Monday, April 16, 2018

The Worst #BookTalk Ever Today!


Today, we had planned for the local indie bookseller's fabulous children's manager to book talk new books for our middle schoolers. She was sick, and so I said I would jump in and give a book talk. This was at about 8 am, and the book talk was planned for 10:15 am! Plus I had a JK class at 9:35. So this became a very busy morning! I reached out to the children's manager to see if she had a list of what she was going to share. I also posted a question for the Learning Librarians group, and they suggested a couple great titles. This gave me a list of 12 books, and I quickly put a powerpoint together. I used the following books:
  1. Chokshi, Roshani. Aru Shah and the end of time. 1st ed., March 2018. Los Angeles : Disney Hyperion, 2018. Twelve-year-old Aru stretches the truth to fit in at her private school, but when she is dared to prove an ancient lamp is cursed, she inadvertently frees an ancient demon.
  2. Reynolds, Jason. Ghost. 1st ed. New York, N.Y. : Atheneum Books For Young Readers, [2016]. "Ghost, a naturally talented runner and troublemaker, is recruited for an elite middle school track team. He must stay on track, literally and figuratively, to reach his full potential".
  3. Kelly, Erin Entrada. Hello universe. 1st ed. New York, NY : Greenwillow Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, [2017]. The lives of four misfits are intertwined when a bully's prank lands shy Virgil at the bottom of a well and Valencia, Kaori, and Gen band together in an epic quest to find and rescue him.
  4. Gidwitz, Adam. The inquisitor's tale, or, the three magical children and their holy dog. New York, NY : Dutton Children's Books, [2016]."A peasant girl and her holy greyhound, an oblate on a mission from his monastery, and a young Jewish boy travel across medieval France to escape persecution and save holy texts from being burned".
  5. Lewis, John, 1940 February 21-. March: Book 1. Marietta, GA : Top Shelf Productions, [2013]. Presents in graphic novel format events from the life of Georgia congressman John Lewis, focusing on his youth in rural Alabama, his meeting with Martin Luther King Jr., and the birth of the Nashville Student Movement.
  6. Anderson, John David,. Ms. Bixby's last day. New York, NY : Walden Pond Press, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, [2016]. Ms. Bixby unexpectedly announces that she is very sick and won't be able to finish the school year, and Topher, Brand and Steve come up with a plan to tell her how much she means to them.
  7. Hiranandani, Veera. The night diary. New York, NY : Dial Books for Young Readers, [2018]. Shy twelve-year-old Nisha, forced to flee her home with her Hindu family during the 1947 partition of India, tries to find her voice and make sense of the world falling apart around her by writing to her deceased Muslim mother in the pages of her diary.
  8. Sappingfield, Eliot. A problematic paradox. New York, NY : G. P. Putnam's Sons, [2018]. "Thirteen-year-old Nikola Kross's world is turned upside down when her father is abducted by aliens and she is suddenly transported to a special boarding school for geniuses, but things get even stranger when she realizes she has certain abilities that put her entire school in grave danger". 
  9. Alexander, Kwame. Rebound. Boston : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, [2018]. In the summer of 1988, twelve-year-old Chuck Bell is sent to stay with his grandparents, where he discovers jazz and basketball and learns more about his family's past.
  10. Rosenstock, Barb. The secret kingdom : Nek Chand, a changing India, and a hidden world of art. 1st ed. 2018. Somerville, Mass.: Candlewick Press, 2018. "Documents the story of how artist Nek Chand, in the aftermath of the partition of India in 1947, created the Rock Garden of Chandigarh, using stockpiled castoff construction materials and debris, as a tribute to the village of his youth".
  11. DasGupta, Sayantani. The serpent's secret. 1st ed., March 2018. New York : Scholastic Press, 2018. Up until her twelfth birthday, Kiranmala considered herself an ordinary sixth-grader in Parsippany, New Jersey, but then her parents disappear and a drooling rakkhosh demon shows up in her kitchen, and soon she is swept into another dimension, full of magic, winged horses, talking birds (very annoying), and cute princes--and somehow Kiranmala needs to sort it all out, find her parents, and basically save the world.
  12. Burg, Ann E. Unbound : a novel in verse. 1st ed., October 2016. New York : Scholastic Press, 2016. The day nine-year-old Grace is called to work in the kitchen in the Big House, everyone warns her to to keep her head down and her thoughts to herself, but the more she sees of the oppressive Master and his hateful wife, the more she questions things until one day her thoughts escape--and to avoid being separated she and her family flee into the Dismal Swamp, to join the other escaped slaves who live there.
I then proceeded to bumble through an explanation for each book, including 7 that I've never read! Thank goodness for great librarians, booksellers, and reviews to help me share these with our kids! 

Happily, I've already had 2 books checked out, so success! 

Tuesday, April 3, 2018

28 + 4 = 33 Books Read and Reviewed Over Spring Break 2018!







1.     Donald Trump : outspoken personality and president / Sherman, Jill
2.     Science activities for children / Nelson, Leslie Weldemar
3.     Great big things / Hoefler, Kate,
4.     The water princess / Verde, Susan
5.     Come with me / McGhee, Holly M.
6.     If you plant a seed / Nelson, Kadir
7.     More-igami / Kleber, Dori
8.     Investing well (in supersonic spaceships!) / Bean, Raymond
9.     The servant and the water princess : a story of Ancient India / Gunderson, Jessica
10.  Maybe something beautiful / Campoy, F. Isabel,
11.  Race for the stars (Barbie) / Liberts, Jennifer
12.  Even more picture-perfect science lessons : using children's books to guide inquiry, K-5 / Ansberry, Karen Rohrich
13.  Right Click: Parenting Your Teenager in a Digital Media World / Bamford, Art, et al.
14.  Fourth dimension / Walters, Eric, 1957-
15.  Picture-Perfect Science Lessons: Using Children's Books to Guide Inquiry / Ansberry, Karen
16.  Spacing out / Steinkraus, Kyla,
17.  How to trap a leprechaun / Fliess, Sue,
18.  The Wild Robot Escapes / Brown, Peter 
19.  Some pets / DiTerlizzi, Angela,
20.  The Wild Robot / Brown, Peter 
21.  What to do with a box / Yolen, Jane,
22.  The science fair is freaky! / Chabert, Jack
23.  I wish you more / Rosenthal, Amy Krouse
24.  Imani's moon / Brown-Wood, JaNay,
25.  Dino Duckling / Murray, Alison (Illustrator),
26.  Shelter / Claire, CĂ©line, 1973-
27.  How to read a story / Messner, Kate,
28.  I took the moon for a walk / Curtis, Carolyn,
29.  Zap! / Freeman, Martha
30.  If I had a little dream / Laden, Nina,
31.  Quick, little monkey! / Thomson, Sarah L.
32.  The way back home / Jeffers, Oliver.
33.  The bear who stared / Beedie, Duncan