Bugs and Bugsicles: Insects in the Winter by Amy S. Hansen

There's a cold wind blowing in Colorado tonight. And even though the trees are still sporting scarves of red and gold, and even though it's supposed to be 71 degrees on Saturday for the boys' last regular season football game, I can't help but think that winter is right around the corner.

It's a perfect night, then, for BUGS AND BUGSICLES. The book begins in late September, when a monarch butterfly, a honey bee, pavement ants, a praying mantis, a field cricket, and an arctic woolly bear caterpillar are just beginning their preparations for winter. Author Amy S. Hansen then follows eight different insects' journey through the winter.

The praying mantis lays three hundred eggs in a sticky, foamy egg sack, then dies. The ladybug engages in a special kind of hibernation (diapause), awakens in spring to mate, then most likely dies before summer. The Monarch Butterfly migrates to Mexico. And most interesting, the Arctic Woolly Bear Caterpillar freezes into a "bugsicle" then thaws out the next spring (and does this seven years in a row!)

The graceful, almost poetic writing in this book is enhanced by wildlife illustrator Robert Kray's beautiful, super-detailed illustrations of insects in a variety of habitats. Appendices include two experiments for young scientists to try. There is a also a list of books and websites for further reading, as well as a glossary and index. And for those of us who are trying to help kids understand text structures, this is a great example of an enumerative text with parallel topics.

MEET THE HOWLERS- April Pulley Sayre

MEET THE HOWLERS is an unusual combination of fiction/poetry and nonfiction. Almost every page contains both a short stanza of poetry, e.g.

Meet the howlers!
Living life on the go
Meet the howlers!
Woo-hoo-hoo!
AH-UH-OH!
and also a chunk of factual information about the howler monkey, e.g.
"Howler monkeys are named for their incredibly loud calls, which can be heard a mile away. Only adult male mantled howler monkeys can actually howl. Infants make quiet "play calls" and young males yip or squeak."

Kids will enjoy chiming in on the repeating refrain, "Woo-hoo-hoo! AH-UH-OH!" I also think they will love learning the factual information. Did you know, for instance that howler monkeys urinate or drop things on the heads of other creatures that get too close? It would be fun, I think, to use this book to talk about the differences between fiction and nonfiction. It would also be interesting to talk about the research the author had to do to enable her to write this book. Appendices include "More About the Howler Monkeys" and also a map of where howlers live.

CLEMENTINE: FRIEND OF THE WEEK by Sara Pennypacker

Our washing machine is broken. Lest I appear an unfit mother, I will carefully avoid ugly comments about teenagers who leave things in their pockets and damage the water pump on the machine, or two weeks later yank the door of the front loading washing machine open mid-cycle. I will also not make comments about teenagers who seem not to mind at all that their mother is dragging seven laundry bags of clothes to the laundromat each week while they sit home and watch television on a Sunday night.

So anyway, tonight I had to go to the laundromat. And I usually I don't particularly enjoy the laundromat. But tonight it wasn't so bad. Why, you ask? Well, because this afternoon at the library I found CLEMENTINE: FRIEND OF THE WEEK. And I love Clementine! I love that she finds the names of her pets in the bathroom, because there are so many beautiful words in there. I love that she is not perfect. I love her descriptions of her friend, Margaret, who is.

In this fourth book in the series, Clementine has been nominated for friend of the week. She wants people to write nice things in her "Friend of the Week" book, so she works hard at doing nice things for her classmates. She gives lots of compliments, sets up her own tattoo parlor on the playground, and makes big plans to help decorate everyone's bike for a weekend rally. Toward the end of the week, however, she is forced to put aside all of her plans when her kitten, Moisturizer, goes missing.

Clementine made the laundromat a whole lot more enjoyable tonight!

CYBILS NOMINEES- TWO BY DAVID ADLER

According to his website, David Adler has written over 200 books. It's not surprising, then, that several of them, at least three that I can count, would end up as CYBILS nominees. Two are related to math

I could have used FRACTIONS, DECIMALS, AND PERCENTS on Friday. I had gone into a sixth grade classroom and was waiting for the teacher to finish a math lesson so we could start writing. Most of the kids have at least some understanding of money-- they visit the neighborhood convenience store on a fairly regular basis. Many of these same students, however, were more than a little confused during Friday's lesson on converting fractions into decimals, and FRACTIONS, DECIMALS, AND PERCENTS would have been a nice segue. Adler uses the prices and signs at a county fair to demonstrate how fractions, decimals, and percentages are related to each other, then review place value and demonstrates how to convert fractions to decimals. He also devotes several pages to explaining when people might use each term, e.g. "If the man at the pie eating contest ate four full pies and half of another pie, he would probably say, 'I ate four and 1/2 pies…he would probably not say 'I ate four pies and 50% of a fifth pie.'" The book would be a terrific math lesson for any intermediate grade teacher, especially if he/she had a document camera so that kids could have some time to examine the illustrations.

Adler's other math-related CYBILS nominee is TIME ZONES. If you have ever had the experience of explaining of trying to explain time zones to a group of eyebrow raising, incredulous/doubtful/non-believing children (and I have, several times) you will definitely appreciate TIME ZONES. Adler opens the book explaining what children in various places around the world would be doing when it is 6 am in Los Angeles. He then covers such topics as how time zones came to be, why time zone lines aren't straight (so they don't go divide major cities), and the International Date Line. The illustrations are clever collage combinations of an astronaut flying children around the world, aliens, clocks, maps, and even a photograph of the International Meridian Conference in 1884. Appendices in the back include a map of U.S. time zones, an explanation of Daylight Savings Time, and an experiment for kids to try.

Another great read aloud for math time.

P.S. I apologize for the way the images are appearing. Not quite sure what I am doing wrong today but everything is going all over the page.

1+1=5 AND OTHER UNLIKELY ADDITIONS- David LaRochelle

OK, today marks the start of my official CYBILS review. It seems impossible to me that out of the 111 picture books nominated for the best nonfiction picture book, I have only read four! Yes, that's right! Four! That's all! I'm excited, then, about the 107 books I'm going to come to know (and probably love, at least for a lot of them)! So let's get reading…

At the top of the stack is 1+1=5 AND OTHER UNLIKELY ADDITIONS by David LaRochelle. This book kind of reminds me of an old, old friend, the ABC book, Q IS FOR DUCK, except it's focused on math. Each right hand page has the 1+1 math "fact," but each answer is different e.g. 1 +1 =3, or 1+1= 110 or 1+1=0. It's up to the reader to use the clues in Brenda Sexton's bright, digitally produced illustrations, to figure out the meaning of the equation, which is revealed on the next page. 1 +1 =3 (1 unicorn + 1 goat =3 horns), 1+1=hundreds (1 pumpkin +1 watermelon= hundreds of seeds), 1 +1 =0(1 snake +1 worm = 0 legs).

A really clever book that I think kids of all ages are going to absolutely love!

POETRY FRIDAY

This picture has absolutely nothing to do with the post
(aside from the fact that this is one of the babies that I pray for every day).
Son#2 at homecoming last week.

I've been a teacher in urban schools for about 25 years. I've heard lots of hard stories. This year, though, has been exceptionally difficult. Story after story after story after story. Every. single. day. The kind that take your breath away- kids being hospitalized in psych wards, drive by shootings, pregnant teenagers, incarcerated parents, kids moving from foster home to foster home to foster home- with no sense of belonging or being loved, family members dying. Kids coming to school every day and needing to be rocked and loved and put back together before they can even begin to think about learning. This morning, when I was thinking about Poetry Friday, I remembered this poem/prayer by one of my heroes, Marion Wright Edelman. And it kinda seemed to fit.

A Prayer for Children

By MARIAN WRIGHT EDELMAN

We pray for children
Who sneak popsicles before supper,
Who erase holes in math workbooks,
Who can never find their shoes.

And we pray for those
Who stare at photographers from behind barbed wire,
Who can't bound down the street in a new pair of sneakers,
Who never "counted potatoes,"
Who are born in places we wouldn't be caught dead,
Who never go to the circus,
Who live in an X-rated world.

We pray for children
Who bring us sticky kisses and fistfuls of dandelions,
Who hug us in a hurry and forget their lunch money.
And we pray for those
Who never get dessert,
Who have no safe blanket to drag behind them,
Who watch their parents watch them die,
Who can't find any bread to steal,
Who don't have any rooms to clean up,
Whose pictures aren't on anybody's dresser,
Whose monsters are real.

We pray for children
Who spend all their allowance before Tuesday,
Who throw tantrums in the grocery store and pick at their food,
Who like ghost stories,
Who shove dirty clothes under the bed and never rinse out the tub,
Who get visits from the tooth fairy,
Who don't like to be kissed in front of the carpool,
Who squirm in church or temple and scream in the phone,
Whose tears we sometimes laugh at and whose smiles can make us cry.

And we pray for those
Whose nightmares come in the daytime,
Who will eat anything,
Who have never seen a dentist,
Who aren't spoiled by anybody,
Who go to bed hungry and cry themselves to sleep,
Who live and move, but have no being.

We pray for children who want to be carried and for those who must,
For those we never give up on and for those who don't get a second chance.
For those we smother ... and for those who will grab the hand of anybody kind enough to offer it.

We pray for children.

POETRY FRIDAY is at A WRUNG SPONGE.

SONGS FOR A TEENAGE NOMAD- Kim Culbertso

Review copy provided by publisher.

Yesterday I posted a review of TUTUS AREN'T MY STYLE. Today's review features another main character trying to find her place in a world that doesn't quite fit her, but this time it's a YA novel, SONGS FOR A TEENAGE NOMAD.

Fourteen year old Calle (pronounced Callie) and her mother live a nomadic life. Calle's father left when she was very small, and she has spent most of her life moving from one California town to the next. Each time another relationship ends, Calle's mom, gets out a map, and tosses a coin, then they pack the car and move to wherever the coin has landed. Calle doesn't bother to make friends or put down roots, because she knows she won't be staying anywhere for very long. The one constant in her life is her song journal, where she records vignettes or memories inspired by different songs. Each chapter begins with one of these memories.

At the beginning of this book, Calle and her mom land in San Andreas Bay, one of the prettiest places they have ever lived. Contrary to her usual pattern, Calle become part of the drama crowd at school, and also becomes friends with Sam, a football player who is dealing with his own struggles at home. She also discovers a wooden box, then a drawer containing artifacts about her father and begins to piece together the pieces of that mystery.

This is one of those books where all of the pieces just work. The teenager living on the edge of high school piece. The absent father piece. The song journal. And it reads a little like a mystery, where you can wait to read the next chapter to see how all of the pieces fit together. But the ending, unlike most puzzles but true to most real lives, is more than a little messy. A great read that I will share with our sixth graders tomorrow.