, line drawings of some of the events, and that helped him stay on track with the story. He was particularly fascinated with the idea of eating the worms and we talked quite a bit about whether or not we would be willing to eat a worm to win a bet, what we'd need to put on it to eat it, how it should be cooked, etc. It's revolting stuff like this that just reels boys in and my kid was no exception.

This one worked well as a read-aloud, although Rockwell sometimes tends to write in loose fragmentary sentences that can get kind of confusing as you're reading along. I probably wouldn't go much younger than 6 for read aloud. Accelerated reader puts this one at a 3.5 for grade level and that seems about right for independent reading. It is a book often recommended for boys since all the characters are boys and the subject matter is one that appeals to boys, but my 8 year old daughter read it last summer and liked it too. There's no swearing, no violence, nobody gets killed or blown up and yet it's still a good book. Go figure.

Cowgirl Kate and Cocoa

2010-03-27T00:00:00.001-05:00

I have a pony lover at my house. Because of that, I have endured countless hours of My Little Pony books and videos. As books go, My Little Pony isn't going to win the Caldecott Medal any time soon. It might win the Fast Pass to a Headache Award, or maybe the Crushingly Boring Medal, but great literature it ain't.

Cowgirl Kate and Cocoa, by Erica Silverman, has been a lifesaver in a world otherwise populated with pink and purple ponies that all have hair like Pamela Anderson.

This is a nice little series that works well as either read-aloud books or as early chapter books for emerging readers. It's on a par with Henry and Mudge or Mr. Putter and Tabby -- short line lengths, easier but not babyish vocabulary, lots of colorful pictures. Each book is broken into 4 chapters and the situations the characters deal with are on a fairly simple order.

What I like about these books is the character of Cocoa, Cowgirl Kate's horse. He's miffy, a little selfish, always hungry, prone to misunderstanding and just generally kind of a pill. My 3 year old daughter loves him and even my 6 year old son laughed at some of his antics when I was reading aloud one day (he says he didn't but I heard him giggle).

The illustrations are so nice -- bright and fun. You may recognize the style: Betsy Lewin has also illustrated Click Clack Moo: Cows that Type and the Duck books that it spawned (Giggle Giggle Quack, Duck for President, etc.) She lends a nice touch of whimsy to the books.

The situations have a nice balance of friendship and humor and respect. In Cowgirl Kate and Cocoa: Partners, Cocoa doesn't want new horseshoes. He'd rather have cowboy boots like Cowgirl Kate. She patiently lets him try on one of her boots until he admits it doesn't fit. Later in the same book, Cowgirl Kate has to coax Cocoa (say that three times fast!) into doing their chores, reminding them that they are partners and must stick together. When he splashes into the pond with her after their work is done, she says "Couldn't you go swimming without me?" and he reminds her that they are partners "through wet and dry." It's sweet, but with a light touch.

It's a lovely series that makes a welcome change from the sugary world of the pastel ponies. The stories have actual content, rather than mindless activity (read enough MLP books and you will know what I mean). This one is good as a read-aloud from about age 3 and up, though I think you could go younger if you had a real horse lover. It should be good as an early chapter book through age 6 and possibly through age 7 (Second Grade) depending on your reader. It should be readily available at your library or in paperback through your favorite bookseller.