Surfer Chick is stoked that her superstar surfer dad is going to teach her how to surf. She is nervous and a little scared that she will not be a great surfer, but when she chooses to be brave, Chick learns that she might be totally awesome after all! I met author Kristy Dempsey when I was presenting at the CERRA Induction Symposium a few weeks ago. Her book Surfer Chick was published in May of 2012, and it is a beautiful book with an inspirational story for our youngest students. Kristy is a native of South Carolina, and is now living in Brazil with her family. She is also a teacher and next year will be her first year as a librarian! How cool to have your own librarian be an author! I was so excited when Kristy mentioned that she offers free Skype visits! She will visit with your class through Skype for 15 minutes for free or 45 minutes for $50 to talk about her books and the writing process. Of course the time difference could pose a problem so if you cannot work out a good time, she will accept questions from your class and send you a video response. Check out the trailer for her book and follow her on Twitter @kristydempsey
Have you ever read the most wonderfully perfect book and wanted to share it with everyone? I found that book in Wonder by RJ Palacio. It makes me want to be a better person and gives me hope that there are still loving, caring and accepting people in our world.
Meet August Pullman, an ordinary 5th grader with a severe facial deformity. Until now, he has been homeschooled, but his parents will be enrolling Auggie in middle school at Beecher Prep in the fall. He wants nothing more than to be just like everyone else, but he is used to the stares and unkind comments about his facial disfiguration. Auggie's year is a difficult one, and Wonder is his story, told from the point of view of many people in his life. Read this wonderful story to be mesmerized by Auggie's life and the people in his life who choose to be kind.
Get Involved in the Wonder of Wonder
Wonder is taking over the world of reading one student, teacher, librarian and book lover at a time! I participated in a twitter chat tonight about #thewonderofwonder, and I came away with so many ideas about how to use this fabulous book in my school but more importantly, how to encourage my students to just be nice to each other.
The book trailer for Wonder is the perfect way to introduce the book to anyone you are trying to entice!
I am planning to use the trailer to introduce the novel to my student and teacher book clubs. This is going to be our first read of the 2012-2013 school year. Along with the book trailer, we will be reading and discussing the picture book One by Kathryn Otoshi as a tie in to get the discussion started about bullying and being unkind.
My new Twitter friend, David Etkin, created an iTunes playlist just for Wonder, and I love it! Give him a shout out on Twitter @DavidAEtkin if you download any of these songs to listen to as you are reading!
Bullying is rampant in middle school, and as a teacher, it is my job to set a good example for my students and encourage them to be kind to everyone they encounter. I want to instill the knowledge in my students that every person has something special to offer to my life, and every person is able to do the same for them in return. The Pledge to Choose Kind tumblr encourages students to think about situations where they have been bullied and the effect this had on their lives. The beginning of change starts with a conversation, and I hope this conversation will begin to change the way our students treat their peers.
If you are using Wonder in your classroom, I would love to read about your ideas! If you haven't read Wonder, I look forward to hearing what you think!
I love cooking, and I love pretending that I am a chef! I was immediately drawn to the cover of Joan Bauer's most recent novel, Close to Famous. I wasn't disappointed. It has a wonderful combination of baking and heartwarming friendships that help the main character, Foster, overcome many fears.
Foster McFee dreams of having her own cooking show one day just like her favorite Food Network Star. For now, she has to settle for baking cupcakes for anyone who will take them. Foster and her mom are running away from their problems in Tennessee, and they run straight to the town of Culpepper where they find friendship, dreams and almost fame.
The Fooducate app is available for iPod Touch, iPhone and iPad. It allows you to scan the barcode on a product, and it will give you the nutritional facts of the item. Your food is also given a grade, and sometimes I would rather not know! You can also search a database if you do not have a barcode to scan. It is very interesting to see the grade of foods that are normally advertised as natural or healthy. The app would be a great tool for health or nutrition courses.
The last two weeks have been filled with wonderful staff development sessions that I have presented with my fabulous partners in crime and fellow middle school librarians Tamara Cox and Monique German. We have had a wonderful time promoting librarianship and technology to the Foreign Language and Social Studies teachers in our district, attendees at the Upstate Technology Conference and administrators at the Upstate Technology conference.
Now my summer can really begin, and I am so excited to read TONS every day! The three middle schools in my district have a summer reading contest that we call the million page challenge, and we are determined to reach a million pages by the beginning of September. I was also inspired by the wonderful Donalyn Miller to participate in the #bookaday challenge on Twitter. I began my first book on Saturday, and here is what I have read so far...
Twitter My newest tech obsession is Twitter! Yes, I know it is not new. I have had an account for quite some time, but until this week, I have not really used it. I have been more of a Facebook girl, but my wonderful friend, Tamara Cox, taught me the ins and outs of using Twitter to create a Professional Learning Network. I am making connections with educators across the globe, and I am finding wonderful ideas to use in my library as soon as we start back to school in August. I also joined the #summerthrowdown, a reading competition between teachers and librarians. I encourage you to read up on using Twitter to expand your PLN and try it for yourself. Don't be afraid to sign up for an account, lurk, tweet, retweet and watch your follower count go up and up and up! It is truly fun and rewarding! If you decide to take the plunge...look me up @KHearne.
I read a review for The Fault in Our Stars, and it appealed to me right away. I was diagnosed with thyroid cancer in January, and I was afraid this book might hit a little too close to home. But I decided to go for it, and it is one of the most perfect books that I have read in a long time. I loved the characters, and I found so many quotable lines as I was reading.
Despite the experimental treatments she is going through, Hazel has never been considered anything except terminal. She believes her story was written at diagnosis, and it did not have a happy ending. Then, she meets a gorgeous plot twist at her cancer support group, and his name is Augustus. Her story is getting ready to be rewritten. What does the world have in store for Hazel now?
One of my colleagues posted the perfect web tool for this book. It is called The Image Language and it lets you write a sentence using images. If you type a sentence into the search box, it selects the first image that pops up in a Google search for that particular word. I selected one of my favorite sentences from the book to write my sentence with images. Hazel tells her mom, "I'm like a grenade, Mom!" She tries to distance herself from people because she wants to minimize the casualties when she dies. This seems like such an odd concept, but it will be at least understandable to those who have had cancer. So here is the image sequence that defines my lasting ideas of The Fault in Our Stars.
I love infographics! I had seen them all over pinterest, but I had not paid much attention to them until I got the book Flip Flop Fly Ball: An Infographic Adventure in my library. I enjoy watching baseball, but I definitely don't know everything there is to know! My visit to Yankee Stadium during Christmas break was very enlightening, and I learned a lot in the museum but learned even more from this book. Each page is a different type of graphic or chart that tells you everything you could possibly want to know about baseball. Some of which, as a baseball novice, I didn't quite understand, but I am going to one day! My husband is tutoring me.
Here are some of my favorite facts from the book:
There were 2,757 bases stolen during the 2008 MLB season. If they were actually stolen, MLB teams would have lost $248,102.43 worth of bases!
Barry Bonds holds the record for career walks. If you put them all together it would be 43.6 miles.
Only 7 MLB parks are smoke free.
Thirty-six world series have gone to 7 games. Eighteen were won at home and eighteen were won on the road.
Nolan Ryan's first MLB season was in 1966 and last was in 1993. WOW!
The New York Yankees have retired 17 numbers (including #8 twice). #42-Jackie Robinson-is the only one to be retired in all of baseball. This is my addition: Mariano Rivera is currently a Yankee, and he wears #42. He wore this number before it was retired so he can continue to wear it, but he will be the last! (Don't be intimidated by my baseball knowledge!)
I love looking at infographics so much that I started looking into how I can create my own, and I came across the website visual.ly. Graphic designers are able to upload their infographics here for everyone to share. They are in the beta testing stages of having a site for people like you and me to create our own infographics! I have signed up on their test page to recieve an email when it is ready to go. When it is ready, it will be great for so many things, but I can see limitless potential for our math classes! While you are waiting on this creation tool, check out the Daily Infographic blog for a new infographic every day. Some of them are school appropriate and some of them are not so make sure to preview them before sharing with your students. Have fun learning!
On the eve of her ninth birthday, unassuming Rose Edelstein, a girl at the edge of schoolyard games and her distracted parents’ attention, bites into her mother’s homemade lemon-chocolate cake and discovers she has a magical gift: she can taste her mother’s emotions in the cake. She discovers this gift to her horror, for her mother—her cheerful, good-with-crafts, can-do mother—tastes of despair and desperation. Suddenly, and for the rest of her life, food becomes a peril and a threat to Rose. The curse her gift has bestowed is the secret knowledge all families keep hidden—her mother’s life outside the home, her father’s detachment, her brother’s clash with the world. Yet as Rose grows up she learns to harness her gift and becomes aware that there are secrets even her taste buds cannot discern. If you enjoy books by Sarah Addison Allen, you will enjoy the magical aspects that Aimee Bender sprinkles throughout her novel.
I read this book in hopes that it would interest some of my 8th grade girls who love coming of age stories, but it didn't quite fit the bill. It was an enjoyable read for an adult, but I wouldn't recommend it for middle school or below.
My read shelf:
Goodreads is a social networking site that is just for book lovers! You can friend request people that you know and see all of the books they are reading. You will also see the ratings that they give the books based on a scale of one to five stars. I often find the next book that I am going to read by looking at what my friends are reading. Who doesn't love getting recommendations from their friends? You can write reviews, vote for your favorite books of the year, create book clubs and much, much more!
Do you use Facebook? If you answered yes, then you can link your Goodreads account to your Facebook account and share the books you are reading in both places. I also share my Goodreads shelf on my school webpage so that my students can see what I am reading!
The possibilities are endless, and the process is quite fun! Happy reading!
