#EARCOS

More Good Books, recommend by Dr. Peggy Sharp.

Since I loved the first workshop I attended at EARCOS with Dr. Peggy Sharp. I went to her second workshop as well (you can never have too much of a good thing right?). During this workshop she discussed new books to use in the classroom that are appropriate for grades 3-5. After the workshop was over I honestly wanted to run straight to a bookstore, purchase all of the books, and start reading… for myself, not even for teaching and sharing them with children! Hehe, anyway… here is a link the handout/packet she had for this workshop:

Peggy Sharp, Grades 3-5

I completely forgot to mention last time that Peggy has symbols by the titles of the books in the handout.

❤ (heart)= picture book that everybody loves

@= early intermediate (grades 3-5)

%= (grades 5-8)

! = sophisticated content (maybe language, violence, etc)

(She didn’t mention what t and the * snowflake mean, so use your best guess?).

It was even more difficult to choose my top three to share really quick… but if I had to pick, these would be it!

There are absolutely fantastic tips in this book for kids who are not the biggest fans of reading (really, they are so useful!).

From the author of So B. It, oh it says that in the picture…

This was the top book I wanted to run out and purchase. I cannot wait to read it. Brian Selnick has done it again, possibly even better than Hugo…

Who doesn’t love to read? I used to get grounded from it when I was little…

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Writing Across the School

Every year, our school has a tradition, where we write across the different elementary classrooms around common photos/drawings/paintings. It started off a few years ago, where during the first time, we used the famous illustrations from Chris Van Allsburg‘s, The Mysteries of Harris Burdick. Each of his drawing has a line that goes with it. The students from all of the elementary classes, each chose one of the photos to write about. They each wrote their own story, starting with the line from the photo. Then, we hung up all the stories for each photo on the walls of our school. It was so interesting to see the different stories that students came up with from Kindergarten to 5th grade.

Last year, we used photos from different Allen Say books. He has great photos in his picture books with Asian characters. This year, our theme is Norman Rockwell. We are using different paintings of his that the students are writing stories about. Our awesome literacy coach made color copies of the photos and laminated 2 sets so the elementary teachers can borrow them. Here are a few of the paintings the students can choose from.

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I’m excited to see what kind of stories the students will come up with this year!

P.S. Melody is going to the EARCOS 2012 conference next week in Bangkok, Thailand! Anyone else going to be there?!