Two more history books...time to end this trend

Not because I don't like history, but because I need to diversify.

Yesterday's book was Revolutionary John Adams by Cheryl Harness. This book was pretty dense, but I seriously enjoyed it. This information-packed book includes not only fact-rich narrative, but illustrations and quotes and other small details that add on more interest and more information.

The book flows in the typical chronological format and includes pictures and illustrations that help to add more information. For example, when it is describing both John and Abigail caring for their firstborn child, it includes a strip at the top with pictures of John and Abigail and the sentence "John Adams and Abigail Smith were married in her home in Weymouth, Massachusetts" as a caption. At the bottom of the page is a second strip, this time containing an illustration of colonists protesting new taxes, with a pair of captions explaining the pictures. Finally, at the bottom of the page is a quote from Adams describing his feelings about the taxes: "That enormous Engine, fabricated by the british [sic] Parliament for battering down all the Rights and Liberties of America, I mean the Stamp Act, has raised and spread thro the whole Continent, a Spirit that will be recorded to our Honour, with all future Generations."(all spelling errors are part of the original.)

What's tricky about this book is the sentence structure. Each sentence is important, and filled with information, but this makes for very long sentences. For example:

When the French and Indian War came to an end in 1763, young King George III and his Parliament in London decided to keep an army posted in the Colonies to protect British Americans from being attacked by Indians -and to keep the colonists out of the Native Americans' hunting grounds beyond the Appalachian Mountains.


That's a pretty long sentence for elementary school kids, huh? Although I can't find a Fountas and Pinnell reading level (I use this because that's what my school uses for reading levels), I would guess that it's probably an S or T, and therefore a solid fifth grade book. This could definitely be used for read aloud in younger grades, though. If I were using it for a read aloud, I would make sure I offered time after the reading for students to go back and reread and look through the illustrations and quotes. I think that those definitely add something to the book that can't really be captured during read aloud, since a lot of the pictures are pretty small.

The book I read today was Thomas Jefferson A Picture Book Biography, by James Cross Giblin. I didn't like this book as much as the John Adams one. There wasn't nearly as much information, the writing style was pretty bland, and the illustrations weren't very exciting to me. The writer kept going in and out of a semi-theme about how Jefferson was a quiet speaker, but never really did anything with that. Additionally, it talked about his inner debate over slavery, but never really problematized that, or really showed any kind of interest in it. John Adams got into a lot of detail about the rivalry between Jefferson and Adams, and there was none of that in there. In fact, the only interesting detail that the writer alluded to was his possible affair with various slaves. Of course, he never came right out and said it, and I might not even have noticed it if I didn't already know that he had affairs with slaves. I'd probably put this somewhere in my classroom, but I don't know if I would really even read it with the students. I'm sure there's a better Thomas Jefferson biography out there.

What I Didn't Read When I Went Swimming Instead

So I more or less didn't read a book yesterday, so today I read two, which means the books were short. 

Today's theme was American History, largely because I did a professional development a couple of years ago in which we received a whole bunch of nonfiction history picture books. I am just now getting around to reading through the ones I haven't read yet, which is a lot of them. Which is also pretty sad. 

The first book is What's the Big Idea, Ben Franklin?, by Jean Fritz. I started this last night at the movies, but decided that even if I was reading during the commercials before the previews start, it was rude to my boyfriend, who was nice enough to not say anything. 

Anyway, this book was in the same kind of series as Why Don't You Get a Horse, Sam Adams? The style and illustrations were very much the same as Sam Adams. I enjoyed the book, and many of my opinions about the other book hold true. This teaches me an important thing about reviewing series books like this: they're pretty much the same. True, the information is different, but the style and format are all pretty much the same. I'll remember this when I get around to The Magic Treehouse. 

The second book I read was A Picture Book of Lewis and Clark. This book is part of a series by David A. Adler (of Cam Jansen fame) about different historical figures. I checked in with a consultant (aka: my sister, who majored in history, and is therefore an expert), and the information is pretty accurate. This is actually something that is pretty reliable about Adler -he does his research and makes sure he's accurate. I saw him speak at the same professional development where I got the book, and he talked about his research process. He said that the reason he's never written a historical fiction book (until recently) was because he always questioned the accuracy of the stories, since he knew they didn't really happen. 

The illustrations in the book are pretty interesting, but since I'm not so great with the visual arts, I'm going to do a pretty poor job of describing them. But here goes: they look like water color paints, with light, gentle brush strokes, leaving wavy lines and faded faces. This leaves the reader with the sense of pulling an image out of their memory: not really able to see details, but able to get the overall picture.

How'd I do with that?

This book in particular I want to use next year with my fourth graders. They read a Lewis and Clark story as part of our reading curriculum (Lewis and Clark and Me), plus the fourth grade social studies theme is Geography of the United States, so I could use the book for either part. Probably the social studies piece, since I don't really want to read a book so that we can read a book. Maybe. We'll see. I'll report back later.

Rules

This was my beach book yesterday, which is probably my favorite thing about summer: the vast number of places I can go to read. No longer am I confined to my bed, couch, office, classroom, or Starbucks. Now I can take a book to the dog park, to the beach, to the pond, to the porch, to the barbecue (assumptions about being anti-social be damned), and myriad other places, in addition to the places I already take my books to. Oh, summer vacation. Three days in and I'm already in love with you.

Anyway, the book -Rules, by Cynthia Lord. I loved it. The book is about Catherine, a twelve year old girl whose summer vacation has just started. Unfortunately, it's not looking good. Her best friend, Melissa, is away for the summer, so she's left with nothing to do but baby-sit her autistic brother. There is an upside: a new girl her age is moving in next door.  However, in typical pre-teen fashion, nothing seems to work out as she expected. Her new friend for the summer instead ends up being Jason, whom she meets in the waiting room of the clinic her brother goes to for OT. Jason has some unspecified disability which leaves him using a wheelchair to get around and a communication book as a means of talking. Through her friendship with Jason, Catherine learns a lot about herself and what it means to be the sister of somebody with Autism.

What really clinched the book for me, though, was how perfectly the author managed to capture what it's like to be a pre-teen girl. Flashlight communication with your new-best-friend next door? Nobody actually does that, but everybody dreams of it. The fear of what other people think of you comes up again and again -after all, Catherine is dealing with a brother who is incapable of understanding how his actions will be perceived by others. She knows how people look at him, but is helpless to stop him from doing weird things (like quoting from "Frog and Toad" when he can't find the right thing to say), which leaves her all the more self-conscious. And now she's made friends with somebody who needs a wheelchair and a communication book to be functional, which only adds to her general outsider-ness (not a word, but since this is a piece of more or less creative writing, I'm allowing word play).

Catherine herself is the perfect heroine: she gets angry and frustrated, but she is, to her core, a strong person and a wonderful role model. She sees Jason for who he really is, instead of being scared of his wheelchair and communication book. She understands that her brother is still her brother -even if he is weird to other people, they still have a special bond that is important to her. And finally, she understands that if other people like her less because she is more inclusive than they are, then they aren't really her friends. For a twelve-year-old to understand this (albeit, a fictional one) is remarkable. She is the kind of student I would dream of having in my classroom.

I stole this book out of my school's guided reading library, so I very much intend to use this for guided reading. As I read this book, I thought about the new CCSS, which strongly emphasize close reading. This book is rich with complex ideas and thematic passages that beg to be dug into, so I can see myself using this book for that purpose in a small group. However, I can also see myself using this book whole-class to dig into some major issues around inclusion. How do we include those who are different, and how do we know when we are being discriminatory? How do we deal with a sibling who is different, and therefore makes us seem different? I don't even know if these are the questions I would use, because they seem somehow discriminatory, but digging into that kind of thinking could be important, especially in inclusive classrooms. So much about this book makes me excited to read it with kids.

Why Don't You Get a Horse, Sam Adams?

I chose this book to start with because A) it is short and I am a little swamped today and B) because it is a social studies book and I've been looking to expand my social studies library. All in all, it was a very cute book. Jean Fritz tells the story of Sam Adams leading up to Independence from Great Britain. To keep the story interesting, she focuses on the story of how Sam Adams finally comes to ride a horse for the first time, while interweaving the story of how he agitated for independence. Fritz does a nice job of including interesting personal details (such as telling what his dog, Queue, would do while he spoke to people) and telling about his actual personal accomplishments (riding a horse, instigating the Boston Tea Party)

I thought this could be a good entry point into learning more about Sam Adams, so if I were using it in a classroom, I might read this story to launch a short unit on him. In the past, I've thought about including a biographies unit in writing, reading, and social studies, so I might also use this book as a mentor text in writing, for gathering background knowledge in social studies, and for skills in reading biographies in reading.

Outside of the classroom, I'm not sure most students would enjoy it. The sentence structure and language can be a little difficult, so it is a solidly fourth grade level text (an R on the Fountas and Pinnell Reading Levels). It's also pretty short, though, so it might not feel very beefy to a fourth grade reader and make them feel like there won't be enough intrigue to keep them interested. Therefore, I don't think most fourth graders would choose to read this book independently.

All in all, a great book for integrating social studies background knowledge; probably won't get much use in a standard independent reading library.

Rules

So these are my own personal rules for my summer vacation reading challenge:

1. I have to average 1 book a day. If I read three in one day, that counts for 3 days. If I do this, I will end up reading a minimum of 72 books this summer.
2. Summer vacation counts as the day after school lets out until Labor Day. The day after that, I will be required to report to work as usual, so I'll count that as the end of break.
3. I will post at least 3 entries a week about these books that I read. I will list every book that I read.
4. Grown-up books can count in my final book count (because I don't want to abandon my-level books). They will count for a book that has been read on the day that I finish the book.
5. If I start reading a book that I don't enjoy and I abandon it, it counts as a book read, but it has to have a blog entry explaining why I abandoned it.

Five is a nice round number, I'll stop writing rules there and figure out the rest later.

It starts

This whole thing started because of Donalynn Miller. She is a teacher of reading and writing in Texas, and a self-proclaimed book-addict. Maybe she didn't use those words, but she would if she had thought of them. Anyway, she is nicknamed "The Book Whisperer" because of her ability to instill a love of reading in her students. She credits her ability to do this with her own love of books. To encourage other teachers (and parents, librarians, or anybody else in minor contact with minors) to read more, she posted a blog entry trying to get people to read a book a day during summer vacation. The "rules" were pretty simple: read an average of one book each day of your summer vacation. Children's books count.

As I described this challenge to another teacher, their initial reaction was that reading a children's book a day was cheating. However, after further discussion, we realized that this was a brilliant way to make sure that we actually read the books we teach to our students. Oh, I haven't mentioned that part yet: I teach reading and English as a Second Language (and before that, fourth grade) to fourth and fifth graders. So yeah, that provides some context.

Anyway. How often do we hear other teachers saying they haven't read the book they're teaching, they don't have time? This is kind of a poor excuse. If we expect our kids to be constant readers, shouldn't we also be constant readers? If we tell them to be lifelong learners, shouldn't we be lifelong learners?

So here I am. I'm going to stop making excuses and start reading the books. I have 72 days of summer. 72 children's books. I can do this, right?