The Misfits

Title: The Misfits

Author: James Howe

Grade Level: Middle School

Rating: 5

Summary: This book is more or less about a group of outsiders who come together and are all best friends.  They are probably four of the most picked on kids in school and when it comes time for their class elections, they want a change.  Addie, Skeezie, Joe, and Bobby create their own third party on the platform of stopping name calling.  Little did they know, what they were about to do was actually going to change things.

Opinion: I wasn’t sure exactly how I was going to like this book at first, especially after they started chapter three with almost a whole chapter of just dialogue that Addie was recording during one of their meetings.  Throughout the book my opinion started to flip the other way and I became very interested in what was going to happen next.  I think that in this book James Howe does such an amazing job of writing a story the middle school aged children can really relate to.  I don’t think that there was one thing in this book that I thought was too farfetched and could never happen to a middle school student.  I think that it helped a lot that Bobby was narrating the whole book because it makes you feel for everything that bobby is going through.  I couldn’t help but think about what was going to happen next to Bobby, even though the rest of the characters were important.  Also, as the book progressed it was really interesting to see the difference in how some of these characters were portrayed in the beginning of the book and how they actually were.  Skeezie is a perfect example of this.  They portray him as a complete dirtball in the beginning of the book, how is made to sound like a kid who just doesn’t care about anyone.  When we really look at Skeezie the person, however, we see how caring he actually is.  It becomes very clear that to Skeezie it doesn’t matter that Bobby is overweight, or Addie is a loud mouth, and it doesn’t even matter that Joe is gay; Skeezie likes his friend because of who THEY are.  Overall I just thought that this book did a great job of keeping my attention and making me wonder “what next!?”

Connection:  I wholeheartedly believe that this book would be really good in any 5-8^th grade classroom.  The whole topic of name calling is present everywhere in school, but it seems to me like the middle school age starting around fifth grade is where it really starts picking up.  I believe that this book could actually have a lasting impact on a student around this age because it shows them that: a. it does hurt the people that are being made fun of, and b. there is something that can be done to put a stop to name calling.  It would even be cool to take the idea of no name calling day/week and trying to implement it into your own classroom as part of an experiment to see if your students really understood the point of this story.

11/9/10

Title: The Sound that Jazz Makes

Author: Carole Boston Weatherford

Grade Level: Upper Elementary

Rating: 5

Summary:  The book takes you from African Tribe Music all the way through modern day rap and jazz.  It covers hundreds of years and has a lot to do with how music in each time period got people of color through hard times.  This book follows tribes, slaves, farmers, railroad workers, gospel singing, and jazz, rap, and finishes with how jazz was born in our nation.

Opinion:  I thought that this book was written really well.  While reading through it I could help but be mesmerized by the way the author wrote everything.  It also seems to be such an inspirational book.  One passage stood out to me above all the others, “Jazz is a down beat in our nation, chords of struggle and jubilation, bursting forth from hearts set free, in notes that echo history.”  This stood out to me because inspirational is exactly what it is.  The verses “chords of struggle and jubilation, bursting forth from hearts set free,” stood out because in two verses the author has described the whole book.  African Americans fight through the struggle, show their jubilation, and sing for being set free.

Connection:  I think that this book would be really good to use to show how African Americans have used music as a means of inspiration and healing, worship and celebration.  The author does a really good job of showing how much music has always meant to African Americans as a culture.  This would be a good book to introduce when talking about slavery, since we know that slaves often used song as inspiration to keep going, as well as a way to communicate about how to escape.

Title:  Home of the Brave

Author:  Allen Say

Grade Level:  Elementary school

Rating: 3

Summary:  This book is about a man who goes through the trauma of experiencing an internment camp in a sequence of dreams.  This book is touching on the time period during World War II when over 120,000 Japanese Americans were forced into internment camps.

Opinion:  I had a little trouble getting into this book.  I think that the author did a good job of writing this story, and I’m sure it has touched a lot of people, but I just couldn’t find any interest in this book.  One thing that did stand out to me about this book was the pictures.  The pictures are so well done, to be specific; the pictures of the little kids’ faces are amazing.  Each face the illustrator has made shows such emotion.

Connection:  This book could definitely be used to teach about Japanese Internment camps.  Much like slavery, I believe that this is one of the most memorable times in our nation’s history as far as depriving a group of people of their civil rights.  While teaching your students about this period in time, this book could be used to teach a few things, including the fact that not only adults were affected by these camps.

Title:  Back to School

Author:  Maya Ajmera; John D. Ivanko

Grade Level:  Lower Elementary

Rating:  4

Summary:  This book is about how learning takes place all over the world.  It shows examples of how students get to school in different countries, how they take field trips, what teams and clubs they might participate in, as well as what you might wear to school.

Opinion:  I thought that this book was interesting.  When I first saw the cover, I wasn’t really sure what the author was trying to write about.  I thought that maybe they were just trying to write a book about minority students in school.  As I read through the book, I really thought that it was cool how these authors were bringing in different cultures and also showing ours, to send the message that there is school in many different cultures, and each may do things a little different.

Connection:  I think that this would be a really good book to use for the younger grades.  The reason that I connect this book to the younger grades is because I think it would be a good read out loud book for a young classroom to have a class discussion over.  It shows you that although people and countries are different, we are also very similar.

Title:  Chicka Chicka Boom Boom

Author:  Bill Martin, Jr.; John Archambault

Grade Level: k-1

Rating:  5

Summary:  This book is about the letters of the alphabet climbing up the coconut tree.  It shows both capital letters as well as lower case letters.  It also shows the letters in alphabetical order appearing one by one.

Opinion:  I really enjoy this book.  I remember my mom reading this book to me when I was little, and it still is just as much fun as it used to be!  I think that it is really fun how the authors use pictures to describe each letter as well.  The page where they introduce skinned-knee D, stubbed-toe E, and patched-up F, is a page that is fun to come to because we actually see D with a skinned knew, E’s toe is swollen, and  F has a band aid on.  Little things like this in the illustrations make the book fun for all readers.

Connection:  This would obviously be a good book to use for younger grades in reviewing the alphabet.  You could use this book as a read out loud, or an independent read where students just practice identifying both their upper and lower case letters.

Title:  Punk Farm on Tour

Author: Jarrett J. Krosoczka

Grade Level: k-2

Rating: 5

Summary:  This book revisits our friends of Punk Farm on their tour across the U.S.A.  Throughout the book the author shows the animals at various venues across the nation playing for packed barns and performing before sold out crowds.  The song in this book is the animals’ rendition of “The wheels on the bus.”  In the end of the book, the animals have to get back to the farm before Farmer Joe gets back from vacation!

Opinion:  My opinion of this book is off the charts, if I could have rated it above 5 I would have.  The prequel to this book, “Punk Farm,” is one of my favorite children’s books ever.  Needless to say, when I saw this book sitting on the shelf at the library I HAD to get it!  I love these books because the author does a really good job of incorporating a fun story in a book that kids can enjoy and even participate in.

Connection: Since this book uses a song throughout, it is a great book to share in front of the class and even get class participation out of.  There is a lot of repetition as far as the chorus of the song being repeated over and over again, so this presents a perfect opportunity to get your students involved and active.  I used the first Punk Farm book as a music book lesson for a preschool class last year and it went over really well.  The students really enjoyed singing a lot with me as well as playing the instruments that I had planned for them to play.

The Woodson Experience..

                The book that I read for this unit was Jacqueline Woodson’s “After Tupac and D Foster.”  When I first chose this book I had never read a book written by Woodson so I really didn’t know what to expect.  To be completely honest the only reason I chose this particular book was because it had Tupac in the title and when I was younger I listened to a lot of Tupac’s music, so naturally, I thought that this book was going to be about Tupac Shakur. 

                Being that I had never read a book written by Woodson before, I really had no expectations of this book.  After reading this book and discussing with others in class about the books that they read I have decided that Jacqueline Woodson is a very interesting author.  In the book “After Tupac and D Foster,” what stood out to me the most was the effect that two single events had on the lives of two relatively young girls.  Losing a best friend because they have to move is something that many people have to go through, but given that Neeka and our narrator only knew D Foster for a short amount of time I found it interesting that she had such an impact on their lives.  The effect that Tupac had on these girls was equally interesting to me.  Being that they were so young, I would imagine that they listen to music, and Tupac was a symbol for all African Americans, especially those who could relate to the lifestyle that he often sang about.  But the fact that Tupac’s death had such an impact on these young girls really struck me as something unexpected.  Their reaction to his death made it seem like even though they were young girls, they were beyond their years as far as their understanding of what was happening around them.

                After reading these books we had the opportunity to discuss with other groups what their books were about and discuss some things we learned about the author.  The first thing that my group really talked about was controversy.  It seemed to us that Woodson is an author who is really not one to shy away from writing about controversial topics.  This reason alone makes her a very interesting figure to look at.  She also writes a lot about relationships in the family.  In my book in particular, it seems like a lot of the book centered around the friendship of these three girls, as well as how events in the family affected them.  One thing we noted was that Woodson seems to center all her stories on African Americans.  We also saw a few examples in hear writing where she talks about interracial relationships, but the constant in all her books are black main characters.