Tesseract!

First of all, let me say that I do not remember there being so much stuff about God when I originally read this in fifth grade. Granted, A Wrinkle in Time was probably a little bit ahead of my reading level, so there's a lot of stuff I missed. However, I completely missed the God stuff.

Does it really add to or subtract from the book for me? No. In fact, I'm not sure why it's there. I think Madeleine L'Engle could have gotten to her point about Love in a much more straightforward manner by leaving out the God stuff, but that's just my opinion. I also haven't read the other books in the series, so I don't know if this comes into play more later on.

This is, obviously, a classic. And for good reason. It's a great science fiction novel. I just don't really like science fiction that much, so this didn't really get me all excited in my reading-places. I felt obligated to reread it, since I know there are a lot of really strong readers going into one of my school's fifth grade classes who should probably give this book a shot -I thought I'd try to speak intelligently on it. Now I think I'll just let them read it and make their own connections. I don't really feel like I have a lot to say about it. Clearly, I'm a realistic fiction addict. At least now I can admit it.

The thing that makes me anxious about this book in terms of classroom use is who is really going to be able to read it. It scores a W according to Fountas and Pinnell, but even that is a little bit generous. I feel like maybe it should really be an X, although I don't read that many books at a W, so I can't be sure. The language structure and the vocabulary use are all pretty difficult to understand, as are the who's, what's, where's, and why's. I guess I can attempt it with my students who are already scoring reading levels of X and Y (of which we have three) and see if they can handle it.

As the summer starts to wind down, and I get busier with getting my classroom together, I'm also noticing that I'm more resistant to wanting to read children's books. I have a long (and ever-growing) list of books on my Goodreads account of adult books I'd like to get back to. I haven't had much time for them this summer, since I've been so busy with children's books. However, I do have some books from my school's guided reading library that I want to get through, so those can by my project in the coming days. As well as just trying to get the library put together *insert panic-faced emoticon here*