Category: J fiction
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Smile! Rats! Or, a book talk
When I book talk, I sometimes like to structure them as a sort of narrative unto themselves. I thought I’d attempt to write out an example for you. When I book talk Smile, I like to throw in my own personal story about when I was a kid and I needed a retainer because one…
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No, really, let kids choose what they read
In case you need something to tide you over while you wait for your copy of Reading Unbound to arrive, here are some more quotes about why we need to let kids choose what they read. We want to help our students fall in love with books in ways that foster a life-long devotion to…
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Wolf Hollow review
Wolf Hollow by Lauren Wolk Cross The Bad Seed with To Kill A Mockingbird and add a dash of Night of the Hunter, King Lear (“I would fain learn to lie,” says the Fool), and Rebecca (the first line of this book is just as haunting as “Last night I dreamt of Manderly again”), and…
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Uncommonly Good Books (and more!) for Common Core Instruction
uncommonbooks (pdf of slide show)November 1st, ISLMA Conference 2013, Springfield, IL Hi ISLMA friends! I’ll be updating this post during the upcoming week, adding annotations and the new resources I added for the second chance presentation. Thanks so much for coming, and if there’s anything you’d like to add please leave a comment! Here is…
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Review: The Lions of Little Rock
The Lions of Little Rock by Kristin Levine My rating: 5 of 5 stars I don’t cry at books. It’s happened only a couple of times. I’m much more likely to cry at television or movies, mostly because of the added manipulation of the music and cinematography. For a book to elicit such a reaction,…
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It Was a Dark and Stormy Night
In 2012, A Wrinkle in Time will be fifty years old, and I’ll be one of many people celebrating this marvelous, mind-bending, heart opening piece of children’s literature. It’s been a dark and stormy week here in a Chicago, which makes it a perfect time to reminisce about this, one of my favorite books of…
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and in the end
Oh, summer, I hardly knew ye. When you weren’t hot as [redacted] you were raining cats and dogs/men/to beat the band. Only recently has the weather been nice, here at the middle of August, and the kids start school next week and the dollar store already has Halloween items out and prominently displayed. Summer reading…
Hi, Miss Julie 